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DPete27
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:52 am

blahsaysblah wrote:
ronch wrote:
BTW, why didn't TR catch this issue? Did they simply get a better sample? But even so, they obviously didn't test power draw as extensively as other sites have.

You need special hardware to analyze power draw like pcper and tomshardware did.

Power Consumption Concerns on the Radeon RX 480
The Math Behind GPU Power Consumption And PSUs
AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB Review - Power Consumption Results

Yeah, TR only reports system power draw. It shows in their power draw graph, but the importance was missed. ...the GTX 1080 in the TR labs [also] need 265W of total system power to do their thing. Unfortunately that was the "story of the century" for this launch.... A red flag should go up when a "150W TDP" GPU with a 6-pin aux power (75W from aux + 75W from slot) is pulling the same system power draw as a 180W TDP GPU with 8-pin aux power. Especially when both products are reference designs not designed to do crazy overclocking like board partners do.

AMD acknowledged the findings and said they were looking into it, but were also dismissive in saying that for the couple reviews that had the issue, there were hundreds that didn't. Yeah, well, when those hundreds (like TR) didn't notice the issue and didn't dig deeper to test, then yeah... duh.
Last edited by DPete27 on Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Topinio
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:54 am

DPete27 wrote:
This seems like a rookie oversight an AMD's part. Perhaps it's possible to correct the issue via BIOS update to limit the amount of power the card is drawing from the PCIe socket, but it just doesn't bode well toward their competency.

Hear, hear!

It's almost certainly correctable by turning the total board power down below 130 W, (4 W from 3.3 V, 63 W from each 12 V rail, little bit of wiggle room) and also take the chip frequency down to ~1.0 GHz to stop it bouncing around with throttling. It might be possible to correct things this way in drivers or WattMan, but obviously then performance would tank.

Unless someone can show otherwise, I reckon this needs a redesign of the auxiliary connector and a new on-board power management configuration.
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DPete27
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:02 am

More than likely all custom cooled cards from board partners (Asus, MSI, Zotac, etc etc) will have 8-pin aux power and be clocked higher than the reference board. But still, increasing the aux power pins should be a necessity because of factory (or intended user) overclocking, NOT a critical add-on to achieve spec functionality.
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:12 am

looks like some people already have damaged motherboards from this card

https://community.amd.com/thread/202410

First-time poster here. I ran into a problem after upgrading my rig with an RX 480 today. Everything was working great but then after a 7-hour straight gaming session with Witcher 3 Blood and Wine (which by the way is AMAZING) I got artifacting and then everything went black and the sound cut out. I reboot my PC several times, but nothing would come up. After looking up the error code on the motherboard, I found that it was "No VGA present" so at first I thought the card was dead and I put back in my 750 ti, but it too would not work with the same error code. So I put the RX 480 in the second PCI-E slot and now everything is working just fine. After everything was A-OK I tried slot 1 again and it failed again, so now I'm in slot 2.
Image
 
chuckula
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:14 am

Topinio wrote:
DPete27 wrote:
This seems like a rookie oversight an AMD's part. Perhaps it's possible to correct the issue via BIOS update to limit the amount of power the card is drawing from the PCIe socket, but it just doesn't bode well toward their competency.

Hear, hear!

It's almost certainly correctable by turning the total board power down below 130 W, (4 W from 3.3 V, 63 W from each 12 V rail, little bit of wiggle room) and also take the chip frequency down to ~1.0 GHz to stop it bouncing around with throttling. It might be possible to correct things this way in drivers or WattMan, but obviously then performance would tank.

Unless someone can show otherwise, I reckon this needs a redesign of the auxiliary connector and a new on-board power management configuration.


Of course, turning the board power down will end up hurting performance and that GTX-970 won't look quite so obsolete vs. an in-spec Polaris. Honestly, I don't think taking the edge off the power draw will be a disaster for Polaris's performance, but it's almost like AMD was grasping for those last few straws that ended up breaking the camel's back.

