Soldato
A badly fitted water cooler dropped the temperature delta by half and kept the clocks solid.
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Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" Launched at $199
- Thread starter Kaapstad
- Start date
A badly fitted water cooler dropped the temperature delta by half and kept the clocks solid.
It gives the AIBs one of the most obvious ways to differentiate themselves from each other and the reference design.
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Soldato
The reference design is still used by AIB vendors when they design their own custom boards. The whole point of the reference design is that it is a model to work from that is fully functional and contains all of the features required for the part to work. AIB's can then add all of their own bells and whistles such as beefier coolers and better power circuitry to differentiate the part.
cost to develop your own board is one consideration.
amd have had for decades solid boards for reference.
Soldato
Very tempted to go to a shop locally (about 20 mins away) that has the 8GB cards for $249 (WHO DO NOT SHIP TO THE UK!!! lol - I don't want to get suspended again).
Still.. sounds like it might be a little silly to do so just to get a 480 today.
Still.. sounds like it might be a little silly to do so just to get a 480 today.
Soldato
I would have liked a ref cooler, i would have paid a little more if the heat sink was a bit beefier with heat pipes. It is a shame that no one is bringing out blower cooler with a better heat sink on it, considering some of the models look as though their heat sinks would fit inside the shroud of the reference blower cooler.
Yes the ref cooler on my old sapphire 4870 had a heatsink twice the size of the 480 heatsink and it even had heatpipes,lol.
AMD could have avoided all this by not pushing the clock so high on a cooler like this one, it's insane, i know they had a lot of pressure to get performance to where ppl expected it, but i would rather see the card 10% slower than 970 and clocked 1000mhz and consumes 120-130watt, with some OC headroom, than giving me a 1300mhz out of the box clock 10% faster than 970, with 150-160watt, and no oc headroom, with a cooler rated 150tdp, so there is basicaly nothing left, the thermals are at their max.
simply stupid, in prvious posts i feared that they would do this, and hoped they wouldn't, but yet they did.
simply stupid, in prvious posts i feared that they would do this, and hoped they wouldn't, but yet they did.
Soldato
For some it seems that the volts are just set a bit too rich. not sure if it is to do with the new active variable voltage controller they are using or if they are just setting the voltage high on all parts to take into account of the lower quality asic parts.
But one site lowered the volts by a nice amount and achiever a 30W power saving and more stable/higher performance. the parts also managing to hit their max boost more frequent.
Soldato
Caporegime
AMD RX 480 PCIe Slot Power Issue Detailed – Not As Bad As Custom GTX 960s, Overclocking Limitations Investigated
http://wccftech.com/amd-rx-480-pcie-power-issue/
http://wccftech.com/amd-rx-480-pcie-power-issue/
Soldato
There's a thread for that already, don't derail this one.
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18738173
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18738173
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Soldato
So post-release mayhem seems to be dying down. My own takeaways after the release are:
1) It's much less than I expected, as was hoping for something almost at 390X level. I think AMD marketing is to blame as the "revolution" turned out to be just a "good deal". Not that the card is a disappointment, but far from the "wow" that AMD lead us to believe...
2) ...which is the second point: the 480's strength is that at this price it's pretty much your only sensible option, especially when any 390 stock is gone, nothing else will make sense (especially considering future-proofing things like RAM and DX12 performance).
3) GTX1060 around the corner, rumoured around £250 and faster than the 480. I think AMD purposefully timed the partner 480s to be released around the same time. Their main concern with the reference card was to keep power under 150W, which is holding the card back, so partner cards will definitely give the 1060 a run for its money (and again there will be the DX12 and RAM concerns in play).
4) There's very little improvement in DX11 apart from shielding the 480 from stuff like meaningless tessellation, with the primitive discard accelerator. So nothing is "better" in GCN4 in that regard, it's just that the tricks that used to make GCN look worse than it actually is will no longer work.
In conclusion, it's a good card. I think the best one to buy at this price. BUT: it seems to me that AMD are dead-certain this time around that DX12 will shine next year. And I'm pretty sure Microsoft has something to do with this.
AMD has been relatively modest in advertising the Vulkan API which I'm slightly disappointed about. It would really open up the competition to all, across all platforms.
It seems to me that the real 500 pound gorilla behind the scenes is Microsoft. They're dead-set on getting DX12 rolling and have build all their strategy around it. What Microsoft wants, it gets...
EDIT: A fifth point is that Pascal is still more power-efficient than GCN4, even though the gap has closed quite a bit. On the other hand though AMD is ahead in idle power consumption. This is quite important for laptops and is probably why "non-gaming" laptops seem to be going for Polaris cards. I still expect brands like Alienware and Razer to go with NVidia solutions.
1) It's much less than I expected, as was hoping for something almost at 390X level. I think AMD marketing is to blame as the "revolution" turned out to be just a "good deal". Not that the card is a disappointment, but far from the "wow" that AMD lead us to believe...
2) ...which is the second point: the 480's strength is that at this price it's pretty much your only sensible option, especially when any 390 stock is gone, nothing else will make sense (especially considering future-proofing things like RAM and DX12 performance).
3) GTX1060 around the corner, rumoured around £250 and faster than the 480. I think AMD purposefully timed the partner 480s to be released around the same time. Their main concern with the reference card was to keep power under 150W, which is holding the card back, so partner cards will definitely give the 1060 a run for its money (and again there will be the DX12 and RAM concerns in play).
4) There's very little improvement in DX11 apart from shielding the 480 from stuff like meaningless tessellation, with the primitive discard accelerator. So nothing is "better" in GCN4 in that regard, it's just that the tricks that used to make GCN look worse than it actually is will no longer work.
In conclusion, it's a good card. I think the best one to buy at this price. BUT: it seems to me that AMD are dead-certain this time around that DX12 will shine next year. And I'm pretty sure Microsoft has something to do with this.
AMD has been relatively modest in advertising the Vulkan API which I'm slightly disappointed about. It would really open up the competition to all, across all platforms.
It seems to me that the real 500 pound gorilla behind the scenes is Microsoft. They're dead-set on getting DX12 rolling and have build all their strategy around it. What Microsoft wants, it gets...
EDIT: A fifth point is that Pascal is still more power-efficient than GCN4, even though the gap has closed quite a bit. On the other hand though AMD is ahead in idle power consumption. This is quite important for laptops and is probably why "non-gaming" laptops seem to be going for Polaris cards. I still expect brands like Alienware and Razer to go with NVidia solutions.
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The vrms themselves can supply 600 amps sodont get confused between vrms and where the card draws that power from.
performance overall is really not that far behind 390X/980, when you do a summary of a lot of games, this is a reference that seem pretty limited by the cooler and the power delivery, i believe with AIBs we can easily see a performance boost of 5-10% out of the box, and i am pretty sure drivers will give it another 5-10% overtime, in few month it will probably outperform 980, and a good binned and OC card or 485 revision, will be around fury.
the thing that doesnt sit well with me is power consumption it's still 30-40watt over what i was hoping for, thats a shame.
i also hope this pci-e issue is very limited to few cards or be able to solve it with driver/bios tweak.
hardwarecanuck
techpowerup 1080p
techpowerup 1440p
Soldato
They got boned by process bodgey again
ergh, i was just about to order one, now its better to wait for AIBs cards? Because it uses too much power?
What is this, the green party? who cares how much power it needs, if we need to build more coal powered power plants lets do it.
if we need to cut down more rain forests, lets do it.
What is this, the green party? who cares how much power it needs, if we need to build more coal powered power plants lets do it.
if we need to cut down more rain forests, lets do it.