The AMD Radeon RX 480 is an impressive graphic card. It isn’t the fastest graphics card on the market, but then it wasn’t designed to be. It has 2,304 streaming multiprocessors with 144 texture units and 8GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gb/s. Its 256-bit memory bus is wide for a card of this stature and allows for up to 256GB/s of memory bandwidth.

AMD has spent a great deal of focus on the RX 480’s acoustic performance. The video card is very quiet, although it can get a little hot. There’s the notion that AMD has balanced thermals vs reduced fan noise, but here AMD Radeon RX 480 favor the latter, a fact borne out by the blower really needing to kick in hard when overclocking. The RX 480 was a 150W TDP, and gets power using just one six-pin PCI Express connector.

When looking at the physical form-factor of the graphic card, its business as usual for a mainstream GPU design, with only one exception: video output port selection. The great news is that the AMD Radeon RX 480 comes with an HDMI 2.0 port, with full H.264/VP9/HEVC media decode and HDCP 2.2 support. 4K gaming may be off the table for games that demand more, but as a basis for a gaming or media PC the RX 480 is fully armed and operational. On the flip-side, the DP ports are 1.3/1.4 HDR compliant, as future-proofed as they can be.

Testing the AMD Radeon RX 480 for Ethereum Mining with the default settings of the RX 480 for both the VRAM (8000 MHz) and the GPU (1266 MHz) and reducing the Power Target slider until it reached 83% – the value at which the power is getting reduced, but the RX 480 hashrate remains the same. Going under 83% percent, the 150W TDP started lowering the RX 480 hashrate below the regular value at 100% power. The outcome was 149 Watt drawn at the wall, taking into consideration the PSU power efficiency that ought to be about 130W actual power usage. This is down from 177W at the wall with default settings the RX 480 hashrate was unaffected and the temperature also move down from 68 to about 60 degrees Celsius.

Ethereum Hashrate

The optimized hashrate for the RX 480 is 27 mh/s.

Miner Software Optimal Configuration

EthosDistro

globalcore 1240
globalmem 2170
globalfan 90