Mining ETH on RX480? Enable Compute Mode!

So I though I would give mining ETH a go with the RX480 in my games rig to see how well it would do.

Initially I was getting a really disappointing 16.5MH/s, looking on forums it looks like the cards are capable of far higher than this so I decided to dig a little deeper.

Turns out the cards are capable of far higher compute power than the default out of the box. There are a raft of more advanced setting you can dig into but the key one you should look at in the driver settings are CPU Workload!

To locate this open your driver control panel then open Gaming>GlobalSettings>GPU Workload and set this to Compute mode and press OK.

Warning, when I did this both my screens went black. Oh FFS I have killed it :( Nope, a rebook later and all was fine and my hash rate had jumped from 16.5MH/s to 24MH/s. The temp had jumped to 83C instead of 80C but this is still well within the limits of the card so no panics there.

You can dig deeper playing with power curves and voltages but I still want to game on this puppy so this will do just fine and I can toggle between modes depending on workload and not stuff my gaming machine FPS.

Thought I would share as that is a real healthy boost for zero effort if you want to try mining on you gaming card.

Woz