Video Cards & GPUs - Page 12

AMD supposedly operates a two-tier system for supplying chips to its graphics card making partners, or that's the belief of the rumor mill.

As VideoCardz reports, this comes from the Board Channels forum over in China, which is always a source we regard with some caution, but admittedly has proved correct with speculation in the past.

The assertion here is that AMD's top-tier board makers - known as 'core' brands - are ASUS, PowerColor and Sapphire, as well as Vastarmor and XFX.

The upcoming GeForce RTX 5060 specs leaked from industry insider @kopite7kimi a week ago. With 3840 CUDA Cores, a 25% increase over the GeForce RTX 4060, it should offer a decent performance increase over one of the most popular GPUs among PC gamers. The leak confirmed 8GB of GDDR7 VRAM for the GPU, offering a 50% bandwidth increase with the same capacity.

Recently, a retail listing from an unknown Chinese retailer (via Videocardz) listed higher-than-expected pricing for the upcoming GeForce RTX 5060 and RTX 5060 Ti. The interesting thing about the listing is that it shows the GeForce RTX 5060 having 12GB of VRAM - the first time we've seen this configuration online.

Based on the source's unknown quantity, it's probably safe to say that the GeForce RTX 5060 will launch with 8GB of fast GDDR7 memory. This has been widely reported for a while now. Ultimately, this has raised our hopes of a new mainstream GPU from NVIDIA with 12GB of VRAM especially when we're reminded that the popular GeForce RTX 3060 launched with 12GB of VRAM back in 2021.

It's not often you see a massive graphics card partner exit from the GPU market, with the last big exit in recent memory being EVGA in 2022. Now MSI can be added to that list, but just for Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.

In a recent statement to Tom's Hardware, MSI has confirmed it will not be manufacturing any graphics card based on AMD's RDNA 4 architecture, which means the company will be skipping out on the entire line-up of RX 9000-series graphics cards.

The partnership between MSI and AMD isn't completely dissolved, as the company will keep the door open for future collaborations, but nothing will be manufactured for this current generation. For comparison, MSI manufactured 45 models of AMD's RDNA 2 generation or the RX 6000-series graphics card. As for the RDNA 3, or the RX 7000-series, MSI only made four models, which equates to a massive reduction of 91% between the two aforementioned generations.

NVIDIA's just-released GeForce RTX 5070 is the most popular graphics card on Amazon right now, dethroning AMD's also just-released Radeon RX 9070 XT.

AMD rapidly rose to the top of Amazon's most-wanted GPU list with its new RDNA 4-powered Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs, but now that NVIDIA's new mid-range GeForce RTX 5070 is here, the RTX 5070 is now the top dog (at least on Amazon). NVIDIA launched its mid-range RTX 5070 the day before the RX 9070 XT, but it took a week before it could topple the flagship RDNA 4 card on Amazon's most-wanted GPU list.

At the very tippy top of Amazon's best-selling graphics cards is the custom ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 12GB OC graphics card, MSI is second with its previous-gen RTX 3060, while third place (at least at the time of writing) is GIGABYTE's custom Radeon RX 7600 XT GAMING OC 16G graphics card.

Take your pick of any recent GPU launch, and you'll probably find that the majority of cards sold were premium partner cards with enhanced cooling and overclocked settings. This has been a thing in the GPU space for years, where PC gamers spend a little extra for that premium build or stylish model with fancy cooling and LED lighting. The only problem is that premium GeForce RTX 5080 and Radeon RX 9070 XT cards are currently being sold at prices that are 40% higher than the MSRP set by NVIDIA and AMD.

This massive discrepancy is a recent phenomenon and has been a hot topic among the enthusiast PC gaming community for several reasons. One, if you're unable to buy, say, buy a GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5070 Ti at the MSRP set by NVIDIA ($549 and $749 respectively), then the next model up might carry a 20-30% higher price which diminishes a chunk of the card's value. In the worst examples it also means that you could end up paying more for a GeForce RTX 5070 than the MSRP of the more powerful GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.

During a recent media pre-brief with NVIDIA, covering the company's latest GeForce RTX and AI announcements as GDC kicks off, we asked about MSRP pricing as a current issue and hot topic.

