The AMD Radeon RX 480 received an update just last week to address the major concerns caused by its PCIe bus following its launch.
While there has been a considerable amount of conflicting criticisms from both sides of its current, and possibly new, user database, the company set the record straight in a reply, acknowledging the possibility of isolated cases wherein accidental damage was done; specifically, fried motherboards.
"Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal," explains AMD in an earlier report, adding that they were already working on a driver update to fix the related issues.
Consumers who have been affected claim that this was caused by the RX 480's PCIe bus in which the graphics processing unit (GPU) purportedly draws as much as 95 watts from a motherboard's PCIe slot. This is well over the designated 75 watts by the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG).
In some scenarios, the power draw issue only causes a fried PCIe slot while other extreme cases report that a whole motherboard ends up dying. Incidentally, other people claim that current motherboards, or mobo, should be able to handle a little excess of power. Consumers, in general, have had quite a lot to say about the issue in the past few days, offering a piece of their expertise in hardware schematics, and there's a lot of these arguments to be found if one simply searches through Google.
In any case, AMD has recognized the issue, worked on a fix and released the update as soon as it caught wind of it.
"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," writes the company in a letter addressed to PC review sites.
Driver 16.7.1 will reroute power distribution on the GPU so that its PCIe bus draws power within the limits (read: rerouted to the six-pin connector instead). A separate configuration setting has also been implemented, which is accessible through Radeon's interface settings under the General tab. Once enabled, the new "compatibility" option should lower overall GPU power consumption with "minimal performance impact" — in case people would really like to make sure that their mobo is safe.
Alongside the fixes are performance optimizations that should improve gameplay experience by around 3 percent, the company claims. This should also make up for the withdrawn performance experienced in lower power mode.
For the full list of updates, users may access the Crimson Edition 16.7.1 Release Notes page where the download links are located as well.
Note: Article updated to reflect driver's earlier release. Thank you for the head's up!
