AMD Releases Statement On Radeon RX 480 Power Consumption; More Details Tuesday
by Ryan Smith on July 2, 2016 5:05 AM EST
Following up on this week's Radeon RX 480 launch, there has been some questions raised about the power consumption of the card. This is after some sites whom directly tap the power rails feeding the card discovered that at least some of their samples were pulling more than the standard-allowed 75W over the PCIe slot and/or 6-pin PCIe external power connector.
To that end, it would appear that AMD's staff is working weekend duty, and they have just sent over the following statement.
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 8Gbps 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).
If some of the data is to be believed, these cards are exceeding 150W total at times, which would mean there is either something causing them to run in the wrong power state, or they are just outright exeeding their power limit and need to be throttled back. As we don't do per-rail testing I don't have anything meaningful to add at this second, but it will be very interesting to see how AMD responds next week.
Update 07/06: AMD has since released their status update, which you can find here.
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Impulses - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
lol?PeckingOrder - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
well this issue is talked about so much all they can really do is mention it and try and make it seem like it's not a big dealsilverblue - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
...or they could've just not mentioned it at all, to fit with the bias you're harping on about.Eden-K121D - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
LOL.Wreckage - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
Well that does explain why they skipped the 1080 review while releasing the 480 review on day 1.coder543 - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
They released a preview of the 480, and they released a preview of the 1080. They haven't fully reviewed either card AFAIK.BMNify - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
Within the comments for the RX 480 preview, Ryan Smith said "The full RX 480 review will be in a few days. The full GTX 1080 review will be a couple of days after that. RX 480 would have been a full review today, but I managed to slice myself with the RX 480 on Tuesday and needed to resolve that first..."Seems like they want to push out the RX 480 review before the 1080 review. Seems fishy to me.
Morawka - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
yup, and they've had the 1080 for a full month longer, And the whitepapers to go with it.Jtaylor1986 - Saturday, July 2, 2016 - link
They released 'previews' of both cards on day 1. Good try though. If you are coming to Anandtech for day 1 reviews you are doing it wrong. You generally get the most comprehensive review of any site a week or two post launchjimbo2779 - Sunday, July 3, 2016 - link
That never used to be the case. It used to be day 1 in depth reviews now often the reviews don't come.It is a shame.