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Last week, AMD released its budget-minded RX 480 graphics card to largely critical acclaim. Unfortunately, the positive reception has been overshadowed by reports that the RX 480 exceeds its 150W target TDP. Furthermore, that extra power draw seems to be coming from the PCIe bus, with the card pulling as much as 90W from its PCIe slot, far exceeding the specified 75W maximum and potentially causing stability issues with certain motherboards.

The tests, conducted by Tom's Hardware, caused quite the stir over on Reddit. Some Reddit users even conducted their own tests on retail versions of the RX 480, with some (though not all) throwing up similar results. AMD has now issued a statement, admitting that the tuning on certain RX 480 cards is "not optimal."

As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximise their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday.

While AMD's statement doesn't indicate precisely what's causing the issues with the RX 480, if it is exceeding its 150W target, either something is causing the card to run in the wrong power state, or it's exceeding its power limit and needs to be throttled back. There's some speculation that AMD was simply too ambitious with the RX 480's power draw, and that the addition of an 8-pin power connector would solve the issue, as well as open up far more headroom for overclocking.

Juno captured this view of the Jovian system on June 24th, as it approached. (credit: NASA)

Back in the early 2000s, scientists began planning how to design and build a spacecraft that could not only survive the voyage to Jupiter, but subsist in its hellish radiation environment long enough to make a careful study of the gas giant's composition and its mysterious interior. For the spacecraft, the radiation dosage during the 1.5-year science mission is equivalent to a patient sitting in a dentist's chair and being X-rayed every second of every day for three years.

Juno is now more than 850 million kilometers away from Earth. After all of that work, a spectacular launch and a deep space cruise, the fate of Juno comes down to tonight—can it successfully fall into orbit around the giant of the solar system?

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have already sent a command to the spacecraft to initiate its autopilot mode. This kicked off a software program that will culminate on Monday night when the spacecraft's main engine, a Leros 1b built by Moog-ISP in England, fires for 35 minutes. That burn is scheduled to begin at 11:18pm ET (4:18am BST on July 5).