PC Graphics

[rohailkhan]

Sapphire Nitro Rx480 4GB overheating to 89-90 and poor performance in all games?

I am very disappointed by the performance overall. I’ve many issues with this card.

• In Idle state card is maintaining temps to around 50-55c, but in games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of Mordor temps goes very high to 85+ on lowest settings in game even I tried run games on lower resolutions, performance was better, But this is not acceptable, this card should easily handle most games on 1080p with atleast medium settings.
• I tried to monitor other things as well, and i notices card is not maintaing core clock as well it goes to 1200+ and suddenly jumps down to even 300 on 100 GPU Load.
• I’ve read many articles blogs but couldnt understand what is wrong with my card.

my Wattman Settings are attached, I’ve tweaked this area only rest is default.

Here is my system specs

Mobo: Asus Z170-A

CPU: Core i5-6600k

PSU: Corsair VS 650

RAM: Corsair 8gb ram

GPU Driver: 18.3.4

Case: Cooler Master K380

Let me know if you need more info about anything to understand my issues.

[plumboby]

Have you got chill activated while gaming as its handy & needs to be activated to hold the temps back. Make sure its activated in global game settings & with the Radeon in Game overlay activate it & set the frames at a lower starting point. I set my low frames to 40 & high limit to 60-70ish. Will make a diffrence with it activated pulling your temps back to 60ish deg. I recomend enabling chill & tuning it in for a test before you blame drivers or the card. Chill is a feature for to keep the card from overheating forcing where ever you set your frames to make the fans on your card spool up cooling it more under load. I Run chill on a Sapphire Pulse RX560OC 4G with single fan with chill activated under heavy gaming load barely gets to 60deg if that. I npush it with The Witcher 3 & vermintide 2 both on medium settings with a lot of settings enabled with Chill activated no issues temps creeping with an i5 2400 with 8G ram. I dont think its card fault or issue more a few settings not activated or settings that need enabling. How many watt is your PSU & how much cooling does your case have in it as might be lack of case cooling could be your issue to heat soaking everything. Saying that I still havnt put my cover back on my case yet, but I will be soon just left mine off till I know my build is running right.

[rohailkhan]

No Chill was not activated, After enabling the chill i ran benchmark test in Shadow of mordor and Batman Arkham Knight on medium settings and 1080p, there was no considerable difference, average temp was 80c and Avg fps was 48-50.
In Witcher 3 the only way i was able to achieve 60fps was

• Res 1366x768
• Low Graphic Settings
• Low Post Processing settings

On 1080p and low settings i barely get 45-50fps

I am not blaming all rx 480s I think there might be a problem with my card only.

As i mention i have cooler master K380 Case, Cooler master D92 for CPU, 2 intake fans (front and bottom) and 1 exhaust fan (rear). one more thing, ambiance temp is relatively high (30c approx.) where i live.

My card is throttling i guess, I don't know why.

[pokester]

My RX 580 is temperamental like that too. While they are supposed to operate at higher temps, mine just isn't stable over 70. I adjust the red temperature slider on the fan settings down to 68 "max", which is the left slider and the right "target" slider all the way down 40. This keeps the card in that temperature range and it doesn't overheat so it doesn't throttle either. I do also have an open case and that helps. Once I did that no more issues. Each flavor of these cards are different. Or in my case I fear they just chose a chip for a card that should not have gone on an overclock version of the card. That isn't AMD's fault.

The vanilla drivers from AMD cant really adjust for every variation.

This is why back in the old days when card makers used to actually update their card bios this would get fixed as drivers changed.

AMD catches a lot of grief on this stuff when in reality they only make the chip not the card. It is up to the maker to do the rest especially when not following the reference design, and most at this point don't other than Vega. Unfortunately I don't think most AIB makers care much beyond the initial sale these days.

This linked support page explains the wattman and chill setting fairly well. Go down to temperature to see the sliders I am talking about.

How to Tune GPU Performance Using Radeon Wattman and Radeon Chill

Excerpt:

Temperature

Manual temperature allows control over the operating temperatures of the GPU when running a 3D application (under load).

The Max (temperature) slider is the maximum temperature allowed before GPU clocks and voltage are lowered to cool down the GPU. Target is the temperature at which fan speeds will ramp up to cool down the GPU.

Target temperature works in tandem with Fan speed which is covered in the next section of this document.

