AMD Radeon RX 480 Reportedly Frying PCIe Slots

Following reports that AMD’s new Radeon RX 480 was exceeding the 75W power draw limit through PCIe, users have posted on the AMD forums to complain that the graphics card has fried their PCIe slots.

A forum thread, entitled PCI-E slot died with RX 480, was started by user roquen22, who was seeking advice after experiencing problems with the AMD graphics card. Whatever the issue was, it resulted in the RX 480 burning the PCIe slot on roquen22’s ASRock 970 Extreme4 motherboard.

roquen22 wrote:

“I ran into a problem after upgrading my rig with an RX 480 today. Everything was working great but then after a 7-hour straight gaming session with Witcher 3 Blood and Wine (which by the way is AMAZING) I got artifacting and then everything went black and the sound cut out. I reboot my PC several times, but nothing would come up. After looking up the error code on the motherboard, I found that it was “No VGA present” so at first I thought the card was dead and I put back in my 750 ti, but it too would not work with the same error code. So I put the RX 480 in the second PCI-E slot and now everything is working just fine. After everything was A-OK I tried slot 1 again and it failed again, so now I’m in slot 2.

I did a Google search to see about this problem and I found several articles about the RX 480 overdrawing power on the PCI-E slot. HOWEVER, I’m not sure I’m ready to pin this issue on that yet, hence why I’m posting. I feel like having the card for just a day and only having a 7-hour gaming session is too soon to cause failure. What do you guys think? Maybe it’s just a coincidence? I’m no expert on power draw or what overdrawing would actually do to a slot or even the motherboard as a whole. I also feel like if it was due to overdrawing of power that the whole south-bridge would get messed up and then the second PCI-E slot wouldn’t work either, but it does work.

With the help of the community we’ve discovered that the left most side of the PCI-E slot did indeed get burned. This is new damage and it is the reason the slot no longer functions. GPU temperature at the time of failure was only 78C, we’ll within normal ranges. In case it’s relevant, CPU Temps were 52-54C on each core. This leads me to the ultimate conclusion that the 480 overdrawing on power did indeed burn out the slot. And just to keep count, 3 other people on this thread are claiming to have the same issue as well so far.”

In response to the post, a couple of other people concurred that they’d experience similar failures:

trix4rix: “I have this exact same issue, totally killed my 990FX from MSI.  The issue is that it destroyed all 3 of my x16 slots, and I have nothing to test my other slots.  I think the cpu still works, but in all honesty, without any video out I have no idea.”

pcmasterrace: “Another motherboard has been destroyd [sic] by the stuff amd has created. Thanks for this. You will hear soon of me and my lawyer. Cheers.”

Another posted a video (in Portuguese) of an RX 480 in action, showing that it was drawing over 90W (192W TDP):

Have you experienced any problems with the RX 480? Let us know in the comments.