The brand new AMD RX 480 seems to have an issue of drawing too much power through the pci-e port, so you may want to hold off on buying one of the first lot for now.
To make it clear, I cannot verify it myself since I have no contacts at AMD to get hold of a card.
Wccftech has the full lowdown here. As do a number of other respected websites.
It's worth noting that the Asus GTX 960 Strix also exhibits similar problems.
The main thing to note is: Don't overclock the reference AMD RX 480 as it could cause issues, but the custom designs from partners like Sapphire, XFX, Asus & MSI shouldn't have the issues.
The reference design also seems to be at the power limit, so hopefully cards from their partners will have additional power connections to feed it.
Still, this is a bit sad to see for a brand new card launch and something that's important for AMD.
This is why I think it's always a bad idea to be an early adopter, it reminds me of how Nvidia stung me with the VRAM issue on the 970 which now sits in my Steam Machine (I now have a 980ti in my desktop). Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
To make it clear, I cannot verify it myself since I have no contacts at AMD to get hold of a card.
Wccftech has the full lowdown here. As do a number of other respected websites.
It's worth noting that the Asus GTX 960 Strix also exhibits similar problems.
The main thing to note is: Don't overclock the reference AMD RX 480 as it could cause issues, but the custom designs from partners like Sapphire, XFX, Asus & MSI shouldn't have the issues.
The reference design also seems to be at the power limit, so hopefully cards from their partners will have additional power connections to feed it.
Still, this is a bit sad to see for a brand new card launch and something that's important for AMD.
This is why I think it's always a bad idea to be an early adopter, it reminds me of how Nvidia stung me with the VRAM issue on the 970 which now sits in my Steam Machine (I now have a 980ti in my desktop). Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Consider this a non-issue. Yes the specification is 75W and the card can consume 77W. But a mainboard manufacturer taking only 2 watts of margin into account would be very, very stupid. You can assume safely that any sane mainboard manufacturer designs their board to be capable of delivering more than 75W.
This is mainly bad press for AMD, the amount of situations where it will cause problems will be near zero.
Last edited by dmantione on 2 July 2016 at 5:11 pm UTC
This is mainly bad press for AMD, the amount of situations where it will cause problems will be near zero.
Last edited by dmantione on 2 July 2016 at 5:11 pm UTC
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Quoting: dmantioneConsider this a non-issue. Yes the specification is 75W and the card can consume 77W. But a mainboard manufacturer taking only 2 watts of margin into account would be very, very stupid. You can assume safely that any sane mainboard manufacturer designs their board to be capable of delivering more than 75W.Maybe you're right, but from the benchmarks I've seen it wasn't just 2W above the PCIe specs, it was way more than that.
This is mainly bad press for AMD, the amount of situations where it will cause problems will be near zero.
The PCIe specs says the maximum intensity the card should get from the mobo is 5.5A but, in Battlefield 4, it's up to 6.92A (that's 25% above the specs without overclocking anything!). Other graphics cards can do it simply because they have more than just a 6-pin connector. AMD should have at least an 8-pin connector by default on their RX 480.
Of course it is good if the mobo can handle it, it means that the mobo can behave correctly if you overclock some parts on it. But that's not how standards work! By default, any component should respect the specs. If it is indeed only 2W... then I promise I won't make such a fuss about it, but it doesn't seem so (I mean just read the articles, they don't even want to try overclocking because they're afraid to damage the other components on their test machines).
A good example of manufacturers not respecting the power specs and leading to dangerous products is the bad USB-C cables. That lead to burn your battery, and clearly it's not up to your phone to handle bad USB-C cables.
I really want AMD to do something about it, I really do, because I really want to buy an AMD card. But until a fix is found (whether it's hardware or software), I think it's stupid to buy an RX 480 card.
Last edited by Creak on 2 July 2016 at 5:59 pm UTC
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I must admit, I've read several articles, but not the one linked by GoL. So I just read it and I agree that the conclusions are far less catastrophic than what I've been used to read. It says that the power consumption isn't that high compared to other cards, and good custom cards that will be sold later should fix the problem by adding a 8-pin connector.
That being said, even in regards to this reading, I'm still disappointed by AMD who advertised a low-power consumption GPU and apparently tried to squeeze the card into this definition by using a 6-pin connector and being just above the limits of the PCIe specs. That is bad PR. It gives the impression that the GPU, although a brand new architecture, has already reached its limits. And it also gives bad press to the cards. It would have been better to have a product a bit less on the edge, at least for the first revisions. Now a lot of users won't even look twice at those cards because of what happened.
Because I really prefer AMD over NVIDIA for several personal reasons, I will continue to follow closely this topic and hope for a brighter tomorrow with the custom cards that seems to be on the way. But if the problems aren't fix by then, I'll be extremely disappointed by AMD.
Last edited by Creak on 2 July 2016 at 7:08 pm UTC
That being said, even in regards to this reading, I'm still disappointed by AMD who advertised a low-power consumption GPU and apparently tried to squeeze the card into this definition by using a 6-pin connector and being just above the limits of the PCIe specs. That is bad PR. It gives the impression that the GPU, although a brand new architecture, has already reached its limits. And it also gives bad press to the cards. It would have been better to have a product a bit less on the edge, at least for the first revisions. Now a lot of users won't even look twice at those cards because of what happened.
