AMD RX 480 Poses For The Public

Over the past several days, we’ve been treated to a slew of AMD RX 480 pictures. Most of the shots have largely focused on the reference cooler of the card, with few showing the PCB or the backside. This all changes today as we’re getting pictures of all sides of the card.  ComputerBase has generously decided to break the NDA for the rest of us and showcased the reference $200 (OR $229 8GB) RX 480 in all it’s glory.

From the pictures, we can see that the cooler is very much like the stock cooler found in recent AMD reference models from the outside. There are too RADEON logos on the card, both near the rear IO bracket. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to be backlit though it’s expected to be missing for a $200 graphics card. I’m expecting the front cover plate will be removable and moddable just like the Fury X one was, with AMD releasing a CAD file for the cover.

On the back of the PCB, there is no backplate. According to the rumours, only XFX is doing a backplate for the reference model which has led to some other OEMs being unhappy. Based on the backside of where the GPU is mounted, we can tell that the Polaris 10 die is quite small. There is provision for DRAM on back side of the card so it looks like the 8B varaint will have all of its VRAM on one side.

Given the short length of the PCB, I expect we’ll have mITX versions coming out shortly and even single slot versions possibly. Given the reportedly low 110W TDP, this may be the SFF budget king for this generation. With just a week to go, I can;t wait to see what the RX 480 will be like!