Interesting article on Game Revolution today citing that a lot of tests have been done on the new RX-480 card and it seems to be drawing more power over the PCI Express slot than what it was designed for.

As part of the testing that goes on for any graphics card launch and its subsequent reviews, it was found by Tom’s Hardware that the RX 480 draws a surprising volume of power through its PCI Express interface. In fact, it draws more power from the mother board than is permitted by the PCI Express standard at around “79 watts average from the 12 volt lines alone”. This average sits above the 75 watt permitted by PCI Express, a standard created 12 years ago.

This could mean a number of fixes really. One of them would be a driver revision that under-clocks the card to make sure it doesn’t draw too much power over the slot.

It will be interesting to see what AMD’s internal results are and how quickly they will fix this.