As for the power delivery, obviously AMD has years and years of experience doing power delivery systems for cards that are MUCH higher up in the power consumption range than Polaris. It's not like they don't know how to do this. My fear is this: They knew the right way to do it. They just chose not to for both marketing reasons (plenty of slides about how those nasty GTX-970 cards need 2 6-pin connectors but Polaris only needs one) and for the unfortunate fallback AMD position: it was just cheaper.
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ronch
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:21 am

Good grief. What a huge mess. There's bound to be some chairs being flung around at AMD HQ as we speak.

Seems to me AMD has a lot of rookies working for it. What a tragedy.

I pity all those kids who thought they're saving a lot of money going with the 480 but now have a dead system. How much would a new mobo cost?
Last edited by ronch on Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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blahsaysblah
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:26 am

ronch wrote:
Good grief. What a huge mess. There's bound to be some chairs being flung around at AMD HQ as we speak.

Seems to me AMD has a lot of rookies working for it. What a tragedy.

I pity all the kids who thought they're saving a lot of money going with the 480 but now have a dead system. How much would a new mobo cost?


And is it worthwhile to spend new $$$ that you may never get re-reimbursed on an old system? Technically, a Skylake chipset/CPU+DDR4 solution would be the proper choice. But likely you got the $200 card because you were cash strapped to begin with.
 
Ryhadar
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:27 am

At least for me, this has sullied the whole launch. Have two friends that are waiting on updating their machines and both can afford 1070s (they just don't want to pay above MSRP for it). Told them to wait until RX 480 came out. Now it's out, performance is good enough for them... But you bet I told them about this issue. Told them they could wait for a resolution, wait longer (potentially) for the GTX 1060, settle for an R9 390 on the cheap, or fork out the extra cash for the 1070 (along with the added price of a new Gsync monitor).

Will see if custom cards perform better but certainly will wait for reviews. I'm awestruck that this got past AMD and all the AIB partners. This needed an official answer yesterday. With the holiday weekend coming up I bet we wont see anything until the end of next week. Just in time for nVidia to allegedly unveil their GTX 1060. GG AMD.
 
Topinio
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:31 am

Ryhadar wrote:
With the holiday weekend coming up I bet we wont see anything until the end of next week.

A proper multinational shouldn't have that issue, or a US-centric firm shouldn't have given itself that issue by launching so close to the holiday weekend, a few days earlier or pushing it back to after would have been having contingency...
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blahsaysblah
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:38 am

chuckula wrote:
Of course, turning the board power down will end up hurting performance and that GTX-970 won't look quite so obsolete vs. an in-spec Polaris. Honestly, I don't think taking the edge off the power draw will be a disaster for Polaris's performance, but it's almost like AMD was grasping for those last few straws that ended up breaking the camel's back.

As for the power delivery, obviously AMD has years and years of experience doing power delivery systems for cards that are MUCH higher up in the power consumption range than Polaris. It's not like they don't know how to do this. My fear is this: They knew the right way to do it. They just chose not to for both marketing reasons (plenty of slides about how those nasty GTX-970 cards need 2 6-pin connectors but Polaris only needs one) and for the unfortunate fallback AMD position: it was just cheaper.

But likely they cant make any of the simple choices.
- How to change power profile without hitting re-certification and or consumer protection laws when they change clock rates.
- Cant just lower PCI-E load, because that would officially put 6-pin over spec and pull card off market.
- Have to be wary of folks buying an RX 480 to damage their motherboard to get a new one care of AMD. I would think small claims court would allow you to buy new MB/CPU/RAM at AMDs expense if your board is old enough.
 
blahsaysblah
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:41 am

Topinio wrote:
Ryhadar wrote:
With the holiday weekend coming up I bet we wont see anything until the end of next week.

A proper multinational shouldn't have that issue, or a US-centric firm shouldn't have given itself that issue by launching so close to the holiday weekend, a few days earlier or pushing it back to after would have been having contingency...

