Anybody try the RX 480? Opinions?

[Chalenge]

I did some reading so let's see if I got this right. A 16pin PCIe card can draw a max of 75W and a 6 pin connector supplies a max of 75W for a total of 150W. Correct?  Testing of the RX 480, which is rated at 150W actually draws more (I read 168W) and may draw 90W or more from the motherboard and could damage some systems. I understand there is a software fix.

The 1060 is rated at 120W so this should not be an issue but I guess we need to wait for testing. Seems like an 8 pin connector for insurance would make sense but I guess that would cost more.

Thanks for the explanation.

The 680 I use in my recording system uses two 6-pin plugs. I think if the RX 480 needs more power they could just change the card to accept two power plugs. There would be more heat, of course, but I think gamers are used to that.

[Pudgie]

(Image removed from quote.)

The discussion is here:
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,379951.msg5061095.html#msg5061095

Bizman echoed my thoughts. Probably advertising for 3rd party games and likely resource hogs. I didn't install the "Gaming Evolved" App yet still ended up with Raptor applications running on my machine. I uninstalled them first thing. Raptor was games advertising iirc.

Ok I see what you're getting at now.......................

Yep, I have from the start only installed the Crimson driver, Radeon Settings and since the Vulkan API was added later, Vulkan. The rest of the stuff I've never installed as I'm not into all the usage these add-ons were designed for.
As far as the games I play Vulkan isn't really needed, but I see this API becoming a norm so I load it anyway......doesn't interfere w\ anything.

Since I'm only using 1 monitor so Eyefinity isn't made available in Radeon Settings on my box I haven't had to deal w\ that.

So the short answer was both..............

 

Thanks for the response!

 

PS--I currently have Crimson 16.7.1 drivers loaded on my box and all is showing to work very well w\ my Fury X. Very stable driver pack. Only issue noted is the same one that I have found since Crimson 16.4.1 concerning using the Power Efficiency control w\ Beta 22 thru current Dx11 vers in which the driver will down clock the GPU clocks approx. 45%-50% and cause the double loping graphics motion at reduced FPS. Didn't have this happening w\ Beta 21 Dx11 vers and never had this happen w\ any Beta Dx9 vers.
I thought about pulling my Fury X and installing my R9 290X to see if the issue was just related to the AMD Fiji GPU or if the AMD Hawaii GPU was affected as well but have been too lazy to do it.

 

[Easyscor]

To stop highjacking that other thread, I moved my reply over here where the discussion includes the PCIe bus and the Crimson driver.

No problem.

PCI-E 2.0 lane thruput spec is 500Mb\s. At 16 lanes (16x) the total thruput is 8Gb\s which is more than enough for most games even today as more games are making more use of the GPU vs CPU to draw, render & display graphics so as long as a modern vid card has enough dedicated onboard mem and mem bus bandwidth to keep the vid card GPU from having to use the swap file created in system mem for frame buffers (which will increase the amount of data sent back and forth across the PCI-E lanes between the vid card and system mem thru DMA controller which is much slower than GDDR5 mem\vid card mem bus) and using DDR3 1066 mem (8.5Gb\s transfer rate) or higher there shouldn't be any "bottlenecking", ie, slowdowns. Due to this, IMO a modern vid card w\ a min of 4Gb GDDR5 mem is the min spec for PCI-E 2.0 16x to prevent frame buffer swapping. More onboard mem obviously is better.
At 8 lanes (8x) the thruput is cut in half to 4Gb\s and this is where most modern vid cards will be hampered in a PCI-E 2.0 spec mobo (equal to PCI-E 1.0 16x thruput).

Hope this helps.

 

That sent me looking for Bandwidth info in my Crimson 16.2.1 driver. It reports 128GBytes/s leaving me wondering how that can be. It also says the current setting is PCIe 2.0 x16.  This was one of the first MBs to come out for the i7-2600k LGA 1155.

[Pudgie]

To stop highjacking that other thread, I moved my reply over here where the discussion includes the PCIe bus and the Crimson driver.

That sent me looking for Bandwidth info in my Crimson 16.2.1 driver. It reports 128GBytes/s leaving me wondering how that can be. It also says the current setting is PCIe 2.0 x16.  This was one of the first MBs to come out for the i7-2600k LGA 1155.

Hi Easyscor,

The bandwidth numbers you saw being reported in the Crimson driver is the total bandwidth capability of the vid card bus\dedicated GDDR mem speed on the H6850 vid card itself. As you can see, the total PCI-E 2.0 x 16x lanes bandwidth is much slower than the onboard vid card bandwidth.

This is why the amount of onboard vid card GDDR mem is important (as well as the number of shader cores\Cuda cores to handle the post-GPU graphics processing work to offload the GPU) to prevent the GPU from swapping frame buffers to system memory before the graphics frames are called to be flipped to display. As long as there is enough onboard vid card GDDR mem capacity for graphics frame buffers to hold ALL completed graphics frames by the GPU before they're flipped to display (in addition to the necessary buffer for the GPU operational instructions as sent by the driver) w\o having to send any of these across the PCI-E lanes to system memory to be stored in swap file then send them back to be flipped to display when called for, your vid card's performance will only then be mostly affected by the actual GPU's performance alone (other than sound processing which, unless you have a dedicated sound card to offload the CPU, will be the biggest hit--along w\ Internet packet transmission buffer capacity--to the CPU's performance as this will have to span across from the CPU to system mem across the DMA controller then sent to sound output in synch w\ the flipped graphics frames to display), which is the best performance scenario for a vid card. Now if you're using the GPU to process sound as well then that's even more of a load on the GPU and onboard vid card GDDR mem\vid card mem bus bandwidth in addition to graphics processing alone.

This goes for mobos w\ PCI-E 3.0 lanes as well.....just not quite as critical as it would be for PCI-E 2.0 lanes but still needs to be addressed for peak graphics performance (PCI-E 3.0 x 16X = 16Gb\s transfer rate vs the same 128Gb\s of your H6850).

Hope this helps.

 

[Easyscor]

Thanks