AMD 2xx series how did they get it so wrong?

[IT Troll]

Really?

To be honest both stock coolers a re loud and with an overclocked 670 you should have waited for the third party designs for either card.

Well I need something now to drive my new 27 incher. It is doubtful that we will seem custom cooled AMDs until next month. The trouble is, with reports of driver crashes in their launch title and two driver updates in a week to patch the fan issues, I have now lost confidence in the card.

More cooling, less sound card next time.

 

[gpuerrilla]

More cooling, less sound card next time.

Depends if that sound card turns out to be "The Bomb"!

Spoiler

 

[bru]

Did AMD get this wrong, Yes, but not for the reasons that everybody thinks.

First up this cooler issue, is it up to the job?

Well the general consensus would be no it isn’t, I mean how often do shops offer a new launch card with the choice of an aftermarket air cooler. To be honest we won’t really know how good/bad the stock cooler is until we see cards with non stock coolers.

Now in my opinion the biggest issue is one that has only briefly been touched upon.

Clock speed. How can AMD think it is alright to sell a card that advertised as up to 1000MHz, in fact I have spent most of the last hour looking at various vendors and I am yet to find one that one that has the 290X advertised as up to 1000MHz, they all have them as 1000MHz. Which is something that AMD should clamp down on; if they insist on advertising up to 1000MHz then they should make sure that vendors do the same.

Even if people think that ‘up to’ is acceptable, just think back to the whole broadband issue.

Imagine if you bought a 4 pack of mars bars and it only had 3 in it, would you just shrug it off or would you take it back and complain?

Before anyone says that the Nvidia cards also throttle, yes they do but have you looked at the figures, first off Nvidia advertise the 780ti cards as 876MHz with a boost of 928MHz, rather than an up to figure and secondly having looked at the reviews we see that the nvidia