As AMD's largest AIB partner, Sapphire has been making custom cards for quite some time now. There is not a lot left to innovate in this space anymore, so just about anything can be a point of difference. As a factory overclocked card, the Nitro+ RX 480 4GB card comes right out of the box with a serious 1306MHz boost clock speed on the Polaris 10 core. What makes this card is the BIOS and thermal work done by the Sapphire team. Whereas the two RX 480 cards I have in the wings would throttle under a heavy load, this card just stays right on point at 1304-1306MHz, allowing it to deliver all it can from a capability standpoint. The memory speed of the 4GB of GDDR5 memory comes in at 1750MHz rather than the 2000MHz seen on the 8GB cards, but the sustained higher clock speed allows it to deliver a higher level of performance.