AMD Radeon RX 460 4GB Graphics Card Review

Temperature & Noise Testing

The gaming performance on a graphics card is the most important factor in buying a card, but you also need to be concerned about the noise, temperature and power consumption numbers.

XFX Radeon RX 460 4GB Double Dissipation Idle and Load Temps:

When it comes to temperatures the XFX Radeon RX 460 4GB Double Dissipation graphics card ran at 38C at idle on our our open air test bench and the fans were spinning at 500 RPM. The screen shot above is from a cold boot to show that the Double Dissipation fans were spinning even though the temperature of the card was just 26C!

While gaming the card topped out at its target temperature of 65C and the fans were spinning at roughly 2,000 RPM. Not bad temperatures!

Sound Testing

We test noise levels with an Extech sound level meter that has 1.5dB accuracy that meets Type 2 standards. This meter ranges from 35dB to 90dB on the low measurement range, which is perfect for us as our test room usually averages around 36dB. We measure the sound level two inches above the corner of the motherboard with ‘A’ frequency weighting. The microphone wind cover is used to make sure no wind is blowing across the microphone, which would seriously throw off the data.

The XFX Radeon RX 460 4GB Double Dissipation is supposed to be a 0dB graphics card, but the fans never stopped running on ours. The XFX Radeon RX 460 4GB Double Dissipation topped out at 41.9dB, which is pretty good!

** The AMD Radeon R9 Fury X reference card that we are using was the original model with a loud water pump that whines. AMD changed the pump design before the cards hit the retail market, but wasn’t willing to replace ours. We expect retail cards to perform quieter for this and hopefully AMD will send us a replacement card for proper noise testing. **