AMD Radeon RX 480 8 GB

[Tsukiyomi91]

how is it that's fast enough to run VR while maintaining 970-like performance??? run all DX11.2 powered games at Medium-High for >60fps?? pfft. The 480's big older bros even butchered it across the deck...

 

[rtwjunkie]

Those who ditched their 970s & 980s for this disappointing card will cry. I knew this card isn't going to perform as per what AMD claims after posting all that hype materials at Computex.

AMD has pitched this as a mid-tier, affordable card that will mostly be a 1080p card that performs right up there with 970 and 980.

All has been met. The rest was hype built up by people, creating an almost impossible goal in their minds for AMD to reach.

You unfortunately either succumbed to the hype or you are one of those people that have so little going on in the world you think the red vs green thing is real life.

 

[jabbadap]

Over on Reddit, Robert @ AMD confirmed that they only had 8GB cards available for reviewers, so they provided reviewers with custom BIOS to simulate a 4GB card so they could also review that, as the only difference between the two cards is physical amount of VRAM and the RAM speed.

Ah, that make more sense. 4Gb gddr5 costs close to half the price of 8Gb chip. So I would assume that $40 price difference is quite close to price of 8*4Gb gddr5 chips, so $5 each while 8Gb chips are twice as much $10 each.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Why is everyone butt hurt. This is exactly what AMD promised price/performance king. They never promoted high-end performance, they never said anything about power efficient, etc. The said the RX 480 was be clearly targeted at the mid-range with a price around $200 with performance close to or on par with their current RX 390. They delivered that hands down. So this is one for the budget minded people with limit wallet space. Good job AMD.

For this crowd, myself included, the RX 490 and 490X or Fury 2 is going to have to be a completely different animal.

 

[GhostRyder]

I wonder when we will see the die shots to confirm if the 480 has locked sectors like is believed. If they keep the old naming, we should expect an RX 480X at some point which might hold some extra performance.

 

[OneCool]

I can OC my 380X and be right there with it? What a Turd.

 

[BiggieShady]

Sadly with this power draw real competitor is good old gtx970, rather than yet unreleased gtx1060 ... dat 14nm fin fets should do better for GCN

 

[Jeffredo]

Such a shame. If this was two years ago they'd have a viable competitor for the GTX 970. As it stands it splits the difference on typical and peak gaming power consumption, is barely faster and can't OC as high. All Nvidia has to do is drop the price on the GTX 970 a bit and its a draw (and they will as old stock clearance gears up).

 

[OneCool]

The quote of the day is!!!!!!! drum roll "they stated in the beginning it was an upper mid - low high end card."

WTH!!!!

 

[okidna]

Well that's the spirit, that meagre default pcb is still keeping it down though. According to Kyle[H](I know hardocp is not really liked here) AIB:s custom cards can be OC to 1490MHz - 1600 MHz.

Yup that's a good spirit, but you might want to read this :

Variasi overclockability Radeon RX480 belum kami ketahui, dan berdasarkan 4 GPU yang ada di kami(2 dari AMD, 2 dari PowerColor), hanya ada 1 GPU yang mampu berjalan di clock 1.4Ghz. Sisanya bervariasi antara 1.33-1.35Ghz.

Translated to English :

We don't know yet about the overall variance of RX 480 overclockability, but with our 4 samples (2 from AMD and 2 from PowerColor) only 1 card managed to reach 1.4 Ghz core clock. The other 3 reach between 1.33-1.35 Ghz core clock.

 

[xorbe]

Can you fit "entry" and "flagship" in there? lol.

 

[john_]

The price is nice, at least in some countries. First prices in Greece over 300 euros. Top retail shops ask 360. Yeah right. I am coming first thing in the morning.

AMD did only one thing wrong here and that's the cooling solution. Third party solutions will not come at $199/$239, so we can't say that they will fix this. You can't say "I fixed that", when having to pay more. In everything else the card is good. Yes, it can't overclock. So? You buy locked Intel processors and you are happy with that. It performs excellent for it's price, doesn't it? It performs better than the competition in newer titles and DX12 and it has double the ram.

