AMD responds to RX 480 'Powergate' issues

July 4, 2016 | 12:58

Tags: #pci-express #powergate #radeon #radeon-rx-480 #rx-480 #specifications

Companies: #amd

AMD has responded to concerns that its Radeon RX 480 graphics card reference design draws excess power from the PCI Express bus, amid unconfirmed reports of motherboard damage as a result.

AMD's latest graphics card, the Radeon RX 480, is designed to help the company claw back lost market share from rival Nvidia. While its price-performance characteristics have been lauded in reviews, there's a bigger issue: issues with the cards drawing excessive power from the host PCI Express bus - with reports circulating on social media and AMD's official support site that the out-of-spec power draw is even enough to permanently damage motherboards as a result.

Responding to the reports, AMD has issued an official statement to press. 'As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximise 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,' the company's spokesperson admitted in the prepared statement. '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.'

AMD has not yet provided technical details of the software update, nor whether the introduction of stricter power limiting to prevent the cards running out-of-spec will have any significant impact on performance or overclockability.
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