"Demand for the RTX 50 Series has been off the charts," NVIDIA's Jason Paul said during a recent media briefing event for the company's GeForce RTX and AI announcements for GDC.

With the Game Developers Conference kicking off next week in San Francisco, NVIDIA is announcing several exciting things for developers and gamers alike, from RTX Neural Shaders coming to DirectX to Half-Life 2: An RTX Remix Project getting a playable demo that anyone with a GeForce RTX GPU can experience. There's a lot to get through so stay tuned to TweakTown for all the news.

With the GeForce RTX 50 Series launch, four new models - the GeForce RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090 - arrived within six weeks. One key problem with the launch, from the perspective of PC gamers looking to upgrade or put together a new build, is availability.

Remember the crypto-mining insanity, where trying to buy graphics cards was nigh impossible? Well, NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 5090 is being sold on Chinese black markets for $5000... with some listings on eBay seeing the RTX 5090 selling for between $5000 and an out-of-this-world $10,000... yeah, $10K for the RTX 5090.

The Information reports: "DeepSeek's skyrocketing popularity has boosted demand for NVIDIA's gaming chips in the underground market as tech firms realize they can run DeepSeek's models at a fraction of the price of AI chips, according to five chip smugglers".

It looks like Chinese companies have discovered that it's far cheaper running DeepSeek AI models on NVIDIA's consumer-focused GeForce RTX series GPUs rather than more expensive -- and hard, or impossible to get because of US export restrictions -- like the H20, H100, etc. China only has access to "stripped-down" variants of its GPUs like the GeForce RTX 5090D, and that demand is so strong that these models are now being sold at "black market" prices with the RTX 5090 (non-D) selling for up to $5000 or more.

Overclocking legend "Der8auer" has had some hands-on time with PowerColor's new custom Radeon RX 9070 XT Red Devil graphics card and overclocked the hell out of the RDN 4 GPU with some undervolting and a 3.3GHz GPU clock and put it head-to-head against the GeForce RTX 5080.

PowerColor's custom RX 9070 XT Red Devil graphics card is the company's flagship RDNA 4 card, with Der8auer reporting that it features higher-quality components and a higher-end cooler. The card is so quiet that Der8auer said he thought he mixed up the OC and Silent BIOS switches, but in real-world testing both of those settings had nearly identical results (62-63C on the RDNA 4 GPU, and 85C hotspot temperatures).

Der8auer started by tweaking the fan profile settings by forcing a 49% fan speed, which is the maximum that the overclocker's ears could enjoy. Once this was tweaked, the results were instant: the RDNA 4 GPU scaled past 2970MHz (2.97GHz) and hitting as high as 3030MHz (3.03GHz) which isn't as high as PowerColor's advertised 3060MHz (3.06GHz) that it says the RX 9070 XT Red Devil is meant to hit.

GALAX's new custom GeForce RTX 5090D HOF OC Lab XOC Limited Edition graphics card has been teased, with its dual 12-2x6 power connectors and overclock breaking 3DMark Speed Way's world record with the GB202 GPU clocking in at 3.27GHz.

The GALAX OC team and Micka have shown off the design of the GALAX RTX 5090D HOF OC Lab XOC Limited Edition graphics card that sports not one but two 12-2x6 power connectors, versus the old design with a single power connector. The GALAX OC team helped design the custom PCB design for the new RTX 5090D HOF OC Lab XOC Limited Edition graphics card, with "XOC" standing for "Extreme OC" which is a model that only GALAX will use in-house.

NVIDIA has to improve every single change to TGP and memory settings, where after approval, BIOSes are distributed confidentially. XOC BIOSes usually leak out to the public, but this is not something that should be done lightly as cards without a dual BIOS make it risky as it can cause failure and you'll have a dead card on your hands.

A survey on the new GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA has cast some further light on the Blackwell versus RDNA 4 battle, with some interesting revelations - including the surprising number of PC gamers out there who've had their enthusiasm for a new GPU pretty much stamped out.

Or maybe that isn't so surprising, depending on your viewpoint, but before we get into that, let's just remember that this is a single survey, so don't draw too much in the way of conclusions.

The poll - conducted by German tech site ComputerBase (and flagged up by 3D Center, via VideoCardz) - tried to feel out wider opinions on both sets of new GPUs, as well as gauging the level of sales.