The AMD Radeon RX 480 has massive power problems

The non-disclosure agreement surrounding AMD’s Radeon RX 480 GPU has finally lifted and reviews have begun flooding in.

While general sentiment surrounding the card seems to be favourable, several complaints have already arisen concerning the amount of power the card seems to be drawing, especially for its price and size.

The Radeon RX 480’s minimum GPU and memory clock rate is 300MHz, resulting in an idle power measurement of 16W (or 19W if you’re using multiple monitors). That’s simply too high for a modern graphics card, reports Tom’s Hardware.

The RX 480 also draws an abnormally high amount of power through the PCIe slot on the motherboard, which could theoretically lead to system instability and damage.

AMD’s Radeon RX 480 draws an average of 164W, which exceeds the company’s target TDP. And it gets worse. The load distribution works out in a way that has the card draw 86W through the motherboard’s PCIe slot.

With peaks of up to 155W, we have to be thankful they’re brief, this means that the “you can hear what you see” effect will be in full force during load changes; activities like scrolling may very well result in audible artifacts.

It may be up to the AIB partner cards to fix the issue, if possible.

Below are Tom’s Hardware’s measurements of PCIe Express slot power draw and total power consumption: