[Powerbits]

AMD’s Radeon RX 480 may be too powerful for its own good

Digital Trends recently had the opportunity to review AMD’s new budget-friendly RX 480, and we loved it for offering 1440p performance at a very reasonable price point. What we didn’t test was the card’s power draw, at least at the level of detail that a few sites, specifically PC Perspective and Tom’s Hardware, did.

Both reviewers engineered setups to test the exact power delivered to the video card itself — rather than what’s delivered to the test rig overall. And both reviewers found the RX 480 slightly exceeds its target TDP. In doing so, the card may exceed the limits of the PCI Express specification.

theoretically pull the other 75 watts from its six-pin PCIe power connection. Both of those connections are specified for a maximum of 75 watts. Yet, in certain situations, the card’s power draw can exceed 150 watts — and thus the limits of one or both power connections.

Tom’s Hardware and PC Perspective discovered power readings that reached 160 watts while playing Metro: Last Light in 4K. Overclocking only exacerbated the issue. Once again, both sites reported peaks of 200 watts, and consistent power draw over 150 watts. Tom’s Hardware even skipped long-term overclocking testing for fear it might damage their test rig.

Pulling more than 75 watts from the PCIe connection to the power supply isn’t a huge deal. The cables and PSU are often rated for much higher loads than that. The motherboard is another story. PC Perspective reached out to a motherboard company to find out just how bad the situation was.

“One vendor told me directly that while spikes as high as 95 watts of power draw through the PCIE connection are tolerated without issue, sustained power draw at that kind of level would likely cause damage,” wrote Ryan Shrout, owner of PC Perspective.

Raja Koduri from Radeon actually responded to a question about the high power draw during a Reddit AMA on launch day. “We have extensive testing internally on our PCIE compliance and RX480 passed our testing. However we have received feedback from some of the reviewers on high current observed on PCIe in some cases. We are looking into these scenarios as we speak to reproduce these scenarios internally. Our engineering team is fully engaged.”

Robert Hallock, from Radeon’s Technical Marketing group, also chimed in to try and contextualize the issue. “We will have more on this topic soon as we investigate, but it’s worth reminding people that only a very small number of hundreds of RX 480 reviews worldwide encountered this issue. Clearly that makes it aberrant, rather than the rule, and we’re working to get that number down to zero.”

What does this mean for you? Very little, under normal circumstances. A Radeon RX 480 running at stock clock speeds is very unlikely to harm your motherboard, even if it does technically exceed specifications under certain loads

Source:digitaltrends

[Robin Brimalm]

This is nothing to worry about. They have gone public with an announcement saying they will be releasing a driver update solving this problem asap. The solution will not mean less performance, only that it takes less from the PCIE slot and more from the PCIE power adapter (as it was intended to do, 75W PCIE slot and 75W PCIE poweradapter).

[Powerbits]

Intresting..now how strong would you say this card is on the nvidia scale?

[Robin Brimalm]

Benchmarks say its somewhere between a 970 and a 980. It performs well with DX12 and as we now know, BF1 will feature DX12 🙂

[Author]

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