Factory Overclocked Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 480 Coming with Two PCIe Connectors

Asus has just announced that it will be releasing the ROG Strix Radeon RX 480 next month. The graphics card will be factory overclocked and can be further tweaked without fear of overheating. Other highlights include a custom board design and DirectCU III.

This comes in the wake of the power issues associated with the AMD RX 480 reference card. The card was reportedly pulling more wattage through the motherboard PCIe connection than the spec allows for. That is however more or less resolved in the 16.7 driver update which rerouted part of the card’s power draw from PCIe slot to the single 6 Pin PCIe connector, bringing the draw under spec.

Regardless, Asus decided to redesign the power draw, with the board design for the ROG Strix Radeon RX 480 drawing “all of the GPU power from the PCIe power connectors.” Since the company used the word “connectors,” we would assume – given that’s not a typo – the ROG Strix RX 480 uses two PCIe connectors instead of one, though the press release didn’t mention the specific power requirements.

Having an extra cable might be seen as a downgrade in design, but it would presumably offer superior overclocking performance. The ROG Strix RX 480 features 1310MHz boost clock speed in gaming mode and 1330MHz clockspeed in OC mode. Asus claims this would translate into a 19% performance increase in Hitman and Doom. There is headroom for further tweaking, as well.

Speaking of the cooling solution, the DirectCU III features three wing-blade fans keeping the card 30 per cent cooler while being three times quieter than reference. Asus is also planning to release a Strix card with reference clocks, aimed at those who are simply looking for decent performance with the better cooler.

Asus ROG Strix RX 480 is set to launch sometime around the middle of August. The company has not revealed the pricing details yet.