As promised last week, AMD have issued a further statement regarding the PCIe power draw issues reported on the new RX480 GPU. As indicated by the first statement on the issue, this is going to be a driver-based fix. The release of 16.7.1 is promised within the next 48 hours.
“We are confident that the levels of reported power draws by the Radeon RX480 do not pose a risk of damage to motherboards or other PC components” AMD write, “[but] we are serious about addressing this topic and allaying outstanding concerns.”
16.7.1 includes a change that will address the power distribution on the RX480, lowering the current drawn from the PCIe bus. In addition to that, 16.7.1 will add a UI/Settings option that can “reduce total power with minimal performance impact”. This ‘compatibility’ toggle will default to ‘off’, but if people are still concerned about overall power draw (separate from the PCIe issue), they can switch it on. AMD claim this will have “minimal performance impact”.
To offset any performance loss from using the ‘compatibility’ switch, AMD say the latest driver boosts Polaris performance by around 3% in “popular game titles”.
“AMD is committed to delivering high quality and high performance products, and we’ll continue to provide users with more control over their product’s performance and efficiency,” the statement adds.
