roger, I'll report back how it goes when they show up from China. I've not used them before either, so I figured an extra 0.5mm sheet (as well as a 1.5mm) should cover the bases. I'll probably only do the back to start.
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30xx Series Founders Edition
- Thread starter Dirk Diggler
- Start date
roger, I'll report back how it goes when they show up from China. I've not used them before either, so I figured an extra 0.5mm sheet (as well as a 1.5mm) should cover the bases. I'll probably only do the back to start.
So my card on stock gets hot and loud very quickly even for seemingly undemanding games. It also seems to reach much lower boost clocks than other people. Undervolting it solves all the issues and the card even seems to be a decent overclocker but on stock it is absolutely terrible.
So I was wondering, perhaps there is poor QC control of memory pads? I've read online that some people see almost no change after changing memory pads but others see huge improvement in memory temps.
I wonder if this could be reason why some get stock graphics score in timespy of like 17.5k and others barely 17k. I am also saw mixed reviews of the noise that these cards produce.
So I was wondering, perhaps there is poor QC control of memory pads? I've read online that some people see almost no change after changing memory pads but others see huge improvement in memory temps.
I wonder if this could be reason why some get stock graphics score in timespy of like 17.5k and others barely 17k. I am also saw mixed reviews of the noise that these cards produce.
Both my FEs are similar.... scored much lower in time spy than reviews suggest. My 80fe was barely hitting 16k stock. With a UV it just about makes it into 17k.
Likewise the 90... stock just about 19k ... UV 19.5k ... OC run 19.9K...
This whole PC build has been "disapointing" when comparing my stock scores to what reviewers get. Despite same CPU/RAM spec/speed / GPU....
Almost wish Id done what I did last build. Never ran a single bench, just went straight to games! (As the build before that I spent ages benching / tweaking etc...)
The issue this time is to get 'Quiet' performance you MUST undervolt. My 90fe coil whine is much worse stock, and the fans run much higher stock too.
Reading rumours the FE are to be discontinued. What a sorry state of affairs this 30 series launch has been, remember when it was just a joke that some gamers weren't going to be able to upgrade until the 40 series?
Hope they aren't true but can't say I blame Nvidia for it. Very hard to justify selling a card for a fraction of the price they are selling elsewhere, given what can be done with these components.
Hope they aren't true but can't say I blame Nvidia for it. Very hard to justify selling a card for a fraction of the price they are selling elsewhere, given what can be done with these components.
Associate
They always were a PR stunt, with the heavy investment in expensive custom cooling and the price fixing to keep them dirt cheap, it was always about what Nvidia could put on paper and boast about. Then just restrict sale of them to tiny numbers and discontinue them as fast as possible. A number of people did the math on these to show they were probably just about breaking even when selling them.
Surely a PR stunt is supposed improve your rep, not damage it. If the numbers are true, it's more likely because they can't produce the amount they want rather than by choice.
But again, I can't blame Nvidia for stopping them, when people can make so much money from them and Nvidia supposedly make little from it, the whole situation is quite ridiculous and another reason crytocurrency mining needs to be stopped at government level, not firmware level.
Mining will kill pc gaming. This is not a meme.
But again, I can't blame Nvidia for stopping them, when people can make so much money from them and Nvidia supposedly make little from it, the whole situation is quite ridiculous and another reason crytocurrency mining needs to be stopped at government level, not firmware level.
Mining will kill pc gaming. This is not a meme.
For anyone to “do the math” (seriously?) they would have to be able to price out all the components on the board and then somehow know about any deals nvidia had in place with the suppliers for component pricing in bulk, which they obviously couldn’t know. So anyone chucking numbers about is just guestimating at best. The cooler alone is a custom job that nobody knows the pricing of or who even manufactured it.
The heat sink itself isn’t really all that elaborate either, it’s just a long heat sink on a short pcb with the fans in an unusual config, cards from sapphire were doing this back in the fury days minus the fan on the back of the card.
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Soldato
Hasn't it always been the case with the FE that it was a limited run?
You realise all the parts are commodities and can be priced individually right? Well except the GPU core but that can be estimated and industry insiders will not be far off.
It’s easy to estimate the cost of the cooler if you are in the industry, it’s not like building a GPU cooler is unique to nvidia. It’s likely to be way more than your usual AIB cards because of the quality of it. Your argument just supports that they are making next to nothing on them and it doesn’t take a genius to work that out.
How do you think the BOM cost of an iPhone is analysed and priced up within about 3 days of them hitting the market?
Soldato
Saying that this is the best FE/Nvidia Reference card I have owned with regards to performance. Its still quieter than the old FE/Reference blower cards.
Also be careful with these reviews just double check what they were scoring because at one point some were using Graphics Score not overall score. eg my Graphics Score was 18118 but my overall score was 16745 and therefore some reviews were saying "my 3d Mark score was 18118" and quoting the graphics score. So when people compared and hit 16000's they thought wahhaa whats going on ?
