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AMD accused of "Golden Sample" on 290X given to reviewers, retail bought cards throttling

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Unfortunately for you...


After suspicions that AMD sent out golden samples for media loading SweClockers test benches again with a PowerColor Radeon R9 290X directly from Amazon Marketplace at Sveavägen in Stockholm.

The procedure is the same for almost every new launch. SweClockers and other media, products directly from the manufacturers before mass production started, which certainly makes it possible to be an early adopter of the reviews, but also may bring some doubts about that product actually corresponds to what would later show up on store shelves.
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With the results in hand, the picture is clear. The performance is basically identical between the press copy and graphics card from the shelf, at least in Uber mode. Any single frame per second is different, which is what may be considered normal as bonds or uncertainty in the measurements.

In the quiet mode, where the dynamic frequencies to work overtime, the situation becomes slightly turbid. A minor performance difference can be seen in some titles, and even if it is not about considerable variations, the trend is clear. In the end, it does an average variance tion of only a few percent, ie no extreme levels. The reason may include slightly less contact with the cooler, or simply easy changing ambient temperature.
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Source
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I read about this late last night. Their retail card was significantly slower than the press card. Pretty interesting.
Can't remember which site I seen it on. I think it was on a 290 review.
 
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LtMatt said:
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So because 2 reviewers got duds at retail and one site got lucky, that means there's nothing to it?
Even of not golden samples, at the very least people are having issues with throttling, which people should want to know about for RMA purposes, no?

AMD have said the retail copy that toms have is faulty, hence the issue, so we should stick our heads in the sand and not make people aware about a potential for getting a faulty card and what to do about it?
 
The difference in that Metro Last Light benchmark is huge!

Though it seems it can be fixed by just upping the fan a bit to stop the throttling? No biggy really. Just turn your speakers up a bit more :p
 
Absolute rubbish about press cards being golden samples.

We had a press sample card, it did OK, we then got an Asus card and a Sapphire card form our warehouse stock, they both beat the press card in all our benchmarks as they hit higher overclocks. None of the cards experienced any throttling issues.

So without a doubt, complete BS. :)
 
Gibbo said:
Absolute rubbish!

We had a press sample card, it did OK, we then got an Asus card and a Sapphire card form our warehouse stock, they both beat the press card in all our benchmarks as they hit higher overclocks.

So without a doubt, complete BS. :)
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Well said.

Andy forgot this part as well.

Update: As is Tom's Hardware policy, we shared these potentially problematic findings with AMD prior to publication, and the company insists something is wrong with the retail-purchased cards I tested. We will continue investigating and, if any additional news becomes available, update this story.
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If anything Toms probably had a faulty card.
 
It's tabloid stuff just to get hits for the site.

If they'd received loads of press samples and they'd all done better then maybe, but just one sample vs a couple of retail ones is ridiculous to base anything on.
 
I think AMD & Nvidia are both guilty of "leaking golden chips" to reviewers at one time or another. But this is a pretty interesting read indeed, that's a big drop in clocks and an even bigger drop in FPS when comparing "press release card vs. retail purchased card"
 
In his 290X review (using a pre-release sample) TTL said that the Nvidia cards he gets sent to him are almost always golden samples that do better than most retail cards.

Wanna make a thread on that?
 
thefogo said:
I read about this late last night. Their retail card was significantly slower than the press card. Pretty interesting.
Can't remember which site I seen it on. I think it was on a 290 review.
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I believe that was the R9 290 which has a default fan speed of 40% which mean't that the card throttled when being tested meaning performance wasn't what it could be.

AMD released a new beta driver which was set to override the bios setting and change the fan speed to 47% which gave the 290 much better performance.

I imagine AMD will change the bios setting on new cards produced set at 47% for the fan speed.
 
I think the problem is that these cards are right on the edge of what the stock cooler and fan profile can cope with so the usual variance in chip quality is causing huge differences in clock speeds between cards. Upping the fan speed will fix it at the expense of noise.
 
Looking at some of the results, it does show that some of the retail results are closely match the press sample and others do fall a long way back, which shows the card really isn't broken, it must be limited in some way. If it was actually broken in some way, all the results would have been affected.
 
They are saying that it only affects quiet mode... if review samples were better samples with a lower TDP then it stands to reason that they won't throttle as early with the fan on low.

As an aside retail AMD FX processors have been accused (by the likes of ASRock/MSI) of breaking the official 125W TDP limit but motherboards and cooling tend to get the blame when throttling occurs there.
 
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