Graphics Cards - Page 238

The holidays are just around the corner, and retailers are starting to offer some pretty amazing deals on today's hottest tech. We've spotted some substantial deals on high-end GPU's that will have the gaming geek in your life jumping for joy, including MSI's Gold NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti for $659, an AMD Radeon R9 Nano for $403, and a Radeon R9 390 for $259.

First up we have NVIDIA's mighty GeForce GTX 980 Ti. You can pick up an MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6G Golden Edition for $659 at NewEgg, which can be knocked down to $629 with a $30 mail in rebate. The card also comes with a free copy of Black Ops 3 and NVIDIA's Blades or Bullets games bundle, offering the choice between Assassin's Creed: Syndicate or Rainbow Six: Siege. If you already have the games (or don't feel like keeping them) you could sell the game codes to make out like a bandit.

With 6GB GDDR5 VRAM and an overclocked core speed of 1190 MHz that's complimented by NVIDIA's stable drivers, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti is seen as the premiere powerhouse GPU on the market today. MSI's 6G flavors of the GTX 980 Ti are the cream of the crop, and our own GPU expert Anthony Garreffa called MSI's 6G GTX 980 Ti "the game enthusiast's dream" in his official review.

With Asetek demanding that AMD stop sales of its Radeon R9 Fury X video card due to watercooling issue between CoolerMaster and Asetek, AMD has now publicly replied.

Packed with a closed loop cooling system, AMD defended its Radeon R9 Fury X with CoolerMaster-supported liquid cooling, stating "We are aware that Asetek has sued Cooler Master. While we defer to Cooler Master regarding the details of the litigation, we understand that the jury in that case did not find that the Cooler Master heat sink currently used with the Radeon Fury X infringed any of Asetek's patents."

With this quote in mind, AMD has not directly stated if they will be continuing to sell or cease production of its Fury X cards, with them claiming that the lawsuit has nothing to do with the R9 card directly.

We all know it's coming, but AMD is expected to launch their next-gen 'Arctic Islands' GPUs in mid-2016. These new cards will be powered by the much faster HBM2 technology, driving up to and over 1TB/sec memory bandwidth - up from the 512GB/sec found on the Fury cards, powered by HBM1.

AMD's new cards will launch on the 14nm/16nm FinFET process, with the GPUs including a huge 2x performance per watt increase over the previous generation cards. With multiple parts powering the new cards, a new architecture, HBM2 and a huge process shrink, I have some big expectations on next-gen GPUs. AMD has recently changed things up with spinning off its GPU business into Radeon Technologies Group, as well as the big changes with Radeon Software.

The flagship GPU in the Arctic Islands family is the exciting Greenland GPU, which is rumored to feature up to 18 billion transistors, and up to 32GB of HBM2.

It looks like AMD is ready to fully announce its dual Fiji-based video card, which should arrive as the Radeon R9 Fury X2. But according to the latest rumors from Benchlife.info, it'll be a paper launch of the Fury X2, with real market availability to kick in sometime in Q1 2016.

The source continued, adding that scheduling issues in production of the new video card could see delays occur. This isn't something new, as AMD paper launched the Fury X before it reached the market weeks later, but this delay will reportedly be months, not weeks. We should know for certain very soon, as we've been invited to an AMD event in Sonoma, California this week (I'm sitting in the Brisbane, Australia airport to board my plane to LA, and then SFO). We're expecting to see AMD unveil the Fury X2, but we won't know for certain until later this week.

Now, what about price? We should be expecting the Radeon R9 Fury X2 to be priced quite high as it features dual Fiji XT GPUs, as well as two separate sets of 4GB of HBM. The Fury X has an MSRP of $649, so we should expect the Fury X2 to be as high as $1049-$1099, or even more. Remember the Radeon R9 295X2 launched at around $1500, but floated down to $1000 after a while.

After hearing reports its Crimson Edition driver was causing low fan speed issues, AMD has released a hotfix driver -- 15.11.1 -- today.

The driver fixes the aforementioned fan issues, and also includes "great stability improvements" and game fixes for Just Cause 3, Star Wars: Battlefront, Fallout 4 (that compass issue is fixed except for R9 290 and AMD Radeon R9 295X2 setups), and Black Ops 3 (which sees good performance in Crossfire now).

For the full notes, hit the source, where you can also grab the driver (also feel free to grab it through the newfangled Radeon Settings application).

