The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

These aren't Intel or AMD chips Rich, they're made by a company called VIA - used to be well-known for making motherboard chipsets back in the days before they were taken in-house, nowadays they specialise in low-power processors.
These entire units draw around 10-20W at most and run off a 12V 2A external power brick.



Excuse the image quality, I took these on my then smartphone back in 2012 when the units were first introduced. Not had any reason to take pictures of them since!

When we buy these cards in, it's rare that they come with a half-height bracket and they're never advertised as whether they do or don't - sometimes you get lucky, sometimes not. I appreciate the offer but there's no need to send us brackets over as each brand's version of the card will have the output connectors in different places.
Since we usually buy these as a spur of the moment affair as and when needed, we don't often end up with the same brand twice.

Nah I've never taken the UP3214Q on the train, much too valuable and also bulky to manage that - I take the 23" U2312HM, a decent 1920x1080 screen, but a tenth of the value and most importantly, extremely lightweight, to the events, in a Geargrip carrier.
My hope is that with the new mini-ITX build I can get the monitor in the suitcase as well which makes use of luggage racks a lot easier.
The old 3008WFP never went on the train to LAN parties either, just in taxis around town on the way to events when I lived nearby. Now I've moved 200 miles back home it's only ever made it as far as the office (20 miles, and only once) If I'm honest, I don't think you can really blame the small number of dead pixels it picked up on the travel. If the screen had taken a knock you'd see a lot more than dead pixels, I assure you!

As far as the train goes, there are three railway stations near me that I use - the nearest is about 2 miles, which I have walked to/fro on regular occasions, takes about 40 minutes to get into central London so it's a bit slow and it also gets very crowded. As of today in fact, that has just been taken over by the company that runs London Underground, so things will be improving pretty rapidly over the next few years as far as trains, punctuality, cleanliness etc.
The second is 3 miles away and the third is 6 miles away - different lines and run by different companies, so a bit of redundancy Both of those take about 25 mins to get in, and fundamentally the third is less than half the cost of the other two!
If you're interested, check this PDF out:
http://www.projectmapping.co.uk/Resources/TOCs AS v9 May 2015.pdf
London is in the bottom right - follow the indigo/grey line from there to the right and look for Brentwood, Shenfield and below them, Upminster. They're the stations I use.
The LAN parties I attend regularly are in York - follow the red line directly upwards from London about halfway up the map.
All of our client travel is done by train pretty much, as most of our clients being London-based, road transport simply isn't a realistic option.

 

Staying with my brother right now. And sharing a 1.5 meg connection. As you can imagine... it sucks! Even a .5gig update takes time. So playing GTA is brutal right now.
Pretty small town at least it isn't dial-up LOL!

 

Heh? A 500MB patch? I'm redoing my entire steam library to load it onto the newest member of the family (far right)

 

Whoa! Very nice!

 

Steam downloads all done, the total library is still well under a terabyte it turns out, thought it was larger...
Two other operations underway at the moment, offline backups (and defragmenting / sector-optimising each disk as I go) of every server disk, and I finally now have an off-site backup client running on my server (backblaze) - been running 38 hours and already uploaded 117GB, so not doing too bad, speed should increase a little further as it works with bigger files. Only another 42,000 to go!

 

Kevin, you moved? A small town where your brother lives - did you change towns or just apartments? You're still with United Parcel I assume - waiting for them to offer you full-time once more after you've turned it down twice by now, as memory serves me. (You had better things to do than truck parcels all over town full-time - like playing Left 4 Dead and GTA!!)

But now you're ready to take their offer. Like I said before - I drove for them one Christmas and I think they're a pretty good company!

Sam, your pictures of the VIA "piggy back" computer were pretty nice for a smart-phone. Yes, I have at least one old p4 computer with a VIA chipset.

So they got out of the chipset business and into the ... the what?

The "Low power processor in a piggy back computer" business.

Sam, I'm going to come back to your post and open up the link to see the map. I stand corrected. You didn't lug the 30" around in trains, only in taxis. And only a few miles away as the LAN events were close to the college.

But now the 23" very light-weight gets put onto the train - and you're hoping the little guy will fit in the same case. Sounds like an excellent plan - 1 TB worth of steam downloads later and you're set to go! I like the newest member of your computer family - he's a little guy that's for sure.

Rich

 

He? Come on Rich, you know how this goes by now...

High time I updated my spec page I suppose!

