http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/rx-480-vs-gtx-970

Barely an upgrade. Waste of money tbh.

You can spend £1000 on the best GPU in the world, but the back plate won't cool it by even 1 degree. False marketing.

I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong about this. Thermal pads don't provide any cooling by themselves. They merely provide effective heat transfer to another surface. You need something pressing against both sides of a thermal pad for it to do anything constructive. Just placed on a surface by themselves, at best they'll do nothing and at worst they'll act as a slight insulator. You can't just slap them on the back of a card without a backplate (or you can, but it'd be stupid to). When connected to a large piece of metal (i.e. the backplate), they transfer the heat from the component into the metal, which can then be cooled via airflow.

A backplate with thermal pads attached to the PCB absolutely will provide some cooling, even if it's fairly negligible. It's not very useful when it comes to the core itself (as evidenced by the LTT video that people are going to now spam to "prove" that backplates do nothing), but they can provide minor additional effective cooling to the VRM area in particular (or VRAM chips on the back of the card, but not many modern cards have any on the rear due to the larger size of modern modules). However, that's only the case if there are thermal pads in place to facilitate heat transfer. Many backplates have no thermal pads at all, and thus do absolutely nothing besides look pretty.

Of course, Luke didn't test this in his highly-scientific five minute video and focused entirely on core temperatures. Which is somewhat fair, given that Gigabyte's snake oil copper plate over the core was the focus of the video. However, it certainly doesn't change the fact that a large piece of metal connected to the back of the board via thermal pads is going to wick some heat away from the PCB. EVGA recently used this to help with their overheating VRMs, along with a secondary plate on the inside of the cooler (which is really no different from the backplate in terms of potential function).

​Are you saying it needs a backplate cause it runs hot? backplates are for reinforcement and asthetics.

HOLY SMOKES!

Now that's a deal.

Semi-decent price but again another RX 480 without a backplate. Polaris runs BLOODY hot!

But seriously this is just getting ridiculous. 480s cheaper than 470s. WTF!?

Oh I also had to laugh at this


Wow!

if you are going to spend 150 on a gpu im sure you have another fiva extra for the next day delivery c'mon now

heat

Screw it, ordered. I'm getting bored of my 970 and would like a new toy. It wont be a big upgrade, but It shouldn't cost me much either so *shrug

Wow - bargain! I've just returned my Sapphire RX 460 4GB to Amazon as I wasn't impressed with the performance - for another £40 I can get this - amazing price.