Disclaimer: This is not a regular review. This post is just to share some benchmark results with my fellow budget gamers.
New cards featuring the AMD Polaris architecture have been around the corner for quite some time now. With the RX 460 from HIS digital being the cheapest one available in India currently, I decided to buy one of those for my ancient PC replacing the Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 (GDDR5 model). Since the budget was tight, I wasn't able to go for any significant upgrade other than the graphics card. So, I decided to pair that card with my ancient (almost 6 years old) AMD Athlon II X4 635 processor and check how much of a bottleneck it was. Here's the test system specification:
Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 635
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H (Rev 1.3)
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair value ram (dual channel)+ single 4GB Kingston HyperX Fury
Chassis: As basic as it can be. It's a generic case with one fan pulling air into the case and one throwing air outside. The PSU (and of course the GPU) has it's own fan. The CPU fan is also the basic one I got with it.
PSU: Tagan 500W Stone Rock
It turned out that the processor was a bottleneck for this card. So, I decided to overclock it.
Here are the settings that I used:
As you can see, I've set the FSB to 230 MHz. and the multiplier to 14.5x (which was the maximum I could get with this processor. So, it turns out to be 3335 MHz. in total. That's a 15% overclock from the base frequency of 2900 MHz. The memory clock was set to 1532 MHz. and I had to overvolt everything to make that stable. The system is quite stable as of now and the temperatures are OK. Here's the temperature after performing a few benchmarks:
Considering that the maximum operating temperature for this CPU is 55-71 degree Celcius, These temperatures seem to be OK.
So, now let's have a look at some scores:
Here's the score for Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Ultra Settings @1080p)
That looks good enough. Somewhat comparable to the test systems using better CPUs. Although there's some drop in performance but still, quite playable.
Next up is Metro: Last Light
I've used 4 different presets for testing. So, here are the results:
I think the performance is good enough and it's delivering playable frame rates.
Next up, Unigine Heaven using DX11 API:
Decent enough performance in both the presets.
New cards featuring the AMD Polaris architecture have been around the corner for quite some time now. With the RX 460 from HIS digital being the cheapest one available in India currently, I decided to buy one of those for my ancient PC replacing the Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 (GDDR5 model). Since the budget was tight, I wasn't able to go for any significant upgrade other than the graphics card. So, I decided to pair that card with my ancient (almost 6 years old) AMD Athlon II X4 635 processor and check how much of a bottleneck it was. Here's the test system specification:
Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 635
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H (Rev 1.3)
RAM: 2x2GB Corsair value ram (dual channel)+ single 4GB Kingston HyperX Fury
Chassis: As basic as it can be. It's a generic case with one fan pulling air into the case and one throwing air outside. The PSU (and of course the GPU) has it's own fan. The CPU fan is also the basic one I got with it.
PSU: Tagan 500W Stone Rock
It turned out that the processor was a bottleneck for this card. So, I decided to overclock it.
Here are the settings that I used:
As you can see, I've set the FSB to 230 MHz. and the multiplier to 14.5x (which was the maximum I could get with this processor. So, it turns out to be 3335 MHz. in total. That's a 15% overclock from the base frequency of 2900 MHz. The memory clock was set to 1532 MHz. and I had to overvolt everything to make that stable. The system is quite stable as of now and the temperatures are OK. Here's the temperature after performing a few benchmarks:
Considering that the maximum operating temperature for this CPU is 55-71 degree Celcius, These temperatures seem to be OK.
So, now let's have a look at some scores:
Here's the score for Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Ultra Settings @1080p)
That looks good enough. Somewhat comparable to the test systems using better CPUs. Although there's some drop in performance but still, quite playable.
Next up is Metro: Last Light
I've used 4 different presets for testing. So, here are the results:
I think the performance is good enough and it's delivering playable frame rates.
Next up, Unigine Heaven using DX11 API:
Decent enough performance in both the presets.
Conclusion
I'll completely leave the decision up to you to decide if this performance satisfies you. If you have a better chassis with bigger fans or some custom cooling solutions, you might be able to overclock it a bit more and get some extra performance out of the CPU. Although, I'd recommend that if you have the budget to go for a better CPU, just go for it, but, in case you're out of budget, this performance is fairly good enough.
PS: In case you don't have enough for a CPU/Motherboard Combo, I'd recommend sticking to the basic 2GB model (which is slightly more than what this CPU can handle), lower the graphics settings a bit and invest in a good gaming mouse like the logitech g402 hyperion fury (that's the one i have ^_^) rather than spending that extra money to go for the 4GB model.
