At stock settings the card idled at around 48 oC, but under heavier loads (like when running 3D Mark, or something at 4K) temperatures will hover in the 70 oC to 80 oC range. But it’s worth noting that you don’t have a great deal of headroom in the temperatures. I then ran the 3D Mark Fire Strike again, and the RX 480 maintained all the set limits without taking off like a jet engine (the drop downs are the loading times in between Fire Strike’s graphics/physics/combined tests).įrom the testing I was able to do prior to embargo, there’s no reason why most users can’t at least squeeze an additional 100 MHz out of the GPU clock. I upped the core clock speed to 1330 MHz, the memory speed to 2050 MHz and allowed for an extra power to be sent to the GPU. It’s worth noting that the power limit feature for the temperature control, which can increase or lower the amount of power sent to the card, is specific to cards with the Polaris 10 XT core (so only the RX 480 for now). The GPU’s voltage control can also be adjusted manually if desired. To overclock, users can either the GPU clock frequency slider in 0.5% increments, or they can set individual MHz targets across various stages. WattMan also provides a histogram for tracking, and users can set individual overclocking profiles for specific games. The suite allows users to track peak and average fan speeds, GPU and memory speeds, temperature, and the GPU’s level of activity. All 400 series cards will support the new overclocking software, but it’s not currently known whether support will also be extended to the 200 or 300 series. It’s called WattMan, and it’s accessible through the Gaming tab of the AMD Radeon Settings control panel. The 8GB reference model has largely the same statistics, but with 8Gbps of GDDR5 memory instead of 7Gbps, and a memory bandwidth speed of 256GB/s instead of the 4GB’s 224GB/s.įor the RX 480 specifically, here’s a full list of the card’s specs straight from the free-to-use GPU-Z utility.Īs part of the Polaris launch, AMD has bundled a new set of overclocking tools into the Catalyst driver suite. There’s support for DirectX 12, the Vulkan API, DisplayPort 1.3 and 1.4, as well as 36 compute units and 2304 stream processors. If you’re looking for a card that can handle virtual reality without breaking the bank, and you’re not expecting stratospheric levels of performance, the RX 480 is a good place to start.īuilt on the 14 nanometer FinFET semiconductor process, the RX 480 has a die of 232 mm 2 and comes in two reference versions: a 4GB card with 7Gbps GDDR5 memory, a 256-bit memory interface, a core clock speed of 1120 MHz with a boost speed of 1266 MHz, and peak performance of up to 5.8 teraflops. In comparison, 8GB models of the RX 480 are going for as low as $379. It’s also a serious competitor to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980: the cheapest 980 at the time of writing is $628, and once stock of those run out you’ll have to fork out $700 or more. Straight out of the box - or bubble wrap, as it was sent to us - the RX 480 is more of a natural replacement for the R9 390 series in performance. Those expecting the RX 480 to compete on any sort of platform with NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 or even the 1070 - don’t bother, because that’s not what the card is built for. And there’s good reason to be excited: if you’re an owner of the R9 200 or 300 series cards, Polaris offers an immense jump in power efficiency, performance per watt, more headroom for clocking, quieter GPUs and, most importantly, faster GPUs.īut precisely how faster are we talking? That will be the sticking point for a lot of gamers. The jump from AMD’s previous generation of graphics cards has been a long time coming. It’s not hard to see why: when you promise a VR-ready card that only costs a few hundred dollars versus the thousand-plus of the competition, people are bound to get excited.īut when you put the card through its paces, does it live up to the hype? That depends on your expectations. The amount of hype behind AMD’s Polaris-based line of graphics cards has been nothing short of monumental.
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