They could have just let the reviews come out earlier. This just made it so much worse.
 
Redocbew
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 11:29 am

Ryhadar wrote:
At least for me, this has sullied the whole launch. Have two friends that are waiting on updating their machines and both can afford 1070s (they just don't want to pay above MSRP for it). Told them to wait until RX 480 came out. Now it's out, performance is good enough for them... But you bet I told them about this issue. Told them they could wait for a resolution, wait longer (potentially) for the GTX 1060, settle for an R9 390 on the cheap, or fork out the extra cash for the 1070


Yeah, that's where I'm at with all of this also. A friend of mine is shopping around for an upgrade also, and even if this got fixed tomorrow I'd still have some reservations about recommending an RX 480 at this point. I personally find it kind of unbelievable that AMD was taken by surprise by this as they seemed to indicate with their statement, and if that's true it's even more of a reason to wonder what went wrong here.
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PrincipalSkinner
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 11:56 am

So shall we call this Polarisgate? You know, just to start a trend.
 
chuckula
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 12:03 pm

PrincipalSkinner wrote:
So shall we call this Polarisgate? You know, just to start a trend.


It's like Stargate. Except you only get transported to an RMA form.
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ronch
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 12:35 pm

PrincipalSkinner wrote:
So shall we call this Polarisgate? You know, just to start a trend.


Aaaaannnndddd..... PrincipalSkinner is FIRST!!!!!!
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PixelArmy
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:08 pm

So... time to fund that 1080 by buying some puts...?
 
anotherengineer
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:16 pm

From techpowerups review Power Consumption does seem to line up with clocks and voltages
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/22.html

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/RX_480/28.html

So solutions

well if it's 6 pin could push out a bios to knock down voltages, and clocks as required

if in production add an 8-pin connector
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anotherengineer
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:17 pm

ronch wrote:
PrincipalSkinner wrote:
So shall we call this Polarisgate? You know, just to start a trend.


Aaaaannnndddd..... PrincipalSkinner is FIRST!!!!!!


Hey Ronch, can we chalk this up to designed in China perhaps?? ;)
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jihadjoe
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 1:23 pm

High power draw through PCIe vs budget motherboard = fail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhjC_8ai7QA

The video creator reviewed the RX 480 with no problems, but that was with his pretty high-end Z170 board (I assume 99% of reviewers also tested with a high-end board and CPU). When he starts doing a budget build though the RX 480 ends up crashing the system, and demonstrably it's the high power draw through PCIe that's a problem because when he changes out the card for a 980Ti the problems go away, despite the 980Ti consuming a lot more total system power than the RX 480.

Apparently AMD has now made a budget GPU that can't be used reliably on budget boards. lol!
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 2:09 pm

blahsaysblah wrote:
ronch wrote:
Good grief. What a huge mess. There's bound to be some chairs being flung around at AMD HQ as we speak.

Seems to me AMD has a lot of rookies working for it. What a tragedy.

I pity all the kids who thought they're saving a lot of money going with the 480 but now have a dead system. How much would a new mobo cost?


And is it worthwhile to spend new $$$ that you may never get re-reimbursed on an old system? Technically, a Skylake chipset/CPU+DDR4 solution would be the proper choice. But likely you got the $200 card because you were cash strapped to begin with.



I'm really confused about this issue, maybe someone can explain?

I understand that pulling more than 75W from a PCIe x16 slot is out of spec, and bad. I was planning on undervolting the card when I get one (will be a few more months to get the $ together).

But... many (most?) motherboards cannot possibly be power-limited to this extent. "pulling more than X watts from a motherboard connector is dangerous"... so let's assume that a cheap motherboard has three x16 (physical) connectors for Crossfire or SLI in an ideal world.

Not including the rest of the system, those three slots are going to involve roughly 75*3=225 watts from the 24-pin motherboard power connector, right? The motherboard would presumably be able to handle at the minimum 225 watts of power throughput to PCIe I assume?

