![]() If you’re the overclocking type, WattMan (found in Gaming > Global Settings > Global WattMan) delivers everything you need to tweak your RX 480’s power limit, fan-speed minimums and maximums, target-temperature minimum and maximums, GPU and memory clocks, and individual GPU and memory voltage levels. Seriously-who thought WattMan sounded better than OverDrive? WattMan’s essentially a supercharged version of the OverDrive overclocking tool AMD has included in its control panel for a while now, with some cool new capabilities and a highly unfortunate name that brings old Sony Walkman cassette players and crappy superheroes to mind. The Radeon RX 480 looks flat-out stunning-though as with the Nano, there’s no backplate on the reference version.ĪMD typically reserves new features for its yearly flagship software launches, but it’s rolling out a great new tool alongside the RX 480: AMD WattMan. ![]() But you’ll only hold it in your hand to install it anyway. The Radeon RX 480 also swipes the Radeon Nano’s and the Radeon Fury X’s sense of style, mimicking their sleek black exterior and prominent Radeon branding, though the RX 480 feels a bit more lightweight and plasticky in hand. Custom mini-ITX versions of this card could be exciting. The RX 480’s memory chips must be laid out on the board itself. While this is a full-length card (just under 9.5 inches in order to accommodate the cooling system’s heat sink and single blower-style fan), the PCB itself is only an inch or so longer than the diminutive Radeon Nano, and that card benefits from high-bandwidth memory’s extreme space savings. Note how much smaller the Radeon RX 480’s PCB is the back third of the card is just shroud and fan.Ĭonsidering all the shader processors and RAM that AMD stuffed into this thing, it’s remarkable how small the card’s circuit board actually is, as we mentioned in our visual preview of the RX 480. AMD says the memory specs in custom cards by partners such as VisionTek, Asus, and Sapphire might vary, but will hit 7Gbps minimum. It’s important to note that the two RX 480 variants are clocked at different memory speeds: The 4GB model tops out at 7Gbps, while the 8GB model hits 8Gbps. Sticking to GDDR5 no doubt helps AMD keep costs down-crucial in a $200 graphics card-and to be honest, it still holds up just fine for in-game performance. That’s traditional GDDR5 memory, by the way, not the exotic high-bandwidth memory found in the Radeon Fury series or the newer GDDR5X memory found in Nvidia’s GTX 10. But the Radeon RX 480’s $200 version contains 4GB of memory, while an 8GB version-the model tested here-will sell for $240 when stores open Wednesday. The older R9 380 and GeForce GTX 960 both started with 2GB of onboard RAM, though pricier 4GB versions were also available. Team Red supersized the memory in its $200 offering, too. The Polaris GPU also brings enhanced geometry engines, improved shader efficiency, updated memory and delta color compression engines, and more. (Such a tease!)Ī breakdown of the RX 480’s Polaris GPU, for you GPU nerds out there. A big jump in stream processor count paired with a big jump in clock speeds means a big jump in overall performance-which we’ll get to in a bit. The reference Radeon RX 480 boosts up to 1,266MHz out of the box, with a base clock of 1,120MHz. The number of onboard compute units expanded from 28 CUs in the R9 380 to 36 CUs in the RX 480.ĪMD was also able to crank the RX 480’s clock speeds. AMD’s previous $200 graphics card, the Radeon R9 380, packed 1,792 stream processors by comparison, and the more powerful Radeon R9 380X contained 2,048. ![]() As you can see in the chart above, the Radeon RX 480 contains 2,304 stream processors, which are AMD’s equivalent to Nvidia’s CUDA cores-though it’s impossible to compare the two radically different architectures in sheer core counts alone. Moving to 14nm lets AMD cram more technology into its GPUs, too. ![]()
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