AMD Issues Statement on Radeon RX 480 Power Concerns

AMD has been looking into the power concerns on the Radeon RX 480 graphics card since concerns over power were brought to light and up and it appears that they were able to replicate it in their labs. This means that too much power was being consumed by the card in certain scenarios, but AMD claims that they can adjust the GPU’s tuning with driver software to resolve the issue. They will issue an update to the community on Tuesday with more information.

“As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximize 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. 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 (July 5, 2016).” – AMD

We highly advise those that ran out and bought an RX 480 not to raise the power limit, overclock it or run CrossFire until a driver solution is available. Normal non-overclocked use looks to be safe enough not to damage any hardware, but raising the power limit and overclocking the card will more than likely draw more power than one would like to see through the x16 PCIe slot and the single 6-pin connector. Maybe AMD can divert more of the power through the 6-pin PCIe power adapter? It will be interesting to see how the tuning AMD does in the driver impacts gaming performance. Most of the board partners will be using a custom board design that has an 8-pin PCIe connector, so they might not be impacted when they are released later this month.