AMD's Crimson Edition driver has been causing fan issues for some, some saying it locks the speed to 20%.

While it's been reported this has caused cards to burn out, Reddit user Joshposh70 conducted some hard tests with his R9 290s in Crossfire and claims temperatures peaked at 94 degrees, at which point clock speeds were automatically reduced to maintain that temperature, as is expected with AMD's built-in Powertune technology.

AMD says it's aware of the issue and will be releasing a hotfix today. We'll let you know when it arrives.

Price drops on AMD Radeon cards hit the headlines yesterday, and now it's NVIDIA's turn. GeForce GTX 900 series cards are all dropping in price in the United States, the first time decent price drops have been applied to the Maxwell-powered cards since they launched late last year.

For example, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti has dropped from its original MSRP of $649 to around $589 - or even cheaper, at $559 after a rebate. The GTX 980 had an MSRP of $499, and can be had for as low as $439 or $409 after a rebate. The GTX 970's original MSRP of $329 has been slashed to as low as $289, or an even more awesome price of $259 after rebate.

If you're after a cheaper mid-range GPU, the GTX 960's original MSRP of $199 has been cut to $179, or just $149 after rebate. But, if you don't want to spend much money, you can grab the GTX 950 for $139 or $129 after rebate, down from the original MSRP of $159.

It's been widely reported the past 24 hours about that the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, R9 Nano, R9 390X, R9 390, R9 380 (2GB and 4GB) video cards received official price drops, but this is not the case.

When asked about it, AMD told us there are "no official price moves on our part" and that it "might be related to the holidays." So there you have it. This means former prices should be restored following the holidays, so if you're on the fence, it's probably better to pull the trigger now.

AMD has hit the headlines in a huge way today, with the tease that the Radeon R9 Fury X2 will be unveiled next month, and that there are huge price drops across their entire range of video cards - with the Fury X now priced at $589.

But news has broken that NVIDIA is preparing the launch of its GeForce GTX 960 Ti, a card that would compete against the just-released Radeon R9 380X from AMD. NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 960 Ti is said to feature a cut-down GM204 GPU, but when it comes to the CUDA count, things could get interesting. The GTX 960 has 1024 CUDA cores while the GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA cores, so we should expect somewhere in the 1280-1408 CUDA core range for the GTX 960 Ti.

As for the SMM count, the GTX 960 has its 1024 CUDA cores in 8 SMMs, while the GTX 970 has its 1664 CUDA cores across 13 SMMs, so the GTX 960 Ti should arrive with 10 or 11 SMMs. The price point of the GTX 960 Ti should be good, with a price of around $249. We should expect NVIDIA to provide a 192-bit memory bus, up from the 128-bit bus found on the GTX 960.

Right off the back of the news that AMD is close to launching its Radeon R9 Fury X2 dual GPU card, news has broken that the company has dropped the price on its Fiji-powered cards in the R9 Fury X, R9 Fury and R9 Nano.

The Radeon R9 Fury X launched with an MSRP of $649 but has dropped to $589 or even $569 after a rebate. The R9 Fury has dropped from its MSRP of $549 to a competitive $499 while the super-small R9 Nano dropped from $649 to $569, or $549 after a rebate. The Radeon 300 series has also received some price cutting love, with the R9 390X dropping from its MSRP of $429 to $379, while the R9 390 drops from $329 to $279.

The mid-range R9 380 2GB drops from $199 to $169, or down to $139 after a rebate while the 4GB version drops from $225 to $179, or only $159 after a rebate. Check out your e-tailer and local retailers to see if these price drops are in effect before purchasing of course.

ASUS has been making video cards for 20 years and is seeing fit to celebrate the milestone with a limited edition golden version of the GTX 980 Ti, pictured here.

They claim it's the fastest 980 Ti available with a base clock of 1,266Mhz and boosted clock of 1,367Mhz, offering about 21% more frames per second over the reference design. As well, it's said to be 30% cooler and three times more quiet during demanding gaming sessions, thanks to DirectCU II cooling tech, which houses a 10mm direct-GPU-contact heat pipe, a 325%-larger heat dissipation area, and two 0dB wing-blade fans. Other specs include 6GB GDDR5 VRAM, 2816 CUDA cores, 7200Mhz memory clock, and a 384-bit memory bus.

