Video Cards & GPUs News - Page 336

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.