You wait years for a decent single slot graphics card, and then two come along at once. Get ready for some single slot RX 460 action.
AMD have been playing catch-up with Nvidia a lot recently, following the release of the stormingly good Pascal architecture. That’s at the core of the product line, pushing the boundaries of GPU computing, but what’s happening at the lower end?
Hot on the heels of the low profile GTX 1050 Ti announced by MSI recently – the dinky little half-height card that runs off PCIe power only, but is still a dual-slot width – a couple of vendors have tipped up with some diminutive AMD-based graphics cards. Not everybody’s case can fit in a dual-slot, half-height card, however; in fact they’re becoming increasingly rare. So rather than going the low profile route, these new AMD cards are going to be full-height, but crucially, only a single expansion slot wide.
The first single slot RX 460 out of the block is from HIS, and is the not especially snappily (but very thoroughly) named HIS RX 460 Slim-iCooler OC 4GB, which tells you all you need to know about the card. It’s an RX 460, it’s slim, it’s running a factory overclock, and it’s got 4GB of RAM. You can find the full specs on the HIS product page for the latest cards.
If we dig a little deeper, we learn that the cooling shroud is metal – unlike the plastic of most manufacturers – which will act as a heatsink for the reduced cooling footprint of the narrower card, along with the big single fan. It’s also got a handsome lion on it, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The second single slot RX 460 is more of a mystery, and seems to have leaked from video card manufacturer XFX. Information is limited at the moment, but according to Videocardz – and assuming that their information is indeed correct – the clock speed is identical to that of the HIS card, but it will also be available in 2GB and 4GB variants.
There’s no release or pricing information available for either single slot RX 460 yet, but it’s still an exciting time to be a small format system builder. Now if somebody could only combine the two and bring us a single slot, low profile graphics card? Then no case would be off limits.