[rohailkhan]

So i did play around with temperatures and Yes it helped, I set max temp to 70 and target to 40 and successfully managed to lower temps While playing game with these settings temperature was around 65-70 which is very good. And I also activated chill as plumboby advised with min 40 and max 60 fps.Thanks for the help.
But here is the thing,  I am unable to maintain core clock frequency it comes down to 300mhz during games, its constantly fluctuating to between 300-800-1200 etc. The Problem is the poor performance in games, like I ran few games with settings mentioned above here is the max and avg frame-rates of these games on 1080p normal settings

Shadwo of mordor : 45-50

The Witcher 3 : 35-41

Batman Arkham Knight: 40-45

I am still not getting the performance that i am expecting from rx 480. It should easily handle these games.

My observations further:
Now its clear that card is not throttling due to temps, that leads me towards PSU, my power supply should be good enough to provide required power to my system, but may be its struggling, or its faulty idk. how can i check my PSU is not causing this problem. If its not the power supply that it means something is wrong with my graphics card chip or it is faulty.?

[handsomefox]

if you still have this freq issue, try installing older drivers, ones that are before adrenalin and try.

[plumboby]

Chill should make a diffrence, It does with mine I am on a Sapphire Pulse RX560OC 4G non overclocked in settings yet capped my frames to my card at 60fps low chill settings while gaming at 40 High settings at 70 no issues with cooling under throttling or under load. I beat on it with 18.2.1 drivers playing The Witcher 3 Meduim/High settings & vermintide2 medium settings, Killing Floor2 Ultra all games sit constant 60fps temps sit on 60deg if that under full load if lucky & its being pushed. Dont run you card fps main settings uncapped will play havoc with throttling & temps it takes a bit of fine tuning but not AMD driver fault either, Chill is there for a reason there to hold temps at a managble limit. Pokster is right with the wattman settings I would advise to do that to, might be a 3rd party card fault or deign fault from ASUS causing you the issue I am running a genuine Sapphire without a problem with a dirty single fan & been great sometimes your better off with genuine partner brand cards like sapphire for the best results & best chips & best build. My sapphire been fantastic I be buying late model Sapphires again I was warned they are hit or miss but so far so good, I be buying Sapphire again for my next builds. Tho chill with the watman settings set correctly should be able to pull your temps back to a more stable temps tho the 480s are known for being tempermantal for getting warmish. Sometimes another reason why the temps creep can be you PSU working extremely hard to seen temps creep from cards being PSUs showing there age loosing there efficientcy.

[rohailkhan]

kindly read my above reply to pokester and add your suggestion and thoughts further.
Thanks

[pokester]

You only need to raise the minimum in chill up to push the clock higher. If that is still not enough just disable chill. You don't really need it to keep the card cool if you have the temperature sliders set where I told you. If that isn't doing it, for you I don't know what is going on as it isn't behaving as mine is for sure. I think at that point I would be talking to the card makers support team about a fix or rma whatever option is best.

[plumboby]

1 quick trick that may work with chill on, in wattman bump the voltage up another .5 on the voltage slider with fan settings manually crank you fan settings as pokester said, lock them in with wattman as your main profile. The extra bit more juice you give them the frequencys with wattman with chill enabled it should go a bit better. Another in your radeon settings enabling a frame cap on your card settings mines capped at 60fps so everything syncs well with Chill enabled. I will post some of my settings I use which seems to work for me on an older build running 1080p games. None freesync monitor.

[plumboby · Accepted solution]

Adrenaline drivers are fine with what I run  & how I am doing it with mine just idling away. I set my frequencys on Auto just with some extra volts & cooling to suit. Tho all RX series cards are locked back on volts I found all the rx series of users bumping voltage helps a lot. I find the frequency doesn't fluctuate much either under load with a few background tasks running in the background to. Try the 17.12.1 Drivers I found they were the drivers I went back to when I had issues & found still prety stable to use. Might find your chill will work better, I found chill settings with wattman profile be a good guide & test on those drivers. Give it a run for a few days leave it idling. Then do a few games testing try run withen game settings you like as a test. Adjust to suit keep an eye on your temps, if you experience the same issues might be a dud card RMA it with ASUS. They might just refund you with an updated model of equivalent card. Give it a test if you going to RMA it & its card at fault they usually give you the upto date spec of that same card which be a rx580.