Tom's Hardware re-examines the RX 480's power consumption

[Mira Yurizaki]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-power-measurements,4622-2.html

 

The tl; dr version is:

Quote

The AMD Radeon RX 480’s power supply configuration exceeds the limit defined by the PCI-SIG’s specifications. It doesn’t exceed them by a massive amount, but it does do so reliably. Norms should be respected, especially if they already have a very generous built-in tolerance range. We never implied in our launch article that a system made up of solid components might be directly damaged by an AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card running at stock clock frequencies.

 

There shouldn’t be any problems unless cheap, dirty or outdated components are used, the card isn’t installed correctly, or the amount of power drawn is increased by overclocking the card.

Or in other words, yes it can exceed the power delivery the PCI Express standard allows for, but it's not going to do so by a huge, worrying amount.

[ivan134]

7 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-power-measurements,4622-2.html

 

The tl; dr version is:

Or in other words, yes it can exceed the power delivery the PCI Express standard allows for, but it's not going to do so by a huge, worrying amount.

Obligatory, no shit. The people who claimed their motherboards were damaged were clearly trolls and yet people still quote them as evidence that the 480 is dangerous for your mobo.

[Valentyn]

I like how they mention dirty components. The one person so far to claim it blew this motherboard had a system that looked like this.

 

The system is in a terrible state.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

So I guess it is a go? 

 

9 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

I like how they mention dirty components. The one person so far to claim it blew this motherboard had a system that looked like this.

 

The system is in a terrible state.

 

Lol, not to mention it looked like someone punched the side of his HDD cage. 

[AresKrieger]

10 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

There shouldn’t be any problems unless cheap, dirty or outdated components are used, the card isn’t installed correctly, or the amount of power drawn is increased by overclocking the card.

Well to be fair many people who buy budget hardware buy cheap components, or are still using old hardware. Honestly it's only a potential issue to better parts if you take it off stock settings, however it doesn't change the fact the reference model 480 is crap, and should not be recommended when better versions will be out soon enough, also it can still cause your system to crash with better hardware just for reference.

[Derangel]

Well, yeah. It "could" do damage under the right situations and it "could" lower the life span of a motherboard but only lower end ones and given how many ways a motherboard can die and how many things can kill it pinning the blame on a GPU 3-4+ years down the line would be a bit of a stretch. The power draw when overclocked is a little more troubling, but trying to push a stock card isn't really worth it anyway.

[ivan134]

8 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

Well to be fair many people who buy budget hardware buy cheap components, or are still using old hardware. Honestly it's only a potential issue to better parts if you take it off stock settings, however it doesn't change the fact the reference model 480 is crap, and should not be recommended when better versions will be out soon enough, also it can still cause your system to crash with better hardware just for reference.

I would only recommend for people who are willing to tinker and tell them to undervolt the card since that brings power consumption within spec. The downside is that there will be no overclocking headroom for them.

[Valentyn]

17 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

I would only recommend for people who are willing to tinker and tell them to undervolt the card since that brings power consumption within spec. The downside is that there will be no overclocking headroom for them.

Honestly I never recommend a reference AMD card to people, not since Hawaii came out anyway.

It's usually worth waiting a bit to get a far superior card from Sapphire with a better cooler, and custom PCB.

[3DOSH]

The PCB and VRM on AMD boards are hell a lot more robust than what Nvidia use but this time for some weird reason they decided to draw most of the power from the MB slot. But yeah people took it to far as they usually do. 

[Derangel]

6 minutes ago, 3DOSH said:

The PCB and VRM on AMD boards are hell a lot more robust than what Nvidia use but this time for some weird reason they decided to draw most of the power from the MB slot. But yeah people took it to far as they usually do. 

It's all speculation, but I'm guessing AMD wanted to push that more power efficient narrative and thought they could get away with violating PCI-SIG requirements without anyone caring. The card should have been an  8 pin instead of a 6. Then they could have kept it in spec.

[3DOSH]

13 minutes ago, Derangel said:

It's all speculation, but I'm guessing AMD wanted to push that more power efficient narrative and thought they could get away with violating PCI-SIG requirements without anyone caring. The card should have been an  8 pin instead of a 6. Then they could have kept it in spec.

Even if they used a 8 pin connecter it would have been the same,  they wired half of the VRM for GPU and VRM for the VRAM to draw power from the MB slot. If they wired it to use the 6 pin it would have been fine since the 6 pin is robust enough to handle more than 150w of power. 

