Saturday, July 2nd 2016
Official Statement from AMD on the PCI-Express Overcurrent Issue
AMD sent us this statement in response to growing concern among our readers that the Radeon RX 480 graphics card violates PCI-Express power specification, by overdrawing power from its single 6-pin PCIe power connector and the PCI-Express slot. Combined, the total power budged of the card should be 150W, however, it was found to draw well over that power limit.
AMD has had out-of-spec power designs in the past with the Radeon R9 295X2, for example, but that card is targeted at buyers with reasonably good PSUs. The RX 480's target audience could face troubles powering the card. Below is AMD's statement on the matter. The company stated that it's working on a driver update that could cap the power at 150W. It will be interesting to see how that power-limit affects performance.
AMD has had out-of-spec power designs in the past with the Radeon R9 295X2, for example, but that card is targeted at buyers with reasonably good PSUs. The RX 480's target audience could face troubles powering the card. Below is AMD's statement on the matter. The company stated that it's working on a driver update that could cap the power at 150W. It will be interesting to see how that power-limit affects performance.
"As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximize their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8 Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday (July 5, 2016)."
358 Comments on Official Statement from AMD on the PCI-Express Overcurrent Issue
I am just curious if you are able to go a little past it with overclocking. Have not tried yet...Excuse me, while I see what I can do with it lol.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/x58-unknown-motherboard.223785/
:)
They could have made this card a bit worse so that it used around 130W or so of total power. It's performance would be worse, obviously, but it shouldn't be too much of a hit in order to reach that wattage. Ofc, for this to work, the wattage coming from the PCI-e slot should not exceed 70W, even when the card is overclocked.
Had they taken this approach, the card would still be a good performer and none of this power-consumption fiasco would have occurred ... but noooo ... the just HAD to shoot themselves AGAIN ...
Only reason that comes to my mind is that marketing PR department had long before said there will be a 6-pin, and engineering team facepalmed while doing only thing they could, using PCI-E bus to deliver power to GPU as well.
i was wandering something though, could amd use the drivers to divert power usage from the pcie to the 6pin? is that even possible?
Techinically, 970 wasn't selling with the wrong spec's It HAS 4gb of memory no matter how much people say its only 3.5. there is 4gb there so specs were correct.
Custom RX 480 cards will come and this matter will be forgotten fast. It will be only one of the things that fanboys will be remembering in fanboy wars. "RX 480 was a fire hazard". "The same can be said for GTX 570(I think)" etc.
What I think we should learn here, is that when overclocking a card that it is at it's TDP limit from the factory(GTX 950 with no power connector, R9 270X with only one 6pin), we are not just stressing the card, we are probably stressing the motherboard. I was in total darkness until now. Was I the only one? I wonder how many people out there get a GTX 950 without a power connector and overclock it because
"It doesn't need a power connector, so it must have some really top quality GPU in there that probably overclocks better than those used in cards that need an extra power connector". The real competition for AMD, the bar they had set to pass, was GTX 970, not 1070 or 1080. They needed a card faster than GTX 970 and at the same time at 150W TDP limit. Lowering the clocks was probably enough to lose some benchmarks. So they decided to go over the TDP limits, probably knowing that if there where any incidents, they would be few. Wrong thinking.
Technically if my EVO 840 was 100GB SSD and 20GB HDD, I wouldn't say "That's OK, I always have 20GBs free", or "That's OK, 100GBs+20GBs it's 120GBs".
I don't give any excuses to AMD, and no one should. The world will be a better place, and products of better quality, if people also stop giving excuses to Nvidia for it's mistakes/lies.
PS Also less ROPs, less cache, less bandwidth. You keep forgetting those.
Hmm, Has anyone run any GPGPU compute power measurements on RX 480? See above, claiming 3x underclocked RX 480s + Coin mining killed it.
IMO these cards should be pulled from the market until the fix has been applied and tested to be effective.
The way this company is going I'm unlikely to ever buy one of their graphics cards again. No wonder NVIDIA can charge what they like for their cards. At least they work beautifully most of the time.
Actually you can connect as many as this motherboard has 4 PCIe. 16,4,1,1x