Just trying to understand what draw is dangerous vs what draw could be expected, since I'm not an expert at all.
 
blahsaysblah
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 3:00 pm

Read the article on pcper.

One PCI-E slot is rated for 65w@[email protected] plus some margin.

Have 450w PS, dont expect it all through one connector
 
Froz
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 3:03 pm

ronch wrote:
Good grief. What a huge mess. There's bound to be some chairs being flung around at AMD HQ as we speak.

Seems to me AMD has a lot of rookies working for it. What a tragedy.

I pity all those kids who thought they're saving a lot of money going with the 480 but now have a dead system. How much would a new mobo cost?

Well, that's just excel management. Let's cut our R&D costs as much as possible. Everyone knows you can replace any engineer with x years of experience with 1 + x new employees straight after graduation. And it will be cheaper! Right?
 
blahsaysblah
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 5:46 pm

Vhalidictes, i looked more. I've never considered SLI/Crossfire myself but was curious.

ATX 24 pin connector has two 12V lines.(the 20+4, the 4 part was in part to add a 2nd 12V line for providing power to PCI-E )

If my google-fu is right, the standard pins were rated for 6A before 2005 and sometime before 2007, ATX12v 2.2 said that High Current Series pins were required to allow 9A per pin. Assume some delay before PS and MB actually conformed to ATX12v 2.2 or newer.

So recent PS/MB using HCS pins should be able to get 216W(2x9Ax12V) of 12V power via the ATX 24pin connector. (264W with HCS Plus pins, 11A, not required, possibly used by expensive boards and very high wattage PS that assume triple/quad SLI?)

That's on input side. (The issue of the PCI-E slot itself not being rated for more than 66W for its 12V contacts, is main issue of RX 480).

Anyway, back to SLI. Either the expensive/high end MB+PS conspire to use HCS Plus pins(11A) and or GPU makers make sure to stay under 50W if they expect to be used in quad SLI.

Btw, a single x16 slot is allowed the 75W (5.5A@[email protected]) but x4 and x8 are only allowed 25W and x1 only 10W.
Not sure what that means for x16 card plugged into x8 slot. The five 12V contacts are actually the very first contacts and are in x1 too. But possibly the necessary grounds are not and those mechanically x16 that are x8 or even x4 electrically wont be able to provide 75W?

Anyway, so the ATX 24 connector is capable of providing 216W (2x12Vx9A) plus 225W (5x5Vx9A) plus 118.8(4x3.3Vx9A) or 559.8W if the PS had that much juice on different rails. (Also CPU is on different 12V rail).

learned something new.
 
sluggo
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 6:53 pm

The pcie-X1 interface has five +12 pads, three +3.3 pads, and three GND pads. Given the low power available to an X1 card, the GND current capability is still plenty enough. As you go to X4 and above, the GND pads number in the dozens, so there should not be an issue there.

What needs to be pointed out (and I only mention it because I have not seen it mentioned so far), is that the PCIE (slot) +12V currents cannot be mixed with the 6-pin or 8-pin connector currents. These currents are designed to be and must be maintained as separate rails with separate return paths. On-board regulation would be a mess otherwise.

Why this is important here for the RX480 is in discussions where people suggest that moving from a 6-pin connector to an 8-pin connector would solve the problem of too high a current draw on the slot connector. This is not the case. Slot current serves the needs of whatever the board designers intended. The ATX supply connections cannot supplement it. Assuming the designers were aware of the power limits on slot current (and I have to assume they were), then if the slot current is too high then the designers were probably "up against it" the entire time. If it's too high now, we can only assume it's because they made efforts to reduce it and could not reduce it any more.

Power loss in mosfet switching at these frequencies is primarily a problem of moving gate charge around. The faster you have to move it, or the more of it there is, or the higher the voltage you're working with, then the higher your power loss. Once you've settled on a manufacturing process you can't change the amount of the gate charge. The only fix for a problem like this is a reduction in clock speeds or rail voltages. Reducing clock speeds cuts into performance, and reducing rail voltages cuts into clock speeds.

