News AMD Navi 10 on Budget: MSI Outs Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming MX Graphics Cards

King_V

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The need for two 8-pin connectors is baffling. A typical RX 5600 XT is about 150W, so, a single 8-pin would be barely enough if it somehow drew ZERO power from the PCIe slot.

Let's say you wanted to stay well below the PCIe max spec for power draw, and refused to pull any more than 50W from it. And, let's say for some reason that these cards, which are NOT highly overclocked, drew 5700 levels of power, so 185W.

That would be 50 from the PCIe, and 135W more from connectors. A single 8-pin is still well more than up to the task.
 
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BaRoMeTrIc

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Jan 30, 2017
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The need for two 8-pin connectors is baffling. A typical RX 5600 XT is about 150W, so, a single 8-pin would be barely enough if it somehow drew ZERO power from the PCIe slot.

Let's say you wanted to stay well below the PCIe max spec for power draw, and refused to pull any more than 50W from it. And, let's say for some reason that these cards, which are NOT highly overclocked, drew 5700 levels of power, so 185W.

That would be 50 from the PCIe, and 135W more from connectors. A single 8-pin is still well more than up to the task.

150 is probably a average use case, AMD doesnt draw much juice from the 3.3v rail on the pcie, so like you said that leaves them with 50w from the 12v rail, probably just spreading it out over the pcie to keep the amps down to maintain efficiency. but under load at that clock speed and memory speed i'm sure it's capable of hitting 200+
 

vinay2070

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The need for two 8-pin connectors is baffling. A typical RX 5600 XT is about 150W, so, a single 8-pin would be barely enough if it somehow drew ZERO power from the PCIe slot.

Let's say you wanted to stay well below the PCIe max spec for power draw, and refused to pull any more than 50W from it. And, let's say for some reason that these cards, which are NOT highly overclocked, drew 5700 levels of power, so 185W.

That would be 50 from the PCIe, and 135W more from connectors. A single 8-pin is still well more than up to the task.
I have a Gigabyte GTX 1080 OC card, which has just a single 8 pin power connector which I have overclocked decently. Pulls 220 Watts as per hwinfo. No issues so far. 2 X 8 pin is overkill.
 

InvalidError

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2 X 8 pin is overkill.
It really is. The spec for the low-current MiniFitJr pins is 9A a piece (13A for the high-current variants) so an 8-pin connector with one 12V line dedicated to remote Vsense would still be good for up to 27A which is roughly 300W at 12V. The PCIe-SIG was being excessively conservative by speccing 6/8-pin PCIe AUX connectors to only 75W and 150W respectively. You'd need to be running #26 wires from the PSU to need this many pins for 150W and the worst PSUs I have seen still use at least #20. The PCIe-SIG spec appears effectively predicated on people using Molex/SATA-to-PCIe adapters.
 

King_V

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150 is probably a average use case, AMD doesnt draw much juice from the 3.3v rail on the pcie, so like you said that leaves them with 50w from the 12v rail, probably just spreading it out over the pcie to keep the amps down to maintain efficiency. but under load at that clock speed and memory speed i'm sure it's capable of hitting 200+
200+? How do you figure that?
 

King_V

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That's TOTAL system power if you look at the description on Anandtech's graph.

The M and MX are meant to be budget cards. They have fairly low clock rates.

And, if you look, and cut out the snarkiness, you don't have to find it "at some Geocities site," but Tom's Hardware reviewed both the reference and the Sapphire Pulse OC with the updated BIOS.
Looking at the power charts, we compared the Sapphire 5600 XT Pulse OC with its reference configuration as well as the OC bios. We saw significant differences between them. Where the reference card peaked at 121W, averaging around 110W, with the new BIOS it peaked at 156W while averaging 140W. Quite a difference, but still averaging well under the listed board power (160W in the case of the Pulse OC).
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx_5600_xt/4

So, the card itself is NOT drawing 200+ watts. Not even close. Even the Sapphire Pulse OC could get by easily on a single 8-pin, peaking at 156W.
 
Sep 19, 2020
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I'm not complaining about the two 8 pin connection because one of my 600 watt power supply supports it but my 700 watt one doesn't so I'll have to swap my power supply. I'm just intrigued on why it would need this type of power. Is there something special about this 5600 xt 6gb model that would indicate that there might be more power under the hood than most realize? If that's the case it's a steal right now at 239.99 after 20 dollar rebate on newegg. Heck I think it's a great deal either way. However if it has more power because of having two 8 pin connection requirement that would be awesome and even more value. I do know this card is still fairly new so for all we know maybe in future bios updates it could possibly get even better?