AMD RX 480 Causing Faults For PC Gamers – PCIe Slots Have Died On High-End Boards

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Teddy07 said:

I agree with the explantion in this video that the problem is exaggerated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFuYc2FHgjw

The problem with that video is that it is factually wrong on a lot of parts. The person making the video does not seem to understand how to read the graphs presented by Tom's Hardware, or maybe he does but is acting ignorant and misinterpreting the results in order to fool others.

 

36 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yep completely agree. Everyone seems to miss the actual point and keeps coming back to the excuse that the known cards in the past that have done this are not reference, it does not matter that isn't actually relevant to the issue that people are claiming there is.

But they haven't... Not even the non-reference cards brought up in the video have exceeded the limit. If you come to the conclusion then you are reading the graphs the wrong way. If you apply a second order low pass filter (like PCPer did) then the results becomes a lot easier to read, and it becomes painfully obvious that the cards does not exceed the limit.

If you want to see what the 960 draws from the motherboard then check out PCPer's article. Here is a direct link to the result. Does it look like it exceeds 75 watts on the motherboard socket to you?

 

Edit: and before someone points out that the card is overdrawing on the 6-pin, let me remind everyone that overdrawing from the PSU directly is in no way shape or for anywhere near as bad as drawing too much over the motherboard. PSUs are often built like tanks (at least the +12V rail). Motherboards... not so much.

That's why overdrawing from the PSU is rarely pointed out as an issue (despite it happening all the time), but overdrawing from the PCIe slot is (which as far as I know has never happened before, at least not continuously like this).

[Bleedingyamato]

15 minutes ago, ace_cheaply said:

The bottom oval looks to be blocked, but the top cable management hole is free in the picture you posted. You can also get right angle sata cables that won't take up so much of the cutout.

I could see if I could make better use of the bottom oval.  I can try looking for different sata cables though unless they'd extend past the edge of the motherboard far enough to fit through the hole I might not be able to use them.

 

Is there a particular brand of sata cables you'd recommend?

[3DOSH]

14 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

They'll have to underbody their cards like many people have done, and that's doable via drivers  since it's doable via watt man. That should lower the overall power consumption without affecting performance, and that should limit the performance impact of any other fix I guess.

Underclocking the card may cause instability in the long run,  you can't  test for that in short time but you need weeks to make sure it works at that low of voltage. 

[laminutederire]

7 minutes ago, 3DOSH said:

Underclocking the card may cause instability in the long run,  you can't  test for that in short time but you need weeks to make sure it works at that low of voltage. 

Sure but under volting isn't so uncommon. Look at intel skylake processors, you can basically under volt them all at stock clocks. And a year later that's still stable. That may work.

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

The problem with that video is that it is factually wrong on a lot of parts. The person making the video does not seem to understand how to read the graphs presented by Tom's Hardware, or maybe he does but is acting ignorant and misinterpreting the results in order to fool others.

 

But they haven't... Not even the non-reference cards brought up in the video have exceeded the limit. If you come to the conclusion then you are reading the graphs the wrong way. If you apply a second order low pass filter (like PCPer did) then the results becomes a lot easier to read, and it becomes painfully obvious that the cards does not exceed the limit.

If you want to see what the 960 draws from the motherboard then check out PCPer's article. Here is a direct link to the result. Does it look like it exceeds 75 watts on the motherboard socket to you?

Probably should have worded that as I agree with the point of the video, not necessarily with all the facts and figures present in it, yea this is a cop-out. But even my old AMD 4670 exceeded 75W average in stress tests at the default clock it came with.

 

Excellent graph though, definitely rules out the 960 strix.

[Valentyn]

15 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Probably should have worded that as I agree with the point of the video, not necessarily with all the facts and figures present in it, yea this is a cop-out. But even my old AMD 4670 exceeded 75W average in stress tests at the default clock it came with.

 

Excellent graph though, definitely rules out the 960 strix.

