PSU melted to motherboard, what drew the power?

[WantoN]

You would think people who buy two cards for xfire, would be knowledgeable enough to have heard of the issue, and took precautions. This was huge deal blown out of the water by press when Polaris launched. And when I say huge it was borderline out of proportions. So you would think that those who consider two card would know about it, and not come back 2.5 years later asking why their motherboards are melting

P.S. I'm not defending AMD here, just curious of the circumstances which prevented non average joe to keep using 2 card and not knowing of the issues those cards had

I’ve not heard of the issue. I’ve been building PCs since I was a kid, and I’ve never thought to see if an expensive component is so poorly designed that it can destroy my hardware.

 

[muziqaz]

I’ve not heard of the issue. I’ve been building PCs since I was a kid, and I’ve never thought to see if an expensive component is so poorly designed that it can destroy my hardware.

Are you guys joking? The first two weeks after release that was all you could hear about 480. The release was overshadowed by this issue.
Google "AMD RX480 power issue" and you'll see massive amounts of coverage of the issue and the fix, and videos and peoples opinions that it was overhyped or wasn't overhyped.

 

[WantoN]

Are you guys joking? The first two weeks after release that was all you could hear about 480. The release was overshadowed by this issue.
Google "AMD RX480 power issue" and you'll see massive amounts of coverage of the issue and the fix, and videos and peoples opinions that it was overhyped or wasn't overhyped.

Nope, not joking.

 

[ubersonic]

I’ve been building PCs since I was a kid, and I’ve never thought to see if an expensive component is so poorly designed that it can destroy my hardware.

One of the most annoying things about it having read up, is how epic-ally they screwed up the design, it's pretty much a textbook example of why you shouldn't build a GPU on a shoestring.

It's not just the PCI-E power of the card that's out of spec, the 6pin is too, which you think would help alleviate some of the issue, but that underestimates how badly the cards design went off the rails. First they added an additional ground to the 6pin, meaning it didn't conform to the ATX spec and was essentially an 8pin with no signalling wires, which while bad practice isn't super bad as 99% of PSU manufacturers account for that possibility so the card was perfectly capable of safely drawing up to 200w over the 6pin, so how did things go so wrong? Simply put the team working on the 6pin never told the team working on the VRMs any of that so they still thought they had to divide the power of a 150w card between a 6pin rated for 75w and a PCI-E slot rated for 75w.

So erring on the side of caution they split the VCORE VRMs between the two and put the VRAM VRMs on the 6pin, so in theory less than half the power of the 150w board was going through the 75w rated PCI-E slot so no problem, however those guys hadn't spoken to the other guys working on the board either so they never discovered that the 150w board power was just marketing fluff and it was actually a ~170w board meaning it was still drawing 88w from the PCI-E slot (compared to the 20-30w a GPU normally draws from the slot). The driver updates after launch did reign this down to 72w (or less with the compatibility mode manually enabled) however AMD never released any warnings about using the reference cards in Crossfire (in fact they still list Crossfire as a supported technology on the RX480s product page).

As you would expect most motherboards don't much like having 13 amps or more drawn from the ATX24's 12v cables, hence myself and many others ending up with melted ATX connectors

 

[WantoN]

That absolutely blows my mind.

After all that, why on earth wouldn’t the option to reduce power draw be mandatory for Crossfire.