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The stock VBIOS?! Wth were they thinking when programming it...

by jotm 7y ago

paulmd 7y ago
Basically, the chips drew more power than expected. You can tell from the fact that they only put one 6-pin on there. That gives a total board power limit of 150W, which the card actually exceeds pretty easily (pulls about 200W). They made the mistake of overdrawing the slot, the fix was to switch to overdrawing the power cable instead (which can tolerate it much more easily, you can very safely do up to twice the rated power). Part of it was likely that NVIDIA's performance was so good. Some anecdotal rumors from the AMD vlogosphere suggest that AMD thought that the RX 480 would be competitive with the GTX 1080 - I consider this kinda dubious because the RX 480 is basically a GTX 980 tier chip, so that would mean AMD thought that NVIDIA wouldn't make any progress at all from a node shrink, which seems dubious. Maybe they figured the RX 480 would be a lot faster or more efficient than it actually ended up being. Polaris was the last generation with "old style" voltage control where you just set a target and go, it is possible that they figured the chips would hit close to 2 GHz like NVIDIA's but ended up with validation problems and didn't hit the expected clocks. This could possibly be the reason they nuked Big Polaris and ended up lengthening the pipeline so much in Vega to try and get the clocks up (along with adding the Pascal-style "smart" power conditioning management). Anyway, regardless, the point is that it seems likely that AMD was forced to push the RX 480 much farther than they intended to, at the last moment. Like, after the PCBs had already gone out for manufacturing, and it was too late to switch the 6-pin to an 8-pin (which would have solved the whole problem, that would have allowed 225W rated total board power). It was still a bit of a showoff move to run from only a 6-pin, there is no way that the card would have been significantly less than 150W total board power, but perhaps defensible as a compatibility move - although some marginal PSUs still might not have handled it.

The stock VBIOS?! Wth were they thinking when programming it...

by jotm 7y ago

The stock VBIOS?! Wth were they thinking when programming it...

Basically, the chips drew more power than expected. You can tell from the fact that they only put one 6-pin on there. That gives a total board power limit of 150W, which the card actually exceeds pretty easily (pulls about 200W). They made the mistake of overdrawing the slot, the fix was to switch to overdrawing the power cable instead (which can tolerate it much more easily, you can very safely do up to twice the rated power). Part of it was likely that NVIDIA's performance was so good. Some anecdotal rumors from the AMD vlogosphere suggest that AMD thought that the RX 480 would be competitive with the GTX 1080 - I consider this kinda dubious because the RX 480 is basically a GTX 980 tier chip, so that would mean AMD thought that NVIDIA wouldn't make any progress at all from a node shrink, which seems dubious. Maybe they figured the RX 480 would be a lot faster or more efficient than it actually ended up being. Polaris was the last generation with "old style" voltage control where you just set a target and go, it is possible that they figured the chips would hit close to 2 GHz like NVIDIA's but ended up with validation problems and didn't hit the expected clocks. This could possibly be the reason they nuked Big Polaris and ended up lengthening the pipeline so much in Vega to try and get the clocks up (along with adding the Pascal-style "smart" power conditioning management). Anyway, regardless, the point is that it seems likely that AMD was forced to push the RX 480 much farther than they intended to, at the last moment. Like, after the PCBs had already gone out for manufacturing, and it was too late to switch the 6-pin to an 8-pin (which would have solved the whole problem, that would have allowed 225W rated total board power). It was still a bit of a showoff move to run from only a 6-pin, there is no way that the card would have been significantly less than 150W total board power, but perhaps defensible as a compatibility move - although some marginal PSUs still might not have handled it.