Features include a Memory Defroster for LN2 overclocking, a color-coded Load Indicator, a Safe Mode button for easy restoration of default settings, and the environmentally-friendly ASUS AUTO-EXTREME technology for higher quality parts ("Digi+ voltage-regulation modules (VRMs) with 14-phase Super Alloy Power II components - long-life capacitors, concrete-core chokes, and hardened MOSFETs") and more overclocking headroom.

We knew it was coming before the end of the year, but it looks like AMD is preparing to launch its dual-GPU beast in the form of the Radeon R9 Fury X2, very soon.

AMD is reportedly holding a special event in December where they'll release the Fury X2, which should be an interesting card. Considering the Radeon R9 Fury X has 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, the Fury X2 might use two Nano cards combined, to keep under that 300W TDP. Where is the news coming from? Well, Johan Andersson from DICE, of course.

Andersson posted to his Twitter account: "Dat feeling when your just arrived closed liquid cooling pre-release GPU turns out to not be so closed after all". If that's not proof enough, we don't have long to wait to see if AMD does indeed unveil the Radeon R9 Fury X2 next month.

Brandishing 768 CUDA cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, BIOSTAR's GeForce GAMING GTX 950 is set up for DirectX 12 and 1080p gaming. With further support for NVIDIA PhysX and DSR technology, this new card will set users back only $199 off the shelf.

Outputs on this new product include four monitor support through dual-DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI, with NVIDIA-exclusive features on offer to improve user experience, including GeForce Experience, Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR), Multi-Frame SuperSampling, native PhysX acceleration and more.

Branded as DirectX 12 ready, this video card features an LED illuminated BIOSTAR logo with it's own 'Warship design'. More information can be found on BIOSTAR's GeForce GTX 950 here.

Today SAPPHIRE welcomed AMD's new mid-ranged R9 380X GPU to its PC gaming Nitro family. SAPPHIRE has outfitted the R9 380X with its noteworthy Dual-X cooling array, which consists of easily-removable 10cm fans optimized with Intelligence Fan Control (IFC-II), a 10mm heat pipe with a diecast heat sink for improved heat dissipation, and Black Diamond chokes that boost power efficiency and heat mitigation.

The SAPPHIRE Nitro R9 380X features 4GB of GDDR5 VRAM with a 256-bit bus clocked at 1500mHz, with 32 compute units and 2048 stream processors running at 1040mHz. The card can hit high 1080p 80FPS performance in today's demanding games like GTA V, and even delivers 50+ FPS in Star Wars: Battlefront running at 2560x1440p resolution on high settings. The card consumes only 225W of power and needs a minimum power supply of 500W, and hooks up via 2x 6x6 AUX pins.

SAPPHIRE's Nitro R9 380X is priced at just $229, making it a great mid-range GPU that serves as a gateway to 1440p gaming while hitting great performance at 1080p. AMD contends that the R9 380X is a great step up for users looking to upgrade from an NVIDIA GTX 950 or GTX 960, and the new card fleshes out Team Red's R9 300 lineup with another 1440p option.

Hardware.info has leaked images of the forthcoming ASUS, XFX, and GIGABYTE versions of the R9 380X video card in preparing its reviews. The images, now pulled, show the R9 380X has 4GB GDDR5 memory, as previously rumored. As well, you can expect DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort for all display output configurations.

The ASUS card is known as the STRIX R9 380X and is said to come factory overclocked; the XFX card is known simply as the XFX Radeon R9 380X and looks similar to the 380, and the GIGABYTE card -- known as the GIGABYTE R9 380X G1 GAMING -- will employ dual-fan WindForce 2X cooling.

Last we checked in, other specification rumors for the R9 380X included pointed to a 256-bit memory bus, a core clock speed of 1000MHz, and a memory clock between 5500MHz and 6000MHz. We should have these confirmed one way or the other come November 20, if 4Gamer is to be believed.

The latest time we saw the discrete GPU market share numbers, NVIDIA was dominating with 82% of the market. We thought with the release of the Radeon R9 390X and the hyped to hell Radeon R9 Fury X (as well as the Fury, and R9 Nano) that AMD would win back a considerable chunk of the dGPU market in the last three months... well, they didn't.

AMD only took back 0.9% of the dGPU market, leaving NVIDIA with 81.1%, according to the latest data from analyst firm JPR. Back in February of this year, NVIDIA had 76% of the market leaving AMD with 24% of the market. But, we should hopefully begin to see a change in these numbers now that AMD is finally doing something about it, splitting its GPU division off recently into Radeon Technologies Group.