I don't see an out for AMD here.

EDIT: readability
Last edited by sluggo on Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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DrDominodog51
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 8:05 pm

Is everyone here in agreement that the RX 480 reference card is to be avoided presently?
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chuckula
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:37 pm

DrDominodog51 wrote:
Is everyone here in agreement that the RX 480 reference card is to be avoided presently?


Yeah, a properly designed board could certainly fix these issues but this board is always going to be out on the ragged edge, so that could explain the pretty low headroom for any overclocking.
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ronch
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 9:53 pm

DrDominodog51 wrote:
Is everyone here in agreement that the RX 480 reference card is to be avoided presently?


Of course, unless you want to kill your slot.

I have to say this will surely pi$$ off AMD's board partners.

And what about damaged motherboards? Don't you think boards sent in for RMA will be inspected for the possibility of a burned out slot due to the 480? I reckon RMA forms ask for the hardware specs but even if users lie about which graphics card was plugged in, mobo technicians will check the slot if video-related problems were the reason for the RMA.
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ronch
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:16 pm

@anotherengineer:

The China engineers crossed my mind but I don't think even them would be so sloppy as to overlook the PCIe power spec compliance. Even Koduri should be well aware of it. As far back as when aux power connectors came into vogue I reckon graphics card designers have often, if not always, played it conservatively and included aux power even if one isn't really needed, just to be sure. Heck, the first graphics card that I had that had an aux connector, an X1950Pro Pro in 2007, ran fine with just one of its two 6-pin aux connectors fed (for whatever reason I was stupid for using a cheapo PSU that lacked enough 6-pin aux lines). So I don't understand why the board designers took the risk and didn't include a more juicy aux supply. Or maybe the 6-pin really was enough until some marketing smart-ass tried to push for higher clocks at the last minute. With production in full swing, there's just no way to economically fix those cards that have already been produced.

So the only reasons I could come up with are: (1) AMD was stupidly cutting costs and insisted one 6-pin aux is fine especially for a $200 card, (2) some stupid marketing guy pushed for higher clocks, although how that got approved is totally beyond me, and/or (3) AMD hired a bunch of first-timers to do the reference design. Any seasoned graphics card designer who's worth his salt can't possibly miss this.

Get rid of your rookies, AMD. Let them work for VIA or SiS or something. Jensen must be laughing his teeth off as we speak. "What a bunch of babies!!", he laughs.
Last edited by ronch on Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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credible
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:20 pm

In all honesty I get whats happening here and it really does suck for AMD but to my mind the pcie slot should be dealt with through the mb manufacturers, they are the ones that should be putting some safe guard in place to limit the power draw to whatever specs they have and if it does not meet those or goes over you get a blue screen or it simply fails to run.
 
ronch
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Re: About that Polaris Power Issue

Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:23 pm

credible wrote:
In all honesty I get whats happening here and it really does suck for AMD but to my mind the pcie slot should be dealt with through the mb manufacturers, they are the ones that should be putting some safe guard in place to limit the power draw to whatever specs they have and if it does not meet those or goes over you get a blue screen or it simply fails to run.


It's not that simple. High end boards probably have that sort of mechanism but cheap ones don't have the luxury unless people would be willing to pay for it.

Besides, I bet even cheap boards comply with the power spec but it's AMD that's being real sloppy here. Really, just one 6-pin aux for a card that sucks 150w, maybe more?
Last edited by ronch on Fri Jul 01, 2016 10:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.
NEC V20 > AMD Am386DX-40 > AMD Am486DX2-66 > Intel Pentium-200 > Cyrix 6x86MX-PR233 > AMD K6-2/450 > AMD Athlon 800 > Intel Pentium 4 2.8C > AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 > AMD Phenom II X3 720 > AMD FX-8350 > RYZEN?
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