[Misanthrope]

There's one guy that actually ran into issues precisely because of an older board: Can't look it up right now since work blocks YouTube but it's called science studio and basically he was trying to build a 350 bucks rig: 200 bucks for a 480 and the rest for everything else. He went with a fairly old AM2 board (or AM3? Not sure but it's like a ddr2 board) and basically he would K.O. the system everytime he tried games (it would just shut down). He replaced the 480 with a 980ti (much higher tpd btw) and it ran just fine and stable.

 

So it is kind of an issue for boards that are a few years older and while his case seems extreme I could potentially see people with 2011 or so boards from fairly cheap prebuild rigs running into shutdowns.

[zMeul]

so get this:

Quote

 

There’s one fact we did get wrong in our Radeon RX 480 launch article: the card's six phases aren’t distributed equally between the PCIe slot and PCIe power connector.

Spoiler

outdated / wrong pic^

 

AMD specifically engineered the board to draw more power from PEG - they did it to mask the fact the card draws way more than 150W

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, Valentyn said:

I like how they mention dirty components. The one person so far to claim it blew this motherboard had a system that looked like this.

 

The system is in a terrible state.

lol, mine's not much better  except the drips but with 3 cats, you get cat hair in there. It doesnt matter if you use dust filters or not. Those fuckers get everywhere.

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, ivan134 said:

I would only recommend for people who are willing to tinker and tell them to undervolt the card since that brings power consumption within spec. The downside is that there will be no overclocking headroom for them.

Excuse you? people are getting 1350 on 1.1, that's almost a 30% overclock compared to stock clock.

[ace_cheaply]

5 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

Excuse you? people are getting 1350 on 1.1, that's almost a 30% overclock compared to stock clock.

Stock clock is 1266mhz, so it's not even 10%, it's 8.4%.

[79wjd]

7 minutes ago, ace_cheaply said:

Stock clock is 1266mhz, so it's not even 10%, it's 8.4%.

1120 is stock, 1266 is factory overclocked. 

[spartaman64]

30 minutes ago, zMeul said:

so get this:

 

AMD specifically engineered the board to draw more power from PEG - they did it to mask the fact the card draws way more than 150W

sure if you consider 15W way more. also did amd ever specify a advertised power consumption or did they just say tdp

[ace_cheaply]

6 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

1120 is stock, 1266 is factory overclocked. 

They all hit the boost clock of 1266, so that is base.

[RagnarokDel]

10 minutes ago, ace_cheaply said:

They all hit the boost clock of 1266, so that is base.

boost clock = overclock

[ace_cheaply]

4 minutes ago, RagnarokDel said:

boost clock = overclock

I disagree, but ok.

[7850OC]

i trust more on "PCper" now than on "toms hardware"

 

(i don't care if they apologize now with us for the mislead) 

 

 

[c00face]

What are you saying, this is okay? First off, it isn't. AMD need to get their head out their _))) thinking they can fool the public by pulling something like this. Having the card draw more power out of the PCI-e slot is not okay. It may not cause harm for more updated mobo's, but people who buy this card get it for the very reason of budget cuts because that's exactly what it's suppose to be, a budget mid-gaming card. If you want to push that RX 480 and have a constant gaming experience for 2+ more years, good luck.

 

I can smell dead PCI-e slots if you choose to seriously game with that crap card after a certain amount of months to years. I'm glad Toms Hardware brought up this subject to the public because Linus didn't do it, and not many other Youtuber's would even do it. Because Tom's made it public, they forced AMD to correct their mistake, and put them in their place if they ever tried to pull another stunt like this.

[Valentyn]

1 hour ago, RagnarokDel said:

lol, mine's not much better  except the drips but with 3 cats, you get cat hair in there. It doesnt matter if you use dust filters or not. Those fuckers get everywhere.

I have 3 cats as well, and I never get hair in there, then again I clean my system each weekend.
My filters I clean twice a week, but it's funny about the hair. I just opened my 390X this morning, and there was some white cat hair that managed to get in the box somehow. Cheeky buggers were trying to get in obviously.

[NumLock21]

2 hours ago, Pohernori said:

So I guess it is a go? 

 

 

Lol, not to mention it looked like someone punched the side of his HDD cage. 

Not punch, more like ripped off.

And source plz!