The first, less interesting half of the new AMD graphics range has now released. The 390X is rather as expected, a rebranded 290X with 8GB of RAM and some power management tweaks, bringing the power usage down to around 280W from the original 300, some of which is probably due to the use of HBM in place of GDDR5. While an increase in memory against a small reduction of power consumption is nice, the 25% price hike is not. This makes the 390X considerably more expensive than the GTX970 and despite the small performance bump arising from the subtle tweaks, 5-10% extra speed does not bring it into GTX980 territory very often, so the 970 is the best card from nvidia it's able to beat. The 970 may be starved of video memory by comparison but at less than 70% of the price, and only 60% of the power consumption even after said tweaks, the 970 is still clearly the superior product.

The 980 meanhile has the disadvantage of only being a 4GB part and being around 15% more expensive than the 390X but it's still noticeably faster and it's still less than 75% of the power consumption. The extra £45 on top of the 390X's £350 asking price seems pretty worth it for that unless you need over 4GB. If you do, there's always the GTX980Ti - significantly more expensive at £550, but also significantly (40%) faster, with the same 280W power consumption. Needing more than 6GB is a little questionable even at 3840x2160, but when you need it, the 40% lead the 980Ti has probably negates the small losses felt between 6 and 8GB.

If they'd kept the 390X price similar to that of the 290X and perhaps called it a 390 and bumped the clock speeds more on a 'proper' 390X, I'd be more impressed. As it stands, I consider the 390X a failure until the price is dropped. Hopefully the Fury and Fury X will be more successful. Trouble is, unless they come with 8GB versions from the outset, they probably won't be.

 

I just read that HBM will be limited at first to 4 gigabytes of memory - which the AMD engineer declared will be sufficient, as "you wouldn't believe how much memory capacity is wasted."

By the way, what size die is AMD working on these days?

Edit: I came across a gamer at a Home Depot in Burbank the other day - up in LA again, this time installing a fancy faucet and a few other minor items. He has a pretty modern system with "32 gigs of Ram that I'll never use" and a 970 card like you, Sam and Jeff. I can't remember if you, also, picked one up, Kevin.

So I asked him if he games - he said "Of course." I started telling him how much I loved Arma3 and using the drone in my new-favorite Operation Scotch Lass - then he told me that he really liked Sniper Elite which he got on a great steam sale. So I'm thinking of getting it. I read some reviews and watched a couple of trailers. Have any of you guys played it?

Rich

 

The die size will vary depending on the actual GPU model in question. Do you mean the silicon process size? That remains 28nm, the 20nm/14nm refreshes still aren't ready.

I'll believe AMD's memory optimisation prophecies when I see them. Personally I'm a little sceptical and suspect it may just be a way to wriggle out of a flaw with the new system they're using, but we should see within a month.

Sorry, not played Sniper Elite so I can't help you there.

 

I moved 7 miles west, to stay with my brother for a month or two. Long story short, folks split up, brother and I took care of our father til he died last week (Cancer). May and June have been really nasty. I sure hope July brings a new job to the table.

If I get this job, things will start to look up for me. Though a GPU upgrade may still be a ways down the road. By the time I can afford one there will probably be yet another top dog LOL!

 

Sorry for your loss. I've been through some pretty rough months (and they too included the loss of a relative) in 2014/2015 so I can sort of empathise, seems like you're taking it well judging by your forum manner - and if you're not, you might be surprised how much talking to pretty much anyone and everyone can less then burden of it.

Here's hoping things look up for you soon!

 

Yeah, it is amazing what we can deal with. Fact is, he died in our arms. The large artery in his neck was under my fingers when he passed. One of the most painful moments of my life. Felt it go from strong, to weak, and then stop :'(
But you're right. Healing is happening slowly but surely.
You guys have MY sympathy as well.

 

Yeah that's what I meant. Seems like that refresh would help out quite a bit re: the high power consumption of the amd gpu relative to nvidia.

Kevin, sorry about your loss of your dad last week. That's nice that you and your brother teamed up to take care of him.

DDP sorry about your loss of your mom - not so sorry about your step dad as it sounds like you guys didn't get along so well.

 

Oh, dementia. I see. Is that the same as Alzheimer's?

So he told people you had committed suicide.

"Hey haven't seen you around here for a while - how's DDP?" "Oh, he committed suicide." "Well .... sorry to hear that!"

Wishful thinking I guess.


We have had dementia in the family - my grandmother - "Are the kids outside?" By kids she meant people who were now adults with their own families. Her sister Anna especially was a really bad case. I saw her when I went with my mom to the hospital in Brooklyn - I can't remember what I was doing in New York at that time - I hadn't even yet met the Finnians. Anyway, Anna couldn't even recognize any of her kids - they were total strangers.


