AMD RX 400 series (Polaris) MegaThread! FAQ & Resources

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personally i never see reports that RX480 drawing excessive power from PCI-E slot causing fried mobo. only that some reviewer giving advice that it might damage some motherboard in the long run (if the issue not fixed). other issue that i saw was RX480 fail to boot. but it is on very old AMD board. over the years even low end board has increased in quality. so for much recent mobo it should work although for some there might still be concern about long term effect. it does not really matte anymore since the issue has been fixed by AMD. the problem is AMD should just let the card draw more power from the cable instead of PCIE slot and should be honest saying that RX480 is 160-165w card instead of saying it was 150w card. just like they did with 295x2 (the power connector suggest the card will pull 375w of power but they honestly say it was 500w card).

anyway did AMD still make reference board or all is left on the market is custom build one by board partners? i heard some people speculating that AMD reference PCB might end up more expensive to make than some of board partner custom PCB. AMD reference have 6 power phase right? some board partner RX480 only have 4 or 5 power phase.
 
I still see Reference 8GB cards out there but the $200 price leader 4GB Reference cards do not exist. Its what I said a couple pages back which IMO is kind of lame. They dropped just enough "4gb" cards out there to try and prove their $200 price point, and after launch day they are long gone.

I happily got one, and BIOS upgraded it to 8gb, so I can't complain. But on a whole the 4gb reference cards were a marketing exercise at this point.
 


I am especially because I paid $199 for what became an 8gb card after a simple BIOS update!

My Microcenter had 2 XFX 4gb cards in stock vs 30+ 8gb cards of various brands. And never got them back and the item doesn't even exist in their inventory for any store about a month after.

To be honest at this point it looks like there was no intention for that card to be any more than a launch day "hey look we have a $199 VR capable GPU" marketing tool with no intention of it going mass production. Considering all the "4GB" cards were really 8gb anyway, it was cheaper for them to just manufacture them that way and then cripple them via the BIOS, and then never have them available again. I just did a search of amazon, newegg, and microcenter and no 4gb reference cards exist even as listed items there. They aren't even "out of stock" they just are not even there. My card does still exist on XFX's website, but you can't buy anything from there.

Anyone out there who is team green or team red needs to realize the higher ups there only care about 1 thing, sales. Even the rank and file do too, so they can get bonuses. Yeah they want to put out a good product that they are proud of, and the RX 480 is hardly a bad one. But lest you think for a moment the upper management of these companies won't do everything they can to manipulate the market in their direction, which is clearly what the "4gb reference RX 480" was, to squeeze you for every dollar they can get.

"Oh the 4gb is out of stock.... well the 8gb is only 30 bucks more and I want it now...." They count on it.
 


http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007709%20600007787&IsNodeId=1&Description=rx%20480%204gb&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=36

Newegg has 5, 4 of which are in stock. But not quite at the $199 price. Or were you referring to the reference ones only?
 


I was talking only about the reference ones. That was their big advertising point "$199"... Mind you $30 more for a non reference isn't a huge difference, but hey 30 bucks is still 30 bucks.

Considering how tight some of our users budgets can be, that can be the difference between a 480 and a 470 for them.
 


Agreed and it allows for the 1060 3gb to grab the recommendation, unless the 480 4gb can be found for the right price.
 


$30 is a lot. 15% more money for like no more improvement IMO. Unless they do what Nvidia does not and cuts down their lesser-memory chips.
 


I agree, and thats the cheap ones, some were $40 more. I meant that as, well at least its not $100.

And yes the performance difference between the reference and the aftermarkets is minimal, while they can also be overclocked a bit too, its not going to make $40 worth of difference, its a few fps.



Exactly, shot themselves right in the foot.

Makes no sense too, Reference 4gb 470 cards are floating around out there in stores. Guess they are avoiding cannibalizing those sales?
 
Plenty of 4gb RX480s available in the UK, e.g. http://www.ebuyer.com/757637-xfx-radeon-rx-480-core-4gb-gddr5-dvi-hdmi-3x-displayport-pci-e-rx-480p4lfb6

That's at £200, although that was the launch price here anyway (remember UK has a 20% sales tax included in all prices the US doesn't- so its usual for us to pay the $ cost in gbp as the price difference covers the tax and import costs).

Edit: We also have the RX 470 for £180. That sounds about right to me.

In comparison the GTX 1060 prices are £180 for the cheapest 3gb (although there is only 1, all other are £200- in which case I'd go with a 4gb RX480 instead). The cheapest 6gb 1060 is £230 currently- which isn't a bad price at all (less than the cheapest 8gb 480).
 


The 480 4gb is in a weird spot right now, It's overall a better GPU than the 1060 3gb, but the 1060 is cheaper and odds are no one will really miss the 1gb VRAM. The performance difference between the cards is only really in DX12 and it's not really great enough to justify the extra cost. For the same price or up to $10 more, the 480 4gb is the better card, but at $15+ more, the 1060 3gb is the winner, IMO.

AMD needs to figure out a way to correct the pricing if they want to hold on to the market share gains they got from their "start in the middle" strategy.
 
i will try again with my question:

Hi guys, one question. Do any of you have Gigabyte G1 RX470 4GB model? I got good deal to buy one so i need opinions from people who have this card. Impressions? Temperatures? I
appreciate every answer.
 
I would be curious to know what the profit margins are for the various 480, 470, and 1060's. I suspect AMD would like their cards to be more competitive on price, but the board partners are playing their own games to maximize profits. I would hypothesize (off of no empirical data) that the board partners, and perhaps even retailers, are making a higher margin on AMD cards than they are NVIDIA cards. After all, why make the same margin on each card and get left holding a bunch of lower margin 1060's if you could increase price on the 480's and 470's to keep them bunched together like this while increasing overall margin? The board partners have no incentive to get aggressive with pricing when they are making products on both sides of the line. I bet, if AMD and NVIDIA had separate board partners, the pricing landscape would be drastically different. Just a thought...
 
Well, to your credit jlfx64, ATI (now AMD) and nVidia were sued once for colluding. So it is not unheard of in the Video Cards sector about getting together in cahoots to manipulate the market.

Cheers!
 
Yet another custom RX 480 review.

This one hit up to 1475MHz (max stable) with a stock bios and nothing other than the default fan curve. :ouch:

All the time it sipped around 133W on average and 60 degrees temp. :ouch:

XFX RX 480 GTR

https://youtu.be/zWASNajSdpg

That gives it a Firestrike score in the same ballpark as a stock R9 Fury. Nice to see the RX 480 cards getting better and better.
 
i tried looking for official review for the card but i can't find one. 130w+ even when OCed to 1475mhz that's crazy. some other RX480 oced to 1500mhz pull as high as 246w. though i found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBWs_7vRWkA

it seems to really know how much the card really consume you probably need the extra hardware that used by some reviewer that can isolate the power consumption to gpu only. according from the video above the card has no sensor that can detect the entire card power consumption. they detect mostly on the gpu side only. you can fast forward to 2:50 into the video.
 
Looking at that PCB review it seems the XFX custom PCB is packing good quality components with no real weak links.

I'll check back to that channel as he's going to try some custom overclocking once he actually has the card in his hands.

But for now, as someone who likes to overclock and bios mod, I'd definitely get the XFX GTR if I was in the market for an RX 480.

Shame that Jay didn't show a full test of it's performance in games, though I imagine it would be the best RX 480 results yet outside of using a custom bios. (EDIT: Maybe that's why? :no:)

I recall a comment from July (supposedly made by someone working at an AMD partner) which said with a good cooler, the RX 480 should be able to hit between 1450MHz to 1480MHz on air. We are finally seeing that about 3 months later.

For 1475MHz the power draw is very good for an RX 480. But for sure, those figures aren't 100% accurate from Afterburner.

I also recall that RX 480 which hit 1520MHz with a custom bios. It was in the 240W to 250W power draw range and was only 'proven' to pass in Firestrike. No idea how stable it was for gaming.
 

The word on the street is that the gloflo process is improving and thus the newer cards are hitting better clocks at lower power draws. this would make sense, I am just not sure how feasible such a noticeable change occurring in such a short time is. it is very impressive how high that card scores as the core clock goes up ( and memory cannot go past 9000 yet). Whereas pascal is maxwell running faster on smaller transistors (a few tweaks too), it seems that if AMD can figure out how to boost clock speed now they will be in a great position. lot of ifs though.
 
So a rumour I heard from RedTechGaming is that Vega could come out sporting higher base and boost clock speeds compared to Polaris. It might mean better overclocking (in terms of %) too.
This may be linked to an improvement in the production process and/or other factors. That is in addition to various other architectural improvements over Polaris to boost performance, including better memory/colour compression.

Another rumour to surface late last week is that some form of Vega might launch in 2016 after-all.

Watch this space.
 


So as someone knowledgeable about GPUs what would you recommend for GPUs between the RX 480 and the GTX 1060 - 1080 for good VR performance? To be honest I don't think I'll be able to afford the $1K plus to start a basic system at this time, but I am curious about this new segment.
 


Games Nexus did a good VR performance review- and came to the conclusion that the RX 480 and GTX 1060 are both a tad weak for VR (it's possible to play on both however you are talking reduced settings to get high enough frame rates, which is not really what you want to be doing if your investing so much in a VR headset).

A GTX 1070, GTX 980ti or something from AMD's Fury series all performed much better for VR so would probably be a better investment.

Edit: Actually review as by HARDOCP, link to their reviews: http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vr

Having read a few I'd generally say the RX 480 / GTX 1060 are both a bit weak.
 

Yes I spend a lot of time on HARDOCP and I have reviewed their VR testing they have done. It really seems AMD doesn't have the horse power to really have a good competition for the 1070 & 1080 models. I hope their Vega addresses that weakness and it comes out early in 2017.
 
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