 

[Totally]

. . . ehhh when I read this I felt like

Unfortunately, I had bee-lined straight to the power consumption charts. Then looking elsewhere there was no justification, better off getting a 380X only advantage I see is if one opts for 8gb which the 380x doesn't offer.

 

[jabbadap]

The price is nice, at least in some countries. First prices in Greece over 300 euros. Top retail shops ask 360. Yeah right. I am coming first thing in the morning.

AMD did only one thing wrong here and that's the cooling solution. Third party solutions will not come at $199/$239, so we can't say that they will fix this. You can't say "I fixed that", when having to pay more. In everything else the card is good. Yes, it can't overclock. So? You buy locked Intel processors and you are happy with that. It performs excellent for it's price, doesn't it? It performs better than the competition in newer titles and DX12 and it has double the ram.

Cooling solution is not the thing what went wrong, that power delivery is much worse. It really screams 8-pin connector, 6-pin it's not enough if you have to take half the power over pcie slot. With 8-pin you could take 2/3 power from there and only 1/3 from the pcie slot.

 

[msamelis]

I think AMD is playing the only card it has under its sleeve and it did hit a nice spot where gamers usually spend around $200 for a GPU and for that price, it doesn't seem like the 480 can be beaten. Sure, it's hit and all that but with an aftermarket cooler, temps will probably in check. Let's hope this drives Nvidia's prices down too, I really hate how expensive the 1000 series is at the moment.

I only just noticed something too, how is it possible that all AMD cards seem to be faster at 4k than on 1440p on Assassin's Creed: Syndicate? Is it because the game is not balanced or something? Am I missing something here?

Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/7.html

Edit: Thanks for the swift response W1zzard

 

[ensabrenoir]

Its a great $200 card....but still only a $200 card and the power draw is concerning. Amd is the value brand so you'll see a lot of value mother boards and psu's with this thing. That I don't like at all. Alot of people got it right with expectations, but a whole lot more didn't.

 

[W1zzard]

Am I missing something here?

No AA at 4K, I keep forgetting to add that info the charts

 

[john_]

Cooling solution is not the thing what went wrong, that power delivery is much worse. It really screams 8-pin connector, 6-pin it's not enough if you have to take half the power over pcie slot. With 8-pin you could take 2/3 power from there and only 1/3 from the pcie slot.

They probably got trapped. They needed a card that was at least as fast as a GTX 970 and also limited to 150W to make third party cards worth considering over the reference. Both AMD and Nvidia here are dishonest to the customer. Nvidia came out talking about $379 and $599 cards, then throw out the Founders Edition cards. Add to that the limited supply and those $379 and $599 where pure lies. AMD on the other hand says $199 and $239, but offers a reference design that is trying to balance on a rope, forcing people to wait for third party cards that will be more expensive.

As for power delivery, I was thinking that this could be a problem, then in a videocardz article was this in the end of the article about this problem

Let me end this post with a link to Radeon HD 6990 review by Anandtech.

I don't say that I understand completely the part in Anandtech's article about HD 6990. But if this is something similar, I also don't remember articles about HD 6990 cards having any problems, so probably we wouldn't see any problems with RX480 cards either. Not to mention that we overclock cards and probably many overclocked cards go over those limits. We just don't know that because we don't have the knowledge or the equipment to check it.

 

[EarthDog]

No AA at 4K, I keep forgetting to add that info the charts

It would be incredibly helpful if you list the settings for each game somewhere. Do I miss that in each article... I feel like that was asked by me and answered before, LOL!

 

[SpAwNtoHell]

I miss the days when AMD was putting more then decent stuff on the table at more then reasonable price, lets see...: this uses more power then it should, runs hot, down-clocks, overclocks worse then small pascal, costs here at the moment more then 970 parteners cards msi asus zotac with decent cooling and factory overclock...

cheapest: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/nda...0-8000mhz-gddr5-1126mhz-gpu-1266mhz-boost-230

i need to ask where is the mainstream product price? feel free to look up on the above for 970 gaming from gigabyte asus strix and msi gaming...

so amd new die of 14nm is behind with 2 years performance or around there?

if this is like this the smaller variants and single slot will be crap.... hope it does a better job with zen and vega...

