Post by KostaAndreadis @ 03:48pm 08/07/16 | 27 Comments
When it releases later this month it'll be more expensive than the equally budget oriented AMD Radeon RX 480, but not by much. And like AMD's card it'll run off a single six-pin power connector, at a very reasonable 120 Watts of power. Which is more efficient than AMD's offering. Nvidia even boast that the card is 15 per cent faster and over 75 per cent more efficient than its "closest competitive product", referring to AMD's card. But as with all GPU performance stats, there are far too many variables to take into consideration.
But, it's safe to say that the GeForce GTX 1060 is an exciting proposition. And proves that the recent advancements in technology that made the 1080 possible, can also be used to increase performance across all entry points into PC gaming.
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Posted 04:32pm 08/7/16
The 1070 isn't quite as bad. US$440 is being sold here for AU$650 so that's only about $60 of additional gouging after currency conversion.
Go to love the Liberals for running our dollar down and making everything the average Australian buys more expensive. It's OK though because big miners profit from a low dollar.
Posted 05:00pm 08/7/16
Posted 06:41pm 08/7/16
Posted 06:48pm 08/7/16
Definitely getting one imported, Australian prices are criminal.
Posted 06:53pm 08/7/16
I think as far as gfx cards go I have given up on local retailers, Newegg and Amazon are much better priced and even with delivery they are a lot cheaper, well over $100 for some of these new cards.
That said, even the US stores are well beyond MSRP on most of their 1000 series stock but unlike the Aus stores they have heavily discounted the 900 series and I'd say when they have cleaned up that then 1000 series prices will come down
Posted 10:36am 09/7/16
Posted 11:13pm 08/7/16
lol you reckon? should see some of the cars the China electronics bawz' drive around in. Lamby Gallardo, Porche GT9, Ferrari F50, a cool white Tesla P90D
and they're just the ones i've seen recently
the 1080 meh? not sure what the big difference worth needing would be, lesser RMS power draw from the psu? 120fps 4k, per channel?
would just be making someone else richer than God by buying another one before the price breaks depreciate
Posted 08:33am 09/7/16
Posted 01:49pm 09/7/16
GTX 1070 for $649.
I would reply to the guy that asked but I don't know how to use reply.
Posted 10:13pm 09/7/16
Will be fixed by software driver updates ie you will have a buggy card for its whole life and are at the mercy of catalysts often s***** driver quality. They make a serious mistake and your card is up for a fry.
Posted 11:37pm 09/7/16
Also I would recommend people only ever buy aftermarket cooling solution cards. Reference models from both companies are almost always garbage.
The GTX1080FE for instance overheats and throttles using the reference cooler.
Posted 11:48pm 09/7/16
I forgot to mention the driver fix for the rx480 not only solves the power problem but it also gets a little buff in performance.
Hopefully it's price comes down over here and everyone can have better than 980 performance for under AU$300. Cheapest I can find is $360 which is about $100 over the conversion cost of the US price. Another gouging In the works.
Posted 12:35am 11/7/16
Posted 01:38am 11/7/16
But if you get a current 4gb rx480 you can flash the firmware to make it an 8gb rx480, because they only made one reference board for both the 4gb and 8gb version, the only difference is the 4gb version has a firmware that locks off half the memory. So might be a cheaper way to score an 8gb card if you wanted one and got a 4gb one now. Later releases of it wont have the extra memory on the 4gb model cos they'll be doing separate production runs, they just did them all as one production run now for the first batch to get them out faster.
Posted 10:25am 11/7/16
On the 480 driver update, there is only a performance drop if you run the card in compatibility mode. Excess power draw now comes through the 6 pin instead of the motherboard, it's only older PSU's that may have any sort of issue with that which was apparently the case with the power going through the mobo, only older mobo's were at any risk of damage. The good thing about that is that you can assume that after market cards will fix that with an 8 pin connector, which IMO is the only kind of card even worth looking at since reference coolers from both AMD and nvidia are s***.
Posted 01:16pm 11/7/16
Its worth noting that US prices generally do not include lots of taxes, whereas Australian prices provided to consumers must include GST.
So ... 650 / .75 * 1.1 = 953. Currency conversion is NEVER clean so we add a few percent for that, plus the generally higher price for consumer goods in Australia due to our significantly higher minimum wage, stronger consumer protections and smaller market scale ... and all of a sudden we're over 1k easy.
You just can't take the US price for a thing and look at the TODAY show AUD rate and scream bloody murder. AU tax does happen - for example, HTC Vive basically plonked on an extra hunge for GST etc and then realised that they didn't / coudlnt do that, left the price as is and took out the 'includes GST' bit on the order lol.
