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Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480

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Sajin
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Friday, July 01, 2016 8:16 PM (permalink)
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Power-Consumption-Concerns-Radeon-RX-480
 

 
 


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    Xavier Zepherious
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Friday, July 01, 2016 10:22 PM (permalink)
    It is worth noting however that while the PCI-SIG does have power specifications, they’re not a principal concern of the group and they want to avoid doing anything that would limit product innovation. While the 300W specification was laid out under the belief that a further specification would not be necessary, the PCI-SIG does not even test for power specification compliance under their current compliance testing procedures.  Conceivably the 6990 could be submitted and could pass the test, leading to it being labeled PCIe compliant. Of course it’s equally conceivable that the PCI-SIG could start doing power compliance testing if it became an issue…
    At the end of the day as the PCI-SIG is a pro-compliance organization as opposed to being a standard-enforcement organization, there’s little to lose for AMD or their partners by not being compliant with the PCIe power specifications.
     
     
     


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    stalinx20
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Saturday, July 02, 2016 2:06 AM (permalink)
    I'm sorry... were they really comparing the 960 with the 480?

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    Bruno747
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Saturday, July 02, 2016 2:46 AM (permalink)
    Its starting to look like there was some truth to the power issues and 850mhz comments a while back.
     
    That said, wasnt the extra power port on most motherboards supposed to help with this? I even seem to remember EVGA releasing a add in card that had a 4 pin molex on it to add stability to the onboard PCI-e power delivery system. If it worked back then, why doesnt it work now with the RX480?
     
    That said, AMD might get another black eye if the 1060 comes out and is lower powered, yet higher performing in the same price range, all without these issues.
     
    I understand AMD is short staffed and underfunded but good grief, they have a crazy history of problems. Thinking back I think it really started to go downhill when they had the TLB bug with the Phenom while running a 64bit os.

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    ty_ger07
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Sunday, July 03, 2016 1:53 AM (permalink)

    That said, wasnt the extra power port on most motherboards supposed to help with this? I even seem to remember EVGA releasing a add in card that had a 4 pin molex on it to add stability to the onboard PCI-e power delivery system. If it worked back then, why doesnt it work now with the RX480?


    The extra power connector on the motherboard or the molex PCI-E power add-in card are both designed for multi-card systems with high total PCI-E load. The problem here is that this AMD card is currently exceeding the max amperage of a single PCI-E slot's electrical connectors by 20-50% and those connectors will burn up when they get hot regardless of how much extra power the motherboard has available. Each pin in the connector is designed to sustain a max or 1.1 amps continuously while the card may draw 1.6 amps relatively continuously in some situations.

    Hopefully it is just an oversight on AMD's part and they will be able to regulate the motherboard's PCI-E power consumption via a driver update (or streamlined driver to firmware update) to cause the card to stay within the power consumption limit and draw the extra power from the auxiliary power connector without pulling a bunch of performance out of the card.
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    Xavier Zepherious
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Sunday, July 03, 2016 2:10 AM (permalink)
    in some cases 100% - watch the video from the other thread - on AMD response
    tom's hardware had an overclock reach 300watts - that's 140-150 watts out of the pcie slot rated for 66watts for 12V   ...let alone the pcie- 6 pin power connecter  which was also drawing 150 watts(also over PCIe specs)
     
     


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    Xavier Zepherious
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    Re: Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480 Sunday, July 03, 2016 11:09 AM (permalink)
    I just read this on an investing site (so take with implicit grain of salt), but wow if this is true (emphasis mine):


    It has been confirmed that AMD designed the RX 480 card so that half of the Voltage Regulator Modules are wired directly to PCI-E bus power supply pins. Any time the card draws more than the Total Dissipated Power of 150 watts, the card will go out of the PCI spec. Many sites have shown that this out of spec conditions can happen running at stock speeds by as much as 27% and at overclocked, up to 50% out of spec. There is no hardware solution nor is there any BIOS or driver solution other than to reduce the voltage by at least 30% which will greatly affect performance.
    There is also the specter of another major problem as the 6 pin power connector sense line is grounded instead of correctly being used for sensing if the connector is indeed installed. If AMD has no other safety feature running, this could mean that the card will boot up using only the PCI-E 75 watt power. That will blow up the motherboard (or the card and the mobo) when a game starts to run.
    Even the custom board manufacturers may be in deep trouble as well. If they trusted AMD to design their reference card properly (which they didn't) and followed the same design, all of their cards will be out of spec. Even worse, they will be more out of spec than the reference card due to the increased power they are pumping into the card (which has to be matched by the PCI-E power as half the card cannot be "more powered" than the other).
    This may indeed be a PR disaster for AMD. It is going to get very interesting!
    BTW my source:
    Twitch
    Click to expand...

    If the 6-pin sense pin is indeed grounded, booting up the machine without the 6-pin installed would do...?

    Update: within the first few minutes, streamer states the 6-pin is used solely for Vcore and that the GPU chip does not draw any power from the PCI-E bus. I suppose that explains the grounded sense pin and why the excessive PCI-E power draw is blamed on the VRAM.
     
     
    from hardocp forums
    https://hardforum.com/threads/amd-in-trouble-rx-480-powergate.1903715/page-15#post-1042395532
     
     
    so 30% drop means 850 MHZ clock - which is what it was originally designed for
     
    there is no fix other than a recall or serious gimping here
    and future 480 would have to have a complete re-design of PCB and possible redesign of ASIC that manages the power draw
     
     


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