Biostar have released their take on AMD’s Radeon RX 470D – a card that was only released in the Chinese market. Trouble is, it’s intended for cryptocurrency miners…
Cryptocurrency mining has wiped out graphics card stock, so we’ve adapted our list of the best graphics cards to show you the best ones you can get your hands on right now.
Looking to ride the massive wave of cryptocurrency miners that has hit the PC hardware community, Biostar’s RX 470D comes equipped with 1,792 stream processors, a memory frequency of 7000MHz, and a clockspeed of 1200MHz. Interestingly, the display ports on the card haven’t been removed – likely a ‘safety net’ in the case that cryptocurrency mining falls flat again and Biostar need to sell these cards to gamers.
Dual fans and a sizeable heat sink are there to keep the temperatures down as the GPU furiously crunches numbers – a nifty feature for gaming too, if you can get your hands on one. The card also sports 4GB of speedy GDDR5 memory.
This cut-down version of AMD’s Polaris 10 GPU lops 256 GCN cores off the version used in the standard RX 470 cards and was previously only released in the Chinese market by Sapphire. It’s not unusual for board manufacturers to create cheaper versions specifically for China, but if Biostar’s RX 470D appears outside of China, it’s likely due to other AMD GPU stock already being taken up by the miners.
Whether it’ll succeed in tugging miners away from the traditionally gaming-focused GPUs they’re currently using remains to be seen, but if these are the only options out there they won’t have a lot of choice.