I just saw that movie that Julianne Moore won the Academy Award for, "Still Alice."


So what was it like to be with your stepdad those last two years when it was just him and you, before you pushed him down the stairs ... I mean.... before he fell down the stairs.

(Sorry to be joking about that.) Other than him blaming you for your mom's illness, what was it like living with him - just the two of you, Alzheimer and the ghost?

 

So you weren't living together? He just checked himself in. They asked "next of kin" and he said "DDP committed suicide so I have no kin."

So he fell out of his hospital bed, or did you push him out of the window?

 

Yeah we had experience with dementia with one of my grandparents, when me and my mother visited him in its latter stages he thought I was her boyfriend, presumably seeing back to 30 years ago thinking I was dad (the fact that I apparently look remarkably like he did at that time probably didn't help) - his stay in the home was mercifully brief, as it was not exactly the nicest of environments. As terrible as this is to say I am almost happy he died relatively early - I wouldn't wish that condition on anyone.

People turning up to this thread are going to be thinking 'what has this to do with graphics cards?'

To that end, AMD has released the extraordinarily unremarkable R9 300 series. - the R7 360 and 370 and the R9 380, 390 and 390X:

: R7 360 (An R7 260 with a 5% clock speed increase and 2GB of memory rather than 1), priced at $110 or £85, the same launch price as the 260 18 months ago.

: R7 370 (An R7 265 with an 8% clock speed increase, priced at $150 or £115, the initial launch price of the (superior!) 270

: R9 380 (An R9 285 with a 6% clock speed increase plus 4GB of memory rather than 2, priced at $200 or £155, cheaper than the launch prices of the 280 or 285.

: R9 390 (An R9 290 with a 5% clock speed increase, continuous clock speed plus 8GB of memory rather than 4, priced at $330 or £250, cheaper than the 290 launch price, but more than it has been latterly.

: R9 390X (An R9 290X with a 5% clock speed increase, continuous clock speed plus 8GB of memory rather than 4, priced at $430 or £330, cheaper than the 290X launch price, but far more than the 290X has been recently sold at.
With the 290X now being deprecated through inventory depletion, this effectively represents a substantial price hike for the 290X.

The more interesting cards are yet to come -
: R9 Nano (A small form factor card with a 2-slot air cooler, capable of delivering anticipated performance similar to that of the 390X in a 175W power envelope. Price not yet specified, if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say $500 or £380. Due for release before christmas, possibly by the end of the Summer.

: R9 Fury (A full-size card with a 2-slot air cooler using a new architecture to provide performance estimated to be similar to that of the Geforce GTX980, so slightly faster than the 390X, in around a 280W power envelope) - will be released by the end of the summer, priced at $550 or £425

: R9 Fury X (A small form factor card with a reference water cooling system, expected to provide performance similar to that of the Geforce Titan X, in around a 350W power envelope) - will be released in the next few weeks, priced at $650 or £500.

: R9 Fury X2 (A full-size card with a reference water cooling system, based on two R9 Fury X GPUs, expected to provide performance up to 95% higher than the Fury X with full scaling, in around a 525W power envelope) - will be released within the next year, possibly by January - no price specified, I would estimate $1500 or £1150, unless the other cards have had price cuts by then.

The long and short of it is that cards offering anything new have yet to arrive - there is now a marginally faster (typically 5%) 290X with 8GB of memory as standard, but it costs substantially more and you can no longer buy the old version unless you find someone with old stock.
The most interesting card to me is the standard Fury, depending on whether any partner companies produce a Fury X with a non-reference air cooler. 375W loads have been tamed on air before with cards like the HD7990. 500W has even been attempted by Powercolor with the 295X2, with disastrous results!
If the Fury provides substantial gains over the 290X, then it wil be a nice card to own with potential uses in crossfire. If running on air sees it little (10% or less) better than the 390X, however, then it will simply force more people to buy a GTX980Ti, who haven't already.

Further to the above, one of the UK's review websites was denied access to review samples of AMD's new hardware at the last minute as AMD feel they have a 'negative stance towards the company' - as far as I can tell, all they are guilty of is telling it like it is with regard to the rebrands above. Shady and unnecessarily vindictive tactics like this to engineer press reviews are not really something AMD are in a position to do. If they're trying to hide something by excluding review sites from engineering sample cards, that ain't going to work more than a week past the launch date at best.