AMD Driver Likely to Throttle Power Draw on RX 480
AMD Driver Likely to Throttle Power Draw on RX 480
2016-07-02
Andy has issued a statement regarding
potential excessive power draw through
the PCIe bus for its new RX 480 video
card and that includes the reference
models currently shipping this coverage
is brought to you by origin pc and a new
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for VR to recap everyone very quickly
the reference model has 16 pin power
connector those are rated for 75 watts
but they can draw more depends on the
power supply the cable things like that
and it's also drawing the rest of its
power through the PCIe slot this is
normal the PCIe slot is generally
accepted and rated for a 75 watt power
draw it can be exceeded it should not be
just kind of as a general safety rule
for the motherboards power management
but the RX 480 is exceeding that limit
especially with overclocking and to give
you an idea of that when we overclocked
this one which is a liquid-cooled RX 40
that we built we were hitting a 192 dot
to watch GPU power draw and that's for
the GPU that's not the board the board
power is an additional 40 watts or so
from the memory and other board
components and then that increases of
course as you overclock and really
stress a fixed clock rate new increase
the power target things like that so
we're looking at a range of 222 250
watts in our overclocking depending on
what we're doing so that's a lot of
power for one 6-pin to handle that means
a lot of it's coming through the PCIe
bus so aMDA has issued this statement
regarding the issue they said as you
know we continuously tune our GPUs to
maximize the performance within their
given power envelopes and the speed of
the memory interface which in this case
is quote an unprecedented 8 gigabits
before gddr5 recently we identified
select scenarios where the tuning of
some RX for 80s was not optimal and we
can adjust this tuning via software
basically is what they're saying and
they're looking for a driver to fix
these issues so first of all I want to
point out that a gigabits per second is
not unprecedented just kind of get that
out of the way marketing speak but the
core of the matter is not about the
memory
speed it's about the power draw and so
this discussion of doing driver updates
to tune down the power draw what that
translates to very likely is a throttle
as we demonstrate this in our how to
overclock the RX 480 video which should
be on the channel now or very soon and
what you'll see is once you've begun
pushing the clock rate if you haven't
touched the power percent target so if
you're not moved up to an additional
fifty percent power the clock will
actually throttle itself and very rarely
if ever reach the targeted overclock
value so you could type in fourteen
hundred megahertz but it may never hit
even 1380 or 1350 based on the power
drug is already choking on power so you
can fix that buddy by increasing power
target fifty percent but a drier update
potentially throttling that back would I
think be a potential limiter to the
clock rate and therefore fps and
performance and frame stability but we
will test this separately once the new
driver or whatever it is comes out I
bought this card out of pocket this is
an RX for 80 reference cards so what is
this at one point but this is a reviewer
model this can actually do a couple
things that these camp like switch
between four and eight gigabytes for
testing this is fixed eight gigabytes it
is a card you can buy off the shelf
yourself I will be testing this one to
see how it is affected by the driver
update and we might validate on this
just to make sure things are looking
good but that's all for the update
basically and he knows about the issue
they're looking at the fixing it and
it's a driver update so people who
already bought these will receive that
update and it should help with cheaper
motherboards things like that which may
be threatened by the overdrawn PCIe but
otherwise we'll have to look into the
frame rate performance so as always
thank you for watching patreon link the
post real video fiona helps that
directly subscribe for more content and
we'll be looking at some other not our x
480 things very soon so do check back
for that i'll see you all next time
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