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AMD addresses power spikes in Radeon RX 480 cards

AMD Radeon RX 480

Hardly a week on from AMD’s launch of the budget-beating RX 480 the graphics card manufacturer is having to allay fears about some iffy power readings.

If you want to know what we thought of the low-cost, high-performance cards, see if it’s theRX 480 or 470you’ll be wanting.

Since sites have gotten their hands on the 480, a couple have noticed in their detailed strip down of the card that the power rails are sometimes exceeding their 75W billing over PCIe.

BothPC PerspectiveandTom’s Hardwarehave noted that the slot and the 6-pin connector on AMD’s newest Polaris architecture cards can spike to 150W total power draw at times.

In response to these revelations, AMD released the following statement toAnandtechduring weekend working hours:

“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).”

Thecurrent investigationsby those outside of AMD have turned up power specification ratings from motherboard manufacturers regarding PCIe limiters, which would indeed by cleared up by firmware rather than hardware issues.

We’ll find out on Tuesday if it’s an edgecase for two reviewers or something a little more complicated for AMD to look into.