AMD and nVidia Price Wars - R9 290X and 780 Ti

We've had a few interesting establishments over the last 6 months or so. From the green team we've had the new 700 series cards, some fairly good performance shown there, right the way up to the TITAN, which shows some monster performance and compute power.

Then from the reds we've had the 7950 and 7970, two cards which do a very good job of dominating the price/performance sectors of the market. After some drivers issues I think most of the crossfire stuttering problems should be solved now, higher resolution and multi screens may have small issues though.

Recently however, AMD are pushing their new release of the R9 series. The 280X seems to be selling fairly well at the price point of £220-£280, which is a point at which you will see either the high end nVidia 760 cards or the lower end 770's.

Currently, the 770s edge out the 280X on lower resolutions of 1080p, but the 280X overtakes it in certain games as you start hitting 4K resolutions., though some still play better on the 770.

Their new 'flagship' R9 290X card however has hit mixed reviews. While it does have TITAN/780 rivalling performance, it does seem to get extremely hot. We're talking almost 95 degrees here. I've heard some people use the argument "Ah but you have to watercool it, then it's fine.". Just stop it, watercooling should not be mandatory, even with flagship cards. They should work just perfectly well out of the box (and not be heating my entire room), and function just as any other card would. I feel the performance gain here was not worth the immense heat they put out. I'm not certain if the new cooler design is to be blamed, or just the huge die. We'll see when the non-reference cards arrive.

As the news of these cards hit the masses though, nVidia decided that a blanket price slash on their 700 series cards was in order. The 780 dropped $150, while the 770 lost $70 from its RRP. This can only be good news to the consumers looking for a decent upgrade!

Soon to arrive is nVidia's next bump up, the 780Ti. Rumours are that it will be close/better than TITAN performance with a larger amount of VRAM (good news for me as I need more than 3GB, preferably 4GB with some games nowadays).

I'm hoping it brings a card that will run newer games at good fps on a surround system (5760*1080), while sporting some decent VRAM (4GB+) and hopefully in the £500-£600 price range. Cheaper is obviously better though!

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It's quite simple, all you need to do is type this coupon discount code into their checkout:

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They've got some great prices on the new SimCity, Tomb Raider, Heart of the Swarm and Crysis 3 games and are always more than happy to answer any questions you have for them!

Kepler Confirmation for April?

Yet again, no official announcements, however we've seen a lot of very similar rumours flying around now that indicate the release of Kepler cards around the second week of April.

If there is any truth in it, we'll be seeing some form of official statement in the next few weeks I would think.

Links:
http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/35933-nvidia-gtx-6xx-kepler-rumoured-production/

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/26069-kepler-gk104-cards-in-production

nVidia Kepler Rumours

So, the mill seems to have been turning! We've seen an article appear on Tom's that has taken some of its information from the Chiphell website. It seems to indicate the timescale for the arrival of the new nVidia Kepler cards:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-Kepler-GTX680-GPU-geforce,14499.html

Again, this is a rumour, not fact. It speculates that the new series of cards will hold the 600 series nomenclature, which opposes some previous rumours stating that the 600 series was being ditched for mobile GPUs, as the 300 series was, and that they were skipping to the 700 series instead.

Not only that but it also states that the new '680' card, may not actually host their flagship core, as has mostly been the case before. Hosting a 780MHz clock speed and 2GB of VRAM, it sounds half decent.

[Speculation]I personally think, if this is to be believed, that this card could be a quick release from nVidia. With AMD currently holding the top spot, they are losing out on cash. I also have a feeling that this is not going to be all nVidia have to offer. Again, if it's to be believed, this card may well be the successor to the '560(Ti)' card, with another release of an even higher single GPU card later in the year. Of course, I could be entirely wrong![/Speculation]

SOPA Stopped Me

I've taken myself offline for today in protest of SOPA and PIPA. A bunch of ridiculous bills the US Congress are trying to pass.

Read more here: http://sopastrike.com/strike/

Support the strike!

Site now back up - thanks for the support and let's hope it achieved something.

Crucial Release Firmware Fix for M4

Crucial announced last Friday that their firmware fix for the M4 SSD went live.

The release was to fix the issue with the drives, where once they reach 5184 power on hours, they would become unresponsive and cycle down. This is just over 7 months of power on time for the drives.

The fix includes all of the changes made in 0009 and you can upgrade from any lower firmware version.

I have just run the update across my two M4's in the desktop and the one in the laptop too without any issue.

See Crucial's website for the files:  http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

Launch of AMD 7000 Series (7970)

Today was the day AMD lifted their NDA on their new cards, specifically the 7970, which went on sale this morning.

As you can see from Aria's web page, it seems stock levels have already dropped to zero!

The acceptable prices seem to vary between around £430 and £520 among most retailers, some sites are selling at over £550. Possible milking of release day prices, I'd hope to see most places drop to below £500 in the not too distant future.

If someone were to ask me if they should buy one, quite frankly I'd say no, as we currently have no idea what nVidia have to offer in their new Kepler cards due to be released in the next few months. If they aren't all that great, you can pick up one of these AMD cards, hopefully prices may have dropped a few pounds then. However, if they are very good cards, I'd be kicking myself if I'd gone for one of these AMD ones now! So my advice is to hold out a short while and see what the green team have to offer.

AMD Deny 7000s GPU with 2304 Cores

From this document I posted earlier, leaked by Sapphire, it appeared as though there were a 2304 core GPU on the cards, however it had been crossed out.

Speculation led people to believe this was the rumoured '7980' card, however the senior PR executive from AMD, Mr. Hook, has denied the claims that there is a 7980 card.
Whether this now means Sapphire are in trouble for leaking (what may have been intentionally false) information or whether they just plain lied is uncertain.

AMD Launching 7000 Series GPUs

So, with the news that AMD are now launching their next generation of GPUs around the 9th January, it seems an appropriate time to write a little on them.

We're currently looking at around £450-£500 retail prices here in the UK based on the speculation we've seen so far. They will be launching their 7970 flagship card first, with the 7950 allegedly coming shortly after.

A few different spec cards can be seen on a 'leaked' Sapphire image HERE, clearly showing variants of the 7970 with clock rates from 925Mhz to 1335Mhz and a decent 3GB of VRAM.

We've got people almost breaking 55K Vantage scores with overclocked cards now HERE and world records being taken already HERE.

These cards should turn out to be quite decent, though perhaps judgement should be reserved for when nVidia's Kepler cards go live? I know that's what I'm waiting on!