jabbadapGood good, keep them coming. That's quite similar to HiS models too, which made me thinking for possibility of it being actually reference design from amd.

owen10578Nah its more like HIS and XFX has been collaborating their card designs ever since the 380X if I remember correctly. The only differences are the shroud design and fans at most.

cdawallNeither company makes its own cards, I believe they both outsource to Tul still. Powercolor, Diamond, HIS, VisionTek, VTX3D, XFX and a couple others use them depending on card and lineup. I have a stack of 290(x)'s at work from all different manufacturers, all the same card.

www.tul.com.tw/global/index.aspx

owen10578Except Tul's cards are different though...none of Powercolor's vards are different so maybe they just outsource the manufacturing or get exclusivity on the design.

cdawallSome of the powercolors match everyone else just depends on model.

owen10578Some maybe but so far the the RX series have none matching powercolor's

cdawallThat's a good thing. Maybe they went out on their own, because the RX series from powercolor is absolute junk. The only company to release a 480 with worse PWM than the reference design. It also clocks worse, they should get some kind of award for being terrible.

owen10578yea the powercolor ones are crap compared to the other and im sad because i own 2 lol but i still am able to overclock to 1420mhz no problem hahah so it ain't that bad. Also Sapphire and MSI and Gigabyte also released a worse VRM design than reference but not as bad as Powercolor's although Gigabyte is close.

cdawallWhich Sapphire card is worse than OEM? The GB one can maintain the same/exceed power output as reference (depending on temps). The powercolor cannot even equal it.

owen10578Noo man the Sapphire Nitro is a little worse but is rated at 125C the Gigabyte is waayy worse than reference too almost as bad as Powercolor's and the MSI is close to reference like the Sapphire as I remember. Watch buildzoid's videos on them on YouTube on his "Actually Hardcore Overclocking" channel.

cdawallSit through and listen to those videos a little better. For aftermarket PCB's it goes Asus Strix, XFX GTR, Nitro+, (MSI/GB/reference all roughly equal) the trashcan outside, most RX460's and finally powercolor.

The Nitro+ can nearly equal the GTR under higher temps. ;) there is a reason most of the high air clocks are it and the XFX.

owen10578Ok i can agree on the Sapphire and MSI being good as well but Gigabyte's is bad. It really is. And yes Powercolor's is absolute garbage. Also overclocking performance doesn't necessarily get affected by the VRM throughput, as my Powercolors on air does 1400MHz no overvolt...it's more so with the chip quality than the noard since all use the same voltage controller and same 6-phase design

cdawallWattage consumed and ability to stabily provide power to the gpu are directly affected by vrm quality. The most efficient Polaris chip might clock as high on any pcb, but we aren't getting those we are getting 150-200w parts at 1450-1500. The power color under water (which lowers consumption) still can't keep stable with any amount of power pulled.

owen10578Yes yes better VRM can deliver more and possibly have better voltage stability (stability i think is more defined by the controller and the amount of caps) im not arguing better VRM isn'timportant. But are you even reading what I said? I can do 1420mhz on mine in crossfire. And i get 1440mhz on firestrike just certain games crash after long gaming sessions so the Powercolor isn't that un-usable like you make it sound like.

cdawallI can run 1480...

owen10578Ok that's great then. But my other card which is an XFX only got up to 1380mhz. So you see its still largely affected by chip quality aka silicon lottery.

cdawallWhich is only made worse by a poor card design.

owen10578Yes true. I never argued that. I was arguing that the Gigabyte was also bad...so....

cdawallIt isn't anywhere near as bad.

owen10578It has a 180A 100C VRM....not far off from the Powercolor's 204A 80C VRM...

Edit: Yea actually its pretty comparable...if you see on the datasheets here:
Gigabyte: www.aosmd.com/res/data_sheets/AON6414A.pdf
Powercolor: www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/NTMFS4C10N-D.PDF

Looks like at 25C Tcase its close with the Gigabyte delivering 4A more so I can only assume the Gigabyte is a bit higher than 204A at 80C and the Powercolor a bit lower than 180A at 100C