Because I really prefer AMD over NVIDIA for several personal reasons, I will continue to follow closely this topic and hope for a brighter tomorrow with the custom cards that seems to be on the way. But if the problems aren't fix by then, I'll be extremely disappointed by AMD.
Last edited by Creak on 2 July 2016 at 7:08 pm UTC
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Another point of view for this is the adoredtv video about it. He points out that even though the average Watts is a little higher than other cards, many cards have significantly higher spikes in consumption with a lower average usage and that this is a common problem throughout the industry. Also, these high averages only occur with resolution, game, and quality settings that you would never run in real life because they're basically a slide show. Additionally a prior video notes that the best efficiency of power to performance on the card is when you set it to -20% power consumption. The new wattman software has fairly fine gained control of the power consumption at various temperatures and clock speeds so under clocking it just in these torture tests in software to prevent the problem should be easy with minimal performance drops in normal operation.
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The funny part is already cards having the same issue, and no one make a big deal.
If people that made so many articles and afraid to damage their hardware they just don' t need to do the test on their hardware usually places that make this kind of measures or testing, have plenty of hardware to reproduce the error or try to damage their hardware in some situations.
So people are making a big deal where is not. Let the places that make review do their test, then wait for the company to respond to that experiments found it.
Anyway the only things is that the graphics cards are demanding more power from the pci express, than usually. That is the only problem if this situation make failure hardware then we need to worry, they need do a better research and for that they need time.
About Creak said Amd said it will work on 6 pin connectors, and it does, isn't it? Remember when you make an specification for anything you can make tolerance, between some ratio that make the hardware works without problem, even when you calculate something you need to do that or to the found an error.
The main problem here is that articles are making a huge deal with the topic then when you read, the topic is already misleading. Even in GOL "The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of". The good things is explain and give some good advice as others company been in the past.
If people that made so many articles and afraid to damage their hardware they just don' t need to do the test on their hardware usually places that make this kind of measures or testing, have plenty of hardware to reproduce the error or try to damage their hardware in some situations.
So people are making a big deal where is not. Let the places that make review do their test, then wait for the company to respond to that experiments found it.
Anyway the only things is that the graphics cards are demanding more power from the pci express, than usually. That is the only problem if this situation make failure hardware then we need to worry, they need do a better research and for that they need time.
About Creak said Amd said it will work on 6 pin connectors, and it does, isn't it? Remember when you make an specification for anything you can make tolerance, between some ratio that make the hardware works without problem, even when you calculate something you need to do that or to the found an error.
The main problem here is that articles are making a huge deal with the topic then when you read, the topic is already misleading. Even in GOL "The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of". The good things is explain and give some good advice as others company been in the past.
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Quoting: TheRiddickI doubt a software patch will fix a fault with a dpm hardware issue on a microprocessor die! Unless they down-clock all 480 card (lol)
Remember those on-chip microcode images we load at power up that some people complain about ? If a software update is not sufficient and the DPM logic actually needs to change that just means an updated microcode image...
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Hello there, all over the place I read about powergate, while other reviews completely skip this aspect. While this is not good for AMD for PR reasons, all their efforts towards Linux are not forgotten. I would love to buy myself a gaming PC (never had, just reading gaming articles with longing), but I would love to have zen onboard too. I may wait for the combo. At work hoeever we use Linux workstations for cfd and simulations and we use quadro cards, but the administration is not simple with different driver versions for old, very old and new cards. I will suggest that once amdgpu supports well recent firepro cards we buy one of them and test it.
Need to support a manufacturer with good Linux stance...
Need to support a manufacturer with good Linux stance...
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Quoting: bridgmanQuoting: TheRiddickI doubt a software patch will fix a fault with a dpm hardware issue on a microprocessor die! Unless they down-clock all 480 card (lol)
Remember those on-chip microcode images we load at power up that some people complain about ? If a software update is not sufficient and the DPM logic actually needs to change that just means an updated microcode image...
Is that AMD-Bridgman ?
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Quoting: raonlinuxThe main problem here is that articles are making a huge deal with the topic then when you read, the topic is already misleading. Even in GOL "The AMD RX 480 seems to have power issues you may want to be aware of". The good things is explain and give some good advice as others company been in the past.The article title is directly related to what is being reported by many sites. I said "seems" for a very good reason as it shows ambiguity/speculation since I didn't do the testing myself, but if multiple people are claiming it and AMD is looking into it that should tell you there is some issue here.
Quoting: bridgmanNice to see you here :)Quoting: TheRiddickI doubt a software patch will fix a fault with a dpm hardware issue on a microprocessor die! Unless they down-clock all 480 card (lol)
Remember those on-chip microcode images we load at power up that some people complain about ? If a software update is not sufficient and the DPM logic actually needs to change that just means an updated microcode image...
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Quoting: pete910Is that AMD-Bridgman ?
Yessir...
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