Posted 05:05pm 11/7/16
The rx480 fix was just to move some of the power draw to the 6pin auxiliary input, meaning the power supply is now being overdrawn instead. It's a non issue really but I personally wouldn't buy a reference model.
The performance gain is purely from an optimised driver.
Both Nvidia and AMD have done a poor job on their releases honestly but it's not the end of the world. Both cards will do a fine job for their price. The 1080 you just expect better seeing as it demands such a premium price.
Posted 05:40pm 11/7/16
The point is that it is a catalyst driver which is holding the whole thing together.
Software drivers are not at the same level as factory performance tuning.
If AMD sends out a dud driver, you could expect the same issues to resurface.
Posted 06:31pm 11/7/16
Firstly the cards are in no danger of "blowing", the only damage that could have occurred was potentially to older motherboards. The power draw was not a problem for the cards.
Secondly, factory performance tuning is not a thing, they are not cars.
I'd go on about the drivers but I always consider people who cry wolf over Ati drivers to be irrational fanboys. I don't own an AMD card and haven't since they were still Ati but from what I hear their drivers are pretty good now and I never had a problem with them even back in the day when people might have had a legitimate reason to complain.
How about that 1060 tho.
Posted 06:57pm 11/7/16
The issue everyone was reporting on when they came out was a driver problem, it kept spinning the fan up and down instead of running it constantly so the card was getting hotter than it was meant to and thermal throttling would kick in. An aftermarket cooler is better for sure, but the reference cooler is fine these days and will run it fine without it hitting the thermal limit. If you use something like afterburner to overclock it you can even raise the thermal limit, and set a more aggressive fan curve that will ramp the fan up faster and keep it under the thermal limit even when running it overclocked. It does get loud though, so it's not great, so yeah the aftermarket coolers do a better job of it still, but it's not like the reference coolers are unusable.
Posted 07:50pm 11/7/16
I work at a partner myself we are also a vendor. So since when does the general public get hold of partner boards. Doesn't f*****g happen matey, not unless you want to be pig f***ed under the NDA, I call bulls***.
last edited by HerbalLizard at 19:50:16 11/Jul/16
Posted 05:39pm 12/7/16
Partner boards have historically fixed reference problems and have improved cooling and design.
It's not rocket science. Or a state secret.
Also why would you be wrecked under NDA? The 1080 partner boards have been out for ages. Which you should know since you work at one of them.
Here is a review of the 1080 Strix from a month ago. Literally the first web site I saw when typing in 1080 strix review.
http://in.ign.com/asus-rog-strix-1080/94461/review
Posted 11:29pm 12/7/16
I got a Galax Exoc when I got my GTX 970 and it's been great. Never really heard of them before though, not with the likes of Asus, EVGA and MSI.
Posted 10:54am 13/7/16
They have been around for ages (mid 90's). They combined their two different names they used in different regions into one a couple of years ago.
Their flagship cards are 'Hall of Fame' branded or HoF.
Nothing wrong with their cards.
Posted 04:39am 14/7/16
Signed many NDA's there sport, I can tell you that they extend way past the public release date. Its not just details on the card its a whole bunch things as well. And they also entend past your employment at a single employer.
FYI until 5pm yesterday I used to work for SGI as in Silicon Graphics as a hpc hardware engineer (start my new job on monday) so yeah we had access for months and months. Its a shame really they they stopped doing the whole graphics thing. But if you know your history you will also know that the engineering guys that built the SGI Onyx etc left and started nvidia. So yes I would have a very good understanding to whats in roadmaps.
On a normal weekday I would build things like
http://www.thecube.qut.edu.au/
http://www.pawsey.org.au/our-services/visualisation/pawseycsiro-visualisation/ (which the page is out of date)
https://rcc.uq.edu.au/tinaroo
https://www.rds.edu.au/
https://www.qriscloud.org.au/
Some of our partners are
https://www.christiedigital.com/en-us
And here is some of the kit we do
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/accelerators/gpu.html
And here is some of the other partners we work with
http://www.sgi.com/partners/
Partner boards are normally a prototype board, some don't even look like what everyone normally knows as a traditional video card. I think we you are referring to is a board made by a partner i.e us / asus / msi etc etc as a non reference design.
As Khel said the throttling is handled via the driver to some extent, and some other things that I still can't say.
Posted 09:53am 14/7/16
Posted 02:43pm 14/7/16