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It isn't that hard to price up most of it - people might not know the deals nVidia have but you can get a good idea for the likely range of it and what kind of deals are realistically likely. Though most of the estimates I've seen underestimate a little bit the prices nVidia will be able to command in bulk commitments.
Associate
They're estimates in some cases, sure. But most of them are going to be pretty accurate because absolutely none of this is unique to Nvidia and insiders can leak info and make reasonable inferences.
We do know the FE had an expensive cooler design and Nvidia did R&D to get that working along side a custom PCB layout that is different from the reference design. We know the sale value of these cards was deliberately price fixed, they even released those cards for sale through a retailer in the UK (I can't mention due to rules on competitors) and the prices were still price fixed. There's only one reason to do that, it's so you can have marketing of your FE product which they put out at good prices and cool and sleek looking new cooler design and it all looks great on paper. All of that effort and engineering at the end of the day is to allow the marketing people to push VthisV in your face when the product launches.
Another thing, the AIBs were complaining to Nvidia that the kit for the GPU and memory they buy from nvidia, plus the other component costs and then having to use a specific RRP in some instances, means in many cases they were barely making a profit from the manufacturing. So there's already thin margins at play which means Nvidias own product doesn't have to be much more expensive to really not be profitable for them. I don't even see how this is controversial, this is like marketing hype 101, being able to show off some vanity project that underprices and over delivers is fantastic for building hype which they did like crazy.
IF the FEs were money makers for Nvidia why don't they just continue to make them and cut out the AIB middle men and continue to eat into that profit? None of this makes any sense from a financial perspective, If nvidia were making cash on this they'd ramp up production not discontinue it. I'd love to have gotten an FE at launch rather than an AIB, but that's the whole point, most of us were doomed never to get one because the deal is too good.
Bill of materials doesn’t account for deals between companies with bulk orders, even if there are prices for bulk orders on websites that is likely different behind the scenes with companies ordering tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands and more of components. It’s best guess at most.
As for the cooler, as I said before there’s really nothing special about it, it just looks a bit unique due to the fan layout. Look at the sapphire fury tri-x which is essentially the same type of design only without a fan on the back.
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That was the case years ago, thats one of the reasons nvidia changed the name to founders edition and increased the price so the card could stay in the marketplace a lot longer.
Associate
Also deals that get done between manufacturers tend to be on bulk orders, and Nvidia certainly were not making these in the kind of bulk the AIBs would, so they're going to be more constrained on the deals. This actually goes to another point as well, which is that things like R&D costs on coolers and custom PCBs are not a per card cost, they're a one off cost at the start of the run. That fixed cost is then divided across the size of the run that use them. With small runs like this each card has to shoulder a larger percentage of the R&D costs and means it's harder to make a profit on. Where as AIBs will do runs probably orders of magnitude greater so those one off costs are spread much thinner making profit margins greater.
Nvidia isn’t buying enough to get special deals on commodity parts. How many of these do you think they are producing?
This isn’t an iPhone being pumped out by the million per day.
The cooler is expensive, you only have to look at the quality and the sheer amount of material in it to realise that compared to the plastic junk on the lower end AIB cards.
We don’t know how many they’re producing so we also don’t know what type of component amount they have bought to make the cards. It’s pointless saying “they’re not making enough of these to get deals” if nobody outside of nvidia has any idea how many they’ve produced.
The cooler is aluminium with a few heat pipes through it, which is what every card uses more or less. It feels more premium due to the entire frame also being metal whereas most aibs would use plastic where possible (depending on their price point). Everyone seems transfixed by the cooler just due to its fan layout, it’s really nothing special at all.
Nvidia did have ambitions to make the FEs a staple and a challenge to the AIB models at one point. I don't know what their thinking is now. AMD certainly intended to discontinue their 'MBA' models almost immediately and only backtracked after people got annoyed at it being a scummy move just so they could say they were technically hitting a certain price. I doubt Nvidia are making much, if anything on the FEs in the current market though, so it wouldn't be a surprise to see them nixed.
I think people vastly underestimate just how many FE cards have actually sold globally across the whole range due to the perception of just how infrequent and quickly exhausted drops have been. Sure it isn't in the millions scale but definitely high enough to take advantage of bulk discounts.
Think I saw an estimate of 135K 3000 series FE cards sold but I'd have to double check that.
EDIT: For comparison nVidia sold 9.13million desktop GPUs in Q4 2020 a good slice of that being 3000 series - despite the appearance of shortages there are a lot of units moving. Though I have to wonder how many actually made it to retail.
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They are continuing to make them, that's one of the main points of the FE to keep the card in production throughout the life of the product. They also have contracts to fulfill with supplying aibs with chips so they can make their own cards.
Ideally it's obvious both amd and nvidia would love to go and do what 3dfx did and be the sole company selling their cards, that could happen at some point in the long term but not in the short term.