The source of the rumours are Tom’s Hardware which found that the RX480 they had received for review drew 86W through the PCIE slot. That’s 11W above the maximum 75W specification required to meet compliance.
The story has gained some currency across the world wide wibble normally reported by confessed Nvidia fanboys desperate to prove that AMD really has not got a winner with this chip.
AMD’s Senior VP and Chief Architect Raja Koduri was a bit puzzled when asked about the rumour. Mostly because PCIE compliance is one of the basic tests before a card goes out. He said that the RX480 passed its testing, but he was taking the reviews seriously.
“However we have received feedback from some of the reviewers on high current observed on PCIE in some cases. We are looking into these scenarios as we speak and reproduce these scenarios internally. Our engineering team is fully engaged.”
It is possible that the review card was faulty or something went wrong with the testing. Reviewers normally get cards that can flash the BIOS to use either 4GB or 8GB of VRAM so card makers don’t have to send a pair of cards for testing.
AMD also points out that the RX480 met ‘Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group’ (PCI-SIG) compliance testing. So it passed external industry testing as well as internal tests.
However there do seem to be a few GPUs exhibiting anomalous behaviour, and we’ve been in touch with these reviewers for a few days to better understand their test configurations to see how this could be possible, that post says.
“We will have more on this topic soon as we investigate, but it’s worth reminding people that only a very small number of hundreds of RX 480 reviews worldwide encountered this issue.”
So far we have only heard review problems for Tom’s Hardware in fact the card has had reasonable reviews elsewhere so it could be a faulty card.
But it is weird how this story is being shaped into a “card is broken story” by the tech press. The level of smear and spin stories that are being put out there at the moment is on the rise, from both sides of the Nvidia and AMD fence and it is getting very difficult to get to the bottom of any of them.
It looks like the Nvidia and AMD wars are turning so nasty that it is going to be increasingly difficult to trust any industry deep throats for a while. It looks like placing stories in the media is going to be part of the industry stock and trade. It is not just AMD being hit. There was one which is doing the rounds claiming Nvidia could not make enough of its latest chips because of a fault with TSMC. It specifically said that suppliers were only getting 20 cards if they were lucky. However it is clear that some suppliers have a 1000 or so.