The biggest GPU fight is about to happen, with the shift from 28nm to 14/16nm set to happen next year. Not only that, but HBM2 will be used by both sides, versus just AMD using HBM right now. If that wasn't exciting enough, Windows 10 delivered DirectX 12 to the world, so we should begin to see some truly interesting things begin to happen early next year.

Following the launch of its take on the GTX 950, GIGABYTE is adding five more high-end video cards to its Xtreme Gaming lineup.

First is the Titan X (GV-NTITANXXTREME-12GD-B), which boasts 1165MHz/1266MHz clock speeds, a 7Gbps memory clock, 12GB VRAM, and a 384-bit memory bus.

The GTX 980 Ti comes in two flavours: Windforce Edition (GV-N98TXTREME-6GD) and Waterforce Edition (GV-N98TXTREME W-6GD). The Windforce Edition features the normal air cooling system; Waterforce features an all-in-one closed-loop water cooling system that houses FEP tubes, a 120mm silent fan, and a low-noise pump. GIGABYTE claims full coverage (GPU, VRAM, and MOSFET) and 38.8% better cooling over the reference design -- plenty enough that no additional fans are needed. Both include LN2 BIOS and an extra 6-pin PCI-E power connector for overclockers. As for specs, you get 1216MHz/1317MHz clock speeds, a 7.2Gbps memory clock, 6GB VRAM, and a 384-bit memory bus with both.

NVIDIA doesn't just release video cards for gaming you know? Yeah, we thought so - but check out their latest NVS 810 video card, which has an insane 8 x mini DisplayPort outputs - each capable of taking 4K displays at 30Hz each.

If the 8 x 4K @ 30Hz was a bit too much and you needed some 60Hz display action, you can knock it down to 4 x 4K at 60Hz. Also, we're not just talking about the normal 4K either - which is 3840x2160, we're talking full 4K - 4096x2160. Each of the miniDP ports on the NVIDIA NVS 810 can handle 4K @ 4096x2160. You can install four of the NVS 810 into a single system for 32 display support... yes, 32 x 4K displays!

The board takes just 68W of power, and is a single slot card for systems where you can have them nice and thin - think display-heavy and digital signage systems. As for what makes the NVS 810 tick, we have 1024 CUDA cores thanks to the use of two GM107 GPUs with 512 CUDA cores on each GPU. There's 4GB of RAM, but NVIDIA doesn't specify if its DDR3 or not.

AMD is expected to drop its mid-range Radeon R9 380X next month, based on the Antigua XT GPU, it should rock 4GB of GDDR5 spread out across a 256-bit memory bus.

Gamers have been expecting the release of the R9 380X for a while now, ever since the R9 285 was released last year. The Radeon R9 380X should feature 2048 stream processors, 128 TMUs, and 32 ROPS alongside the 4GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit memory bus. Earlier rumors had the R9 380X pegged to include a 384-bit bus, but it looks like 256-bit is where we'll sit.

AMD is gracing the R9 380X with its GCN 1.2 architecture, providing it with the same iteration of architecture that the Fiji GPU includes - the chip that powers the HBM-powered Fury range of cards, as well as the R9 Nano. As for power consumption, we should expect the Radeon R9 380X to use between 200-220W, with aftermarket designs of the card to sport better coolers, lower temperatures and possibly higher power consumption - depending on the card, of course.

When we heard whispers of NVIDIA using GDDR5X on its upcoming Pascal GPUs, it made sense. HBM2 is going to be sparse, and with AMD reportedly having 'priority access' to HBM2, the use of GDDR5X is going to come in handy, big time. Not only is NVIDIA said to be set to reveal GDDR5X-based video cards, but AMD will, too.

According to a new presentation, GDDR5X is going to provide twice the data rate per memory access. We're going to see it jump from the current 32B data per memory access, to 64B data per memory access. GDDR5 has hit a ceiling at around 7Gbps, but GDDR5X is going to have a much higher I/O rates of around 10-12Gbps.

It looks as though GDDR5X is going to be used well into 2018, while GDDR5 will most likely be kept for lower-end cards. I think we're going to see $50 - $300 cards with GDDR5, $300 - $500 cards (and possibly higher) with GDDR5X, and $500+ left for the higher-end HBM2 technology. The use of GDDR5X by AMD and NVIDIA is going to save much more money on R&D, because instead of moving over their entire next-gen GPU product lines, they can continue to use GDDR5X, which is not all that different to the current GDDR5 technology.