The AMD Radeon RX 480 PCIe spec issues

[Legendary Silke]

(Tsutarja mentioned that I should be posting this right here in the forums, so here it is.)

Apparently, the Radeon RX 480 either has gotten delisted, or was never certified in the PCI-SIG integrator listing, possibly due to it drawing too much power from the motherboard PCIe slot.

Using the latest drivers should avoid the issues for the most part, especially if a compatibility option is turned on, but when initially released with its first drivers, the power draw is significantly higher than the maximum allowed. While most of us with mid-range to high-end motherboards (as well as budget motherboards of recent manufacturing designs) wouldn't be really affected, one does wonder about the long-term effects of having such a card on, say, a very low-end motherboard of an older design, or the boards found in OEM machines. Also to consider is what happens when you attempt to run a multi-GPU setup - I've heard of digital currency miners ruining their motherboards when attempting to run 4 of them at the same time to mine things.

Thoughts?

 

[Melody]

Gotta say that the comment section on this article tells all. Pretty much the loudest reaction that strikes me is one of "Who Cares?" Seriously. It appears as though the PCI-SIG certification process has done it's job in finding a manufacturer who took a shortcut and didn't follow to specs. This won't affect anyone who is in the know; they'll see this card lacks the Cert and pass it up if their system build cannot handle cards going out of spec this way. This isn't going to kill anything; and there's options in the latest driver package that allows you to instruct the card to stay within specs (or at least try). This is fine if you're worried about the overall power draw of the card.

But most people won't be. Most people aren't building perfect systems; they'll only be concerned if it doesn't work. Unless said motherboard is a stickler for specs; in which case I question why someone would use such a limited motherboard for a beefier build.

It might cause some people upgrading a bit of trouble; but the ones who do the research will notice the lack of cert and avoid it altogether. It will always be noted in it's specs what it's overall power draw will be, and any average person buying should hopefully pay attention to this spec sheet and be properly concerned if they think it's too high.

There might be legitimate concern if AMD attempts to hide or mask the increased power draw, or lie about it. But I haven't seen claims of this in this article or anywhere else. Seems like it's just another article about AMD doing what any company will do best if they can...rounding their corners off. Hopefully being denied the certification will wake up the company so they don't make that particular mistake with another card or piece of hardware.

With regards to currency miners...you seldom make enough money to justify the power bill and cost of hardware. Most cryptocurrencies don't pay out highly enough. You'd need to be multimining anyways and there are seldom people who mine with GPUs anymore. There are dedicated ASICS (USB Pluggable daughterboards dedicated to such intensive algorithmic and mathematical tasks). You'd be foolish to GPU mine anyways. GPUs are not meant to mine cryptocurrencies, and because you can...doesn't mean you should. Especially on OLDER equipment.

One shouldn't mine crypto on anything but reasonably recently manufactured hardware...and ideally one should just buy one or more of the aforementioned ASICS and plug those puppies in. This lowers the strain on the motherboard and CPU/GPU devices considerably.