AMD Will Address RX 480 Power Consumption With Radeon Software Update This Week

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Vladraconis

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And who else, exactly, is getting a pass? Some examples?

And, I don't get it why are you talking about fried / bursting in flames motherboards. The issue is that, since the card is rather consistently ( not sometimes) drawing more amps through the PCI-E slot, it might fry the PCI-E slot. But only the slot, not the whole motherboard. Let alone make it burst in flames. And, as Tom's have already pointed it out, this might affect only older / cheaper boards, which are not that capable of handling such overloads. Nor should they be, that's why we have specifications.

Does the AMD RX 480 work within specs? No, it doesn't..

Is it a 200$ video card, aimed at bringing performance to consumers without braking the bank? Yes, it is.

Is it likely that those who buy the RX 480 will have also bought a cheaper motherboard / kept the old one? I would say it is.

Is it possible - just possible, not for sure - that the card will fry the PCI-E, and only the PCI-E, slot on an older / cheaper motherboard? Yes, and reports say that it has happend three times, shortly after launch.

Have AMD admitted that the promblem really exists, and are trying to fix it? Yes, they have.

So, why the "ÄMD bashing" theory and the motherboard in flames posts?

Please correct me if I said anything dumb.
 

greenmachineiijh

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Anyone notice the implications of their statement "These optimizations are designed to improve the performance of the Radeon RX 480, and should substantially offset the performance impact for users who choose to activate the “compatibility” toggle."

So you WILL have performance reduction across the board enabling this "Compatibility" mode. Their statement of "performance uplifts in popular game titles of up to 3%" means that only "popular" titles will not be impacted for performance.

TOMS! I see a retest with a focus on these statements...

Seems like a firmware fix or hardware V2 is in order to correct this properly.
 

TJ Hooker

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Yeah, but you can just not enable compatibility mode. The way I read it, there are two "fixes" being implemented here. The first is to move more power to the 6 pin connector from the PCIe slot. This would in turn push 6 pin power beyond the 75W standard, but this is much less of an issue than going over the slot's limit. The 2nd fix (compatibility mode) would lower overall power (and therefore performance), presumably to try and keep both the connector and the slot within spec. That's how I interpret it anyway.
 

greenmachineiijh

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That is how I read it too. But there may be some that would not want to take the chance of not having the compatibility turned on for the boards sake. What if they do not know about this?

Either way, they made some good adjustments and quickly to offset the issue.
 

emac2003

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i dont think a driver could fix the issue without droping performance the thing is they probably limit powerdraw so...
 
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