AMD Radeon RX 480 Power Concerns - Detailed Analysis

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The launch of the AMD Radeon RX 480 has generally been considered a success. Our review of the new reference card shows impressive gains in architectural efficiency, improved positioning against NVIDIA’s competing parts in the same price range as well as VR-ready gaming performance starting at $199 for the 4GB model. AMD has every right to be proud of the new product and should have this lone position until the GeForce product line brings a Pascal card down into the same price category.

If you read carefully through my review, there was some interesting data that cropped up around the power consumption and delivery on the new RX 480. Looking at our power consumption numbers, measured directly from the card, not from the wall, it was using slightly more than the 150 watt TDP it was advertised as. This was done at 1920x1080 and tested in both Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3.

When overclocked, the results were even higher, approaching the 200 watt mark in Rise of the Tomb Raider!

A portion of the review over at Tom’s Hardware produced similar results but detailed the power consumption from the motherboard PCI Express connection versus the power provided by the 6-pin PCIe power cable. There has been a considerable amount of discussion in the community about the amount of power the RX 480 draws through the motherboard, whether it is out of spec and what kind of impact it might have on the stability or life of the PC the RX 480 is installed in.

As it turns out, we have the ability to measure the exact same kind of data, albeit through a different method than Tom’s, and wanted to see if the result we saw broke down in the same way.