According to a couple of posts all around the net and a couple of test from some websites, it appears that AMD RX 480 might be drawing too much power from the PCI-Express slot.

The original story came from Tom's Hardware site which did not even want to test the overclocking potential of the RX 480 in their review since it drew 86W from the PCIe slot, which is 11W more than maximum 75W specification. According to AMD, this might be just a lonely case since the card passed PCIe compliance tests, so it does not make any sense.

The apparent issue lies in the fact that RX 480 only comes with a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, which provides 75W, while it draws the rest from the PCIe slot. With TDP of the RX 480 set at 150W, this should be enough as long as the card does not draw more power.

To make things worse, a forum thread has surfaced on AMD where two users have reported dead PCIe slots after extensive gaming session with the RX 480.

According to our sources, AMD sold a lot of RX 480 graphics cards and some retailers in the US sold over 8,000 cards in first 12 hours so some of these graphics cards could simply be faulty. Plenty of other graphics cards had similar issues and we are quite sure that these are just isolated cases since some respectable sites did report high power usage but nothing serious.

Most reviews agree that AMD RX 480 has a lousy reference cooler which is both loud and can't keep the temps as low as they would like but extensive power usage is not something that has been common in all reviews.

Upcoming custom RX 480 graphics cards should all feature 8-pin PCIe power connector so these should not be plagued by the same issue, if it is an issue. Hopefully this is just an isolated case but we will keeping a closer eye on the situation.



Source: Videocardz.com.