Heard bout the RX 480 having issues like drawing more power than it should from the slots on your motherboard. Is everything fine with it now? I could need an upgrade from my rusty GTX 760, ah and while we're on it.. What brand should I pick? Thinking about Sapphire and MSi, heard a lot of good opinions about Sapphire yet the heatpipes of the MSI one impress me and from what I've heard it's supposed to have heatsinks on the VRAM as well.
the issues are on the reference card and they have fixed the issues in a recent driver update so you dont need to worry and the sapphire looks the best i feel like asus has used the same cooler from the 1060 on the 480 which is why i prefer getting from sapphire or xfx since they dont make nvidia cards
The issue was more prevalent on the earlier reference design, which used a 6 pin power connector.
You shouldn't have to worry now as aftermarket manufacturers use a 8 pin design and AMD released a firmware update that should have fixed the issue
But that's what I heard as I have not yet received my Sapphire Nitro Card yet
I would wait for the powercolor devil to come back in stock. Also there really wasn't to many issues with the rx 480 pulling from the motherboard, but I may have never experienced it.
Spphire with OC is above the others... Next is Asus with OC, next is the Red devil from PowerColor. I go sapphire...
There have been a driver update and it's all fine.
https://www.techpowerup.com/223981/amd-releases-pci-express-power-draw-fix-we-tested-confirmed-works
Wow, even 460 in a few days could be an upgrade from 760... It's quite an old GPU that have not aged well...
Don't think of MSI at all... MSI and AMD don't work well together. Just like Nvidia and reasonable business decisions...
But seriously now, with all issues i had with MSI AMD combos, i can't recommend MSI to anyone, especially when Sapphire is on the table and it is good...
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The RX480 drew power out of spec for the PCIE slot standard. It's only supposed to pull 75W. Reviewers found that it could pull more, up to 88W. Not a big deal if you have a high quality Motherboard.
When the third party cards come out they will have an 8-Pin connector and this problem will go away. AMD will also release or has already released software updates to get the card back into spec.
This really isn't a problem, in my opinion, since we're talking about a reference card. AMD was extremely aggressive in pricing and design, and it shows. They're pushing the limit and lowering the entry point for the mid-tier GPU market, and if they pull a few extra watts on the way it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
It was never an issue to begin with, but with how small shit like this becomes wildfire pretty quickly, AMD released a "fix" via driver update, allowing you to enable "compatibility mode" so the card draws any extra needed power via the PCI-E 6-pin instead of the motherboard.
I'd also recommend going for the Powercolor Devil card, as it's the best cooler for it atm.
I do believe every major board partner that is releasing their version of the RX 480 is the VRM cooling integrated onto the main heatsink. (HiS integrated cooling solution hasn't been confirmed, but if they are going to be borrowing XFX's heatsink design, like with some of the R9 300 series, then it probably will.) If I am wrong, someone please correct me.
Thusfar, reviews for the Sapphire Nitro+, ASUS Strix, and Powercolor Red Devil custom cards have shown up, with then hitting the market very soon. Sapphire has the best out-of-box factory overclock (by 12mhz), but ASUS and Powercolor's cooling solution does a better job. If you were lucky, you could have already snagged either the Nitro+ or Red Devil on the market today.
There seems to be a trend that ~1350-1375mhz seems to be a common "cap" for overclocking. 1400+ seems to be a uncommon or rare.
XFX, MSI, and Gigabyte's solutions are to follow soon. Gigabyte hasn't even announced their clock rates, but I know that their G1 Gaming and XFX's Black Edition should be pretty good. MSI reportedly is going with a 4+2 phase VRM, which struck me as very odd. It doesn't mean it will be worse, but I can't imagine it being better. :|
EDIT - German Tom's Hardware and Anandtech point to the MSI's cooler not have integrated cooling for their RX 480, which I think is odd. I think MSI lost out on the bin-bidding this time around.
Either way, I am actually leaning towards the Powercolor Red Devil at this point in time, but I am ultimately waiting for what XFX has to bring to the table with their custom cooler before I make my decision.
I am doing a video roundup of all RX480 models we know so far, but from what i have seen, no... The power color card is not the best... Yes, it is WAY cooler than the competition, i mean it's not even funny, 10 degrees difference... But then we go to the performance and we see the Sapphire a couple of frames ahead...
Yup... The MSI cooler is quite crappy this time around. I don't know what is holding them back, but...
From what i could find from here and there, Gigabyte's cooler don't have direct contact with the VRMs as well... Just like the MSI one...
http://www.babeltechreviews.com/rx-480-vs-gtx-1060-vs-gtx-980-overclocked-showdown/3/
Some comparisons made. The 1060 not having SLI is really going to kill that card off for NVIDIA, lets hope somebody slaps a SLI bridge on their custom board sometime.....
Not really... With the press changing performance tables after the fact and praising it to high heavens, there will be nothing killing the 1060...
It does what it does, never heard of this changing of performance tables thing. But again no SLI is a problem.
Glad to see you're going with the 480 instead of 1060 since the 480, if history is to be repeated, will have more staying power than the 1060.
The pcie power draw issue (if you can call it that... really wasn't that big a deal if you had a decent board) has been fixed with an update and it was mainly on the reference cards anyway... should have no problems on the aftermarket cards.
As far as brands are concerned Sapphire is to AMD GPUs as Seasonic is to PSUs imo (the gold standard).
Apparently, while ASUS was in a hurry to kick out the card and just used the cooling solution from another set-up, Powercolor released a number of cards that were essentially BIOS-locked from overclocking. They've released a BIOS update to unlock it since, but at least one review site has released an article where they didn't bother trying to explore the full capabilities of the card.
First MSI review. It has 6+2 phase VRM, and actually cools fairly well, but it is highly inefficient:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/RX_480_Gaming_X/4.html
It cools the chip well... everything else is on the will of this plate...
On the other hand, check out the sapphire:
Everything is cooled by the cooler, not a metal plates...
The asus is the worst in that comparison...
The vram cooling is amazing...