Speaking of the 4670, I just recently removed one from a computer that's been running since 2009, barely ever turned off; and was used for gaming ( WoW ).

System ran an AMD Phenom II 940 as well, a damn power hungry CPU for its time.

 

I recently had to refurbish and clean out the system and until it recently started choking on dust and cat hair build up it never skipped a beat.
 

I spent over 3 hours pulling everything apart, including  PSU and more to clean it out. Photo is after I cleaned out the cat hair and 1cm thick sticky dust build up. Spend even longer getting it clean shiny again.

Now she's purring along again with some upgrades added in. Once the RX 470 is out I'll probably get them one of those.

 

[HalGameGuru]

7 hours ago, 3DOSH said:

Yesterday a guy live streamed trying to power mod the Rx 480 and he found some interesting stuff. The 6 pin connecter had 3 ground cables where it should have been 2 only. Also half of the VRM for the GPU is connected to the 6 pin and the other is to the MB slot.  AUX power and VRM for the memory is also connected to the MB,  he fails to mod the card given the complexity of the controller and it's small pins/contacts managing only 1410 OC after adding few capacitors to the PCB. 

I'm not sure what this means interms of fix but I doubt it's gonna be without preformnce hit.  

 

Live stream: 

  Hide contents

https://www.twitch.tv/buildzoid/v/75850933

 

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnectors/connectors.html#pciexpress

 

Not sure where the only 2 ground info came from, some spec sheets show the middle ground being a "sense" wire but most are setup 3 ground, interestingly apparently the spec allows for only 2 12v wires if desired, but 3 across the board is the norm. Grain of salt, lots of people have different info on the spec. This source doesn't mention the sense wire, but not everyone does, many show 3 ground, some show 2 ground and 1 blue sense wire. And this is the first place I've seen state the spec only requires 2 12v wires and merely allows a third.

[ace_cheaply]

7 hours ago, Bleedingyamato said:

I could see if I could make better use of the bottom oval.  I can try looking for different sata cables though unless they'd extend past the edge of the motherboard far enough to fit through the hole I might not be able to use them.

 

Is there a particular brand of sata cables you'd recommend?

Nah, just get what's cheapest in the length and color you want.  Just make sure it had a right angle connector like this.

 

Also, you should be able to run most through the top cable management port,  especially the 24pin, and you can run the cpu pin out of the top no problem.

[Bleedingyamato]

8 hours ago, Valentyn said:

Speaking of the 4670, I just recently removed one from a computer that's been running since 2009, barely ever turned off; and was used for gaming ( WoW ).

System ran an AMD Phenom II 940 as well, a damn power hungry CPU for its time.

 

I recently had to refurbish and clean out the system and until it recently started choking on dust and cat hair build up it never skipped a beat.
 

I spent over 3 hours pulling everything apart, including  PSU and more to clean it out. Photo is after I cleaned out the cat hair and 1cm thick sticky dust build up. Spend even longer getting it clean shiny again.

Now she's purring along again with some upgrades added in. Once the RX 470 is out I'll probably get them one of those.

 

How about showing us what it looks like all clean and shiny so we can see how nice it looks after all your hard work.  ?    Unless you're still working on this.

 

How and what would you use to clean a mess like that?  I'd be lost... 

 

 

[Bleedingyamato]

1 hour ago, ace_cheaply said:

Nah, just get what's cheapest in the length and color you want.  Just make sure it had a right angle connector like this.

 

Also, you should be able to run most through the top cable management port,  especially the 24pin, and you can run the cpu pin out of the top no problem.

They come in different colors?  That's awesome.  Thanks for the tips.  ?

[Valentyn]

21 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

How about showing us what it looks like all clean and shiny so we can see how nice it looks after all your hard work.  ?    Unless you're still working on this.

 

How and what would you use to clean a mess like that?  I'd be lost... 

 

 

Here you go, added a GTX 470 for now until the RX470 is released. The motherboard still has sata 2, so added an old Samgung 250GB ssd on a spare PCIe card to remove the bottleneck and run at 500MB/s+.

