Sapphire RX 480 4GB Teardown - With 8GB Surprise!

[MrTeal]

At this time, no. The small caveat (assuming all the flashable 4GB cards are gone) is that when they actually do ship with 7Gbps chips you might not be able to overclock them back up to 8Gbps or higher like you can with an 8GB card.

That might change in a year or two as game requirements change. Still, save your money. You could spend an extra $40 on the extra RAM, but if you just buy the 4GB now in a year or two you can just sell your 4GB 480 and buy an 8GB 480 for less than $40 difference, or spend the money on something more performant.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Great Thread ! :thumbsup:

I was wondering, were is the flash on the gpu board ?

IEC, have you measured if the 12V contacts from the pcie- power connector are directly connected to the 12V pins of the pcie card slot connector ?

 

[IEC]

I've successfully flashed to 8GB on both cards. Ignore the wonky GPU-Z display, I am testing undervolting.

 

[MrTeal]

I've successfully flashed to 8GB on both cards. Ignore the wonky GPU-Z display, I am testing undervolting.

Lucky guy.
I would have loved to have gotten a 4GB, but given the circumstances I'm not sure how many (if any) will come back into stock at Newegg. Seems like it might be a one time deal to claim they shipped $200 4GB cards while they waited for actual stock.

 

[IEC]

Great Thread ! :thumbsup:

I was wondering, were is the flash on the gpu board ?

IEC, have you measured if the 12V contacts from the pcie- power connector are directly connected to the 12V pins of the pcie card slot connector ?

Malventano on OCN did the following:

Here's the layout via direct measurement (I followed from the PWM output all the way to the FETs of each power phase):

 

[William Gaatjes]

Malventano on OCN did the following:

Ah thank you. That kind of confirms what i read from what the other posters said.
Well, with the exception that the other smps are also fed from the pcie power connector. That seems a good thing.

Have you looked at the datasheet of the IR3567B ? It seems there is a customer ID in the order partnumber. Interesting.

 

[Gunbuster]

Dear AMD, don't pull a Kingston and swap in slower RAM chips when you get around to making real 4GB cards. You sent out "4GB" cards for review at launch so the real ones better perform the same.

 

[MrTeal]

Dear AMD, don't pull a Kingston and swap in slower RAM chips when you get around to making real 4GB cards. You sent out "4GB" cards for review at launch so the real ones better perform the same.

Well, they might swap in slower chips, but the 4GB test BIOS that reviewers used underclocked the RAM from 8Gbps to 7Gbps, so performance out of the box shouldn't be affected.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Dear AMD, don't pull a Kingston and swap in slower RAM chips when you get around to making real 4GB cards. You sent out "4GB" cards for review at launch so the real ones better perform the same.

I think most of the 4GB cards will be AIB ones in the long run, but the bios on the current 4GB cards both clocks them down and cuts the ram. Real 4GB cards will give the same performance reviews are showing, just some 8GB AIB cards might give worse with slower RAM.

 

[IEC]

Dear AMD, don't pull a Kingston and swap in slower RAM chips when you get around to making real 4GB cards. You sent out "4GB" cards for review at launch so the real ones better perform the same.

The 4GB models default to a memory clock of 7GHz. Any future actual 4GB cards will at least match the review benchmarks, and I bet we'll see some AIBs launch 4GB cards with 8GHz+ GDDR5 as well.