I want to share my experience upgrading to a RX 470

Hardware GPU
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To be clear this is more of a rant about my recent purchase, I decided it’s a good time to upgrade from my old Sapphire 7850 since you can find used 470s and 480s for under $100 at the moment, found a sweet deal on a single fan XFX 470 for just $50.

Now where the problems start, let me preface this by saying that nothing is physically wrong with the card itself, all my problems are driver related with the first problem I noticed was that some but not all youtube videos were stuttering, so fairly minor issue and I just disabled hardware acceleration, next when I tried out a game I noticed mouse lag, so after more googling I turned off HDCP support, then I after using it a while I saw that simply moving windows was jittery (I think this was because my FPS was capped to 30 according to other users with this issue) and eventually found out it was caused by HDMI scaling which I needed to fit the image properly on my TV, fortunately for me I was able to find the service menu for the TV so I could change the overscan on the TV itself and turn off scaling.

All said and done none those problems were huge issues but it was still quite frustrating and I spent a few hours fixing something I just bought, especially frustrating since I had no such issues on several older cards, but making this worse is that I’ve read a good handful of similar stories from people upgrading to 400 or 500 series cards and bare in mind all these issues I mentioned have been reported around 2 years ago and AMD should know about them (and fixed them by now), so I’m left wondering “am I good now or what’s going to break next?” so yeah… I like AMD but after an experience like that I’m questioning if it’s worth sticking with them or if I should just give in and make my next card be from our Nvidia overlords. (well I shouldn’t have think about that for at least another 4-6 years but this experience has soured my taste for AMD)

Edit: Forgot to mention that I didn’t use DDU but I selected the clean install option on the installer to perform a clean install of the current latest drivers 19.1.1 and then updated to the optional 19.1.2 driver.

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Very very odd.
Have you installed drivers from clean slate (uninstalled old ones with DDU) or have you just installed the new ones next to the old?

Used 470 for $50… either seller didn´t know what they had or they have been mined on real good.

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Both of the Polaris cards I’ve owned causes flickering in web browsers.
Can’t figure out why.

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Because browsers require Nvidia Gameworks.

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Yes, forgot to mention that, I didn’t use DDU but I selected the clean install option on the installer to perform a clean install of version 19.1.1 drivers and then updated to the optional 19.1.2

As for the card, well the bios doesn’t appear to have been modified (by that I mean GPU-Z doesn’t say anything is off about it), he only sold the one card as far as I noticed, the seller said he only replaced it for an upgrade and the seller even did a good job cleaning it, the thing looks practically new so dunno why he listed it for just $50.

1 Like
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Have you made sure your display is set to its native refresh rate in Windows?
This is known to cause issues on older VGA-Projectors (59Hz when it should be 60Hz)

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Yep, it’s set to 60Hz and oddly enough with scaling enabled I was also able to fix it by setting it to “High color (16-bit)” but of course… Ew, no thanks. (I didn’t notice until later on that you didn’t reply to me lol)

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I upgraded to an RX590 from an integrated Intel GPU. Installed AMD drivers over Intel ones as well as did a clean install. Never had any issues, especially the ones you mentioned.