 

[Casecutter]

Looking at the 99th-percentile frame time and frames beyond the 16.7-ms this Polaris is a good improvement over a 380X. In some cases Polaris is a healthier 1440p than OC custom 970's, although I wish such a review had a 390 in the mix to give a full picture of such improvements. As to the power numbers I don't see them off by that much from their original presentation, but it really hard to say if it validates their "2.5x improved performance-per-watt" compared with its 28nm-class hardware. I'd like to know if the power we're seeing is more a Polaris GCN architecture thing, or is it GloFlo 14nm process issue. If more on the latter, I might cut some slack if it permits us not to be TSMC dependent, if that's just a repercussion in promoting a second source it's a small price to pay long term.

The reference cooler is just that, and it needed at least one "S" shaped heat-pipe instead of that lub of copper in a aluminum extrusion I think it would have been a improvement. I've never saw what a 380X reference made due with, but this RX480 was only just adequate for a closed case of average air flow.

I think in AIB custom form like a Nitro, STRIX, Double-D, or PCS+ we can see this Polaris at it best. I just hope such AIB's start with the understanding of how budget the BOM of these reference RX480's starts at, and can do their thing without gouging on price. Over the last several releases they've held to give nice cards with hardly a bump from MSRP. Let's hope that they'll hold to a $250 price for such 8Gb cards, heck even reign in the bulk of 4Gb to $200-215.

 

[Ungari]

I miss the days when AMD was putting more then decent stuff on the table at more then reasonable price, lets see...: this uses more power then it should, runs hot, down-clocks, overclocks worse then small pascal, costs here at the moment more then 970 parteners cards msi asus zotac with decent cooling and factory overclock...

cheapest: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/nda...0-8000mhz-gddr5-1126mhz-gpu-1266mhz-boost-230

i need to ask where is the mainstream product price? feel free to look up on the above for 970 gaming from gigabyte asus strix and msi gaming...

so amd new die of 14nm is behind with 2 years performance or around there?

if this is like this the smaller variants and single slot will be crap.... hope it does a better job with zen and vega...

The only reason you are seeing cheap 970s is because of this launch.

 

[Fluffmeister]

Not impressed.

 

[Dethroy]

AMD should simply abandon their stock solutions. The stock RX 480 will surely leave a sour taste in everyone's mouth. AIB 480s would've looked so much more enticing. After all, the first impression counts.

 

[efikkan]

Why is everyone butt hurt. This is exactly what AMD promised price/performance king. They never promoted high-end performance, they never said anything about power efficient, etc.

Power efficency was almost the only thing they promised, and didn't deliver anything close to 2.5×.

The said the RX 480 was be clearly targeted at the mid-range with a price around $200 with performance close to or on par with their current RX 390. They delivered that hands down. So this is one for the budget minded people with limit wallet space. Good job AMD.

Pascal is nearly twice as power efficient, which is a huge problem for AMD when GP106 and GP107 arrives, they simply don't stand a chance.

If AMD were going to become relevant at all they would have needed to close the efficiency gap. Even if we give AMD the benefit of the doubt and assume they will gain a few percent from driver improvements, they are still at the efficiency of GTX 900 vs Radeon 300 series. They need to shave off 10-20% of this gap for each generation. So at this point Pascal is twice as energy efficient, that is really BAD NEWS for AMD. The only "good" aspect of this chip is performance per dollar, but it looses in every other aspect.

For this crowd, myself included, the RX 490 and 490X or Fury 2 is going to have to be a completely different animal.

And which chips are those based on?
I'm going to give you a very simple math challenge. Given the efficiency of RX 480, how much power will a "GTX 1070 competitor"(50% over RX 480) and "GTX 1080 competitor"(+85%) draw?

It performs better than the competition in newer titles and DX12 and it has double the ram.

Does it? Tell me which games (which are not AMD-biased). Nothing in this performance range needs more than 4 GB, probably not even 3 GB.