Well the NDA has lifted.
I flicked through several reviews to see whats what.
Sounded in some as what was expected and stated by AMD while in others it did a little less and around and even see below a GeForce 970? Weird.
What was stranger still was the power draw of the RX480. Not normally something I looked at and only did because of the talk of efficiency I did spot a few graphs and something caught my eye.
In several I looked at I noticed the power draw to be above 150W and I thought the benchmarks were BS ... except I only ever look at sites with good reputations?!
The problem with this is that the PC-Express sockets are only rated at 75 Watts and the 6 pin connector is the same at 75 Watts. So how can the card be drawing more than 150 Watts? Then I thought that maybe with some motherboards they might be rated higher? But that certainly would not be the case with all of them.
Then I found that there was indeed an issue and as a result some people testing the cards were deciding not to overclock their test cards. I mean if your getting over 150 Watts already you do not want to tempt fate. I actually read a power draw of 200 Watt written somewhere, provided that was not BS.
Someone thought that nVidia might have rushed their 1070s and 1080s and I am beginning to think it might be the other way around? Or perhaps they were both trigger happy worrying about what the other one was going to do far too much?
This new generation of 16nm and 14nm chips is working out very bizarre this time around and far from straightforward. I hope nothing untoward happens with Zen.
Though saying that this is not necessarily a hug thing. Could turn out to be ... I mean that the extra wattage might be going through the 6 pin connector which may be able to handle it. As opposed to a dissolving motherboard?
They could simply add a power connector to the cards while ones purchased would have to be returned to manufacturers. But then most people are probably waiting for the cards from Asus, MSI, Sapphire and others, AIB, anyway that probably wont have this issue. Unless they have been silly too and been stock-piling the things up like AMD have done?
It still looks like a good card for the money ... though some tests have it close to a nVidia 980 while the odd one close to a 970. But it is good to see this level come down to the price point it is at. AFter all once everything has levelled out with supply the cost of cards lke these can only ever go downwards which means everyone benefits.
Anyway there is this link on Reddit that has a few details about the power draw ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4qfwd4/rx480_fails_pcie_specification/
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