XFX RX 460 Slim Review

The RX 460 is the lowest-end iteration of Polaris on the desktop. And AMD has made the claim that it’s a more than capable GPU for machines that have a smaller budget. The RX 460 is even touted as being somewhat VR Ready, the erroneous, marketing-based moniker that helps sets limits on acceptable VR performance. Indeed, the 896 stream processors (organized in 14 compute units) combined with the ~$129 price tag of our XFX 4GB sample make it a desirable choice for those looking to to equip a less expensive dive computing rig. But is Polaris 11, and the Single-slot 4GB XFX variant we have here, good enough against its competitors to warrant you spending your money in it?

XFX RX 460 Slim belies its size

The AMD RX 460 is a fully enabled Polaris 11 GPU. That means that this is as large as this particular iteration of the Polaris architecture is going to be. It has 14 compute units with 896 stream processors that operate at a base of 1090MHz with a boost frequency of 1200MHz. Memory consists of either 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5, with this XFX sample containing 4GB of VRAM with a 128-bit memory interface that equates to 112GB/s of memory bandwidth. The whole thing uses around 75W with this single-slot solution from XFX using precisely up to that due to the lack of any external power connectors. The RX 460 isn’t exactly a maximum performance card, but can presumably provide a good performance/watt ratio for the given market it’s aiming for. You can check out and review the improvements that Polaris brings right here.

Being lower-end, what are our expectations? We expect to be able to play modern games with moderate settings at 1080P. We don’t expect miracles, and the XFX RX 460 Slim should give us a bit more headroom at that resolution with a slightly higher core clockspeed of 1220MHz.Though because of the smaller cooler, we don’t expect magical temperatures nor do we expect to be able to overclock very much. But that’s not the point of the Slim, either. The Slim has a completely different market to tend to, and for that it may be one of the better options.

The Slim is a great card for a variety of reasons. More so in that it can fit in more places and in tighter spots than most, giving you leeway in making full-height PCIe systems for embedded or other applications. You may decide not to even use the minuscule PC you’ve built for gaming specifically, and instead want the efficiency of Polaris 11 and the size of this card to help make a better media center PC or some other, specific application such as a dedicated streaming PC. But even as a gaming machine, thankfully GCN, and this fourth iteration, scales pretty well with next-generation APIs that are used well. Meaning that this tiny card could be much better than you or I think. And for those more budget minded builds, more so than even an RX 480 could fulfill, the competition is fierce. So how does this perform? Well, not terribly. Let’s take a look.

Specifications