MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X Gets Pictured With A Custom Board That’s Made For Slightly Higher Overclocking Results

Despite the fact that MSI has not revealed any details on its RX 480 GAMING Z (if existed, such a variant would sport a higher GPU and boost clock over the GAMING X models), we are glad to see that the RX 480 GAMING X version has been detailed, and is expected to come with several perks that the non-reference model will be unable to provide to gamers.

MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X Comes With An Additional DVI Connector And 8-Pin Power Connector – Higher Overclocking Potential Is Expected From The GPU Thanks To A Better Phase VRM Design

According to the details stated by VideoCardz, the MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X version comes with custom board, meaning that the graphics card comes with an 8-pin power connector. If you take a look at the image carefully, you can see that the PCIe power connector has four metallic connectors going in, suggesting that instead of the 6-pin power connector that is found on the reference model of RX 480, MSI decided to cater to the requirements of gamers with an 8-pin connector. According to our previous findings, the reference RX 480 features a 6+1 phase VRM design, but this one features a 4+2 VRM design, which is quite odd, since a non-reference GPU would always feature more VRMs (at least those dedicated for the GPU) for a higher overclocking result.

Regardless, we will be taking this info with a grain of salt and wait for further confirmation. According to the source, the MSI Radeon RX 480 GAMING X version is expected to be released during the end of July, so we’ll keep you posted accordingly. AMD Radeon RX 480 is based on the latest GCN 4.0 architecture which makes use of the FinFET architecture to deliver low power consumption, lesser voltage leak and better performance. AMD deploys a completely new architecture for Polaris chips with enhanced features listed below:

• Primitive Discard Accelerator
• Hardware Scheduler
• Instruction Pre-Fetch
• Improved Shader Efficiency
• Memory Compression

As a result, these GPUs can deliver up to 1.7 times the performance per watt increase thanks to the FinFET architecture while AMD exclusive technologies will help drive this efficiency up to 2.8 times which is thoroughly impressive. In addition to the foundation of AMD’s current generation GCN architecture, 4th generation GCN introduces new features. And one of them is primitive discard acceleration, which in no certain terms is AMD’s way of revealing that its upcoming GPUs will add support for additional key DirectX12 features such as Conservative Rasterization.

Additionally, AMD Radeon RX 480 is also capable of delivering up to 5.5 TFLOPs of compute performance which is extremely impressive considering the Radeon R9 390X delivers 400 GFLOPs more while consuming much more power (275W for the R9 390X vs 150W for the RX 480). While the graphics is available in the 8GB GDDR5 variant, it is also available in the 4GB GDDR5 model.

The 8GB frame buffer will allow great gaming experience on the 1440p resolution, and the memory clock of the GPU is running at 8GHz, which brings us to a grand total of 256 GB/s memory bandwidth.

AMD Polaris GCN 4.0 GPU Lineup:

Source