TheOverclocker Issue 40 | Page 35

games tested using the latest driver at the time . Something that one wishes were true for the RX480 .
Nonetheless , the issues were worked around and all the games tested performed as they should . Once again , with AMD ’ s ability to improve performance quite frequently with driver updates . I ’ d not be surprised to see some minor performance gains during the lifetime of the graphics card and possibly a few additions feature wise .
That said , what could ASUS bring out of this GPU that wasn ’ t already available in the AMD supplied model ? Well , it turns out quite a few things . Most of them will only be appreciated by the extreme overclocker ( at least those who would ever bother with such a graphics card ).
For one the , VRM complex has been not only beefed up but re-designed so it makes sense . No longer will one need to concern themselves with ticking the box that allows the graphics card to draw more power or current from the PCI-Express slot allocates . Instead , you simply install the graphics card and run it at full performance and higher with no concern over these limitations or rather exceeding these limitations .
How ASUS has done this is via wiring all the power that would be draw by the GPU directly to the power delivered by the PCI-Express power plug . This also helps to provide the card with as much power as it would need under extreme overclocking conditions without needing any modifications at all . You can simply use the available LN2 BIOS from ASUS on this card and it should work just fine , allowing you to take the GPU to 1700MHz or more if you ’ re lucky .
For the gamer or more casual user , there isn ’ t much that this changes , but where there are meaningful differences are in the cooler or heatsink-fan which ASUS has used on this GPU . It ’ s a familiar one that we have seen before , but it is effective and it helps cool the RX480 , while maintaining manageable noise levels . Again , something that was quite troublesome with the regular blower style cooler . Given that this graphics card ships with a minor factory overclock as well , it ’ s good to see the temperatures lower than on the factory card , but the performance higher . That in my book , is never a bad thing .
Add to which , one still has the full control over fan profiles , but provided in perhaps a more useful tool in GPU-Tweak . Perhaps not my favorite tuning utility around , but once you get used to it , it works just fine .
When this review was written , sadly GPU-Tweak didn ’ t integrate any LED management software in it , thus you needed a separate tool to manage the colors of the LEDs . The VGA Aura utility which was different from the one that you ’ d use for the motherboard , and
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