 

Cable management is a pita in these old cheap chassis, no real place to tuck away all those cables from a non-modular PSU. Had to cable-tie them, and shove them into the 5.25" bays.

Also if you have an old worn out toothbrush, it's great for cleaning out fans and heatsinks. The best is really buying a baby soft toothbrush to get into parts, and of course lots of cans of compressed air. After that move the PC and parts out and vacuum the entire room really well, before repeating the process.

The system was really weird, it had a silverstone 850W PSU in there, so at least it can easily handle a new system in the future.

 

The old Asus 6670 still works as well, and has HMDI, DVI, and VGA. So that's going to be a nice little backup card.

 

[Bleedingyamato]

21 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

Here you go, added a GTX 470 for now until the RX470 is released. The motherboard still has sata 2, so added an old Samgung 250GB ssd on a spare PCIe card to remove the bottleneck and run at 500MB/s+.

 

Cable management is a pita in these old cheap chassis, no real place to tuck away all those cables from a non-modular PSU. Had to cable-tie them, and shove them into the 5.25" bays.

Also if you have an old worn out toothbrush, it's great for cleaning out fans and heatsinks. The best is really buying a baby soft toothbrush to get into parts, and of course lots of cans of compressed air.

The system was really weird, it had a silverstone 850W PSU in there, so at least it can easily handle a new system in the future.

 

The old Asus 6670 still works as well, and has HMDI, DVI, and VGA. So that's going to be a nice little backup card.

 

Thank you.  Wow you did a great job it looks so much better now.  Does sata 3 still cause a bottleneck for SSDs or is that just sata 2?    Isn't an 850W PSU overkill for a system that old?  Or were things just that much more power hungry back when it was new?  

 

Did you clean this out just for fun or some other reason?

[PlayStation 2]

Guess I'm gonna look into an R9 390 then.

[Valentyn]

5 minutes ago, Bleedingyamato said:

Thank you.  Wow you did a great job it looks so much better now.  Does sata 3 still cause a bottleneck for SSDs or is that just sata 2?    Isn't an 850W PSU overkill for a system that old?  Or were things just that much more power hungry back when it was new?  

 

Did if you clean this out just for fun or some other reason?

Sata runs at a theoretical max of 3Gb/s, so around 250MB/s. Sata 3 is 6GB/s, so the PCIe card removed the Sata 2 bottleneck.

 

The motherboard was one of the first ones capable of support CPU's that draw 150W. The CPU is the AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition, it's a 3Ghz Quadcore that's has a 125W TDP.

Also the PC came with that PSU, so now that it's nice a clean it should keep working a long time. 

The GTX 470 gpu I added also has a TDP of 225W, which was a lot back then. I opened that up and clean it out as well. Was very dusty. 

 

I did all this for a friend, this will be her first PC besides a 2008 Dell laptop, and she's always wanted to be able to play games; so once the RX 470 is out she'll have a nice little system. Better than simply chucking this old computer into a bin, and I had plenty of old spares to upgrade it with.

[Bleedingyamato]

21 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

Sata runs at a theoretical max of 3Gb/s, so around 250MB/s. Sata 3 is 6GB/s, so the PCIe card removed the Sata 2 bottleneck.

 

The motherboard was one of the first ones capable of support CPU's that draw 150W. The CPU is the AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition, it's a 3Ghz Quadcore that's has a 125W TDP.

Also the PC came with that PSU, so now that it's nice a clean it should keep working a long time. 

The GTX 470 gpu I added also has a TDP of 225W, which was a lot back then. I opened that up and clean it out as well. Was very dusty. 

 

I did all this for a friend, this will be her first PC besides a 2008 Dell laptop, and she's always wanted to be able to play games; so once the RX 470 is out she'll have a nice little system. Better than simply chucking this old computer into a bin, and I had plenty of old spares to upgrade it with.

Interesting.

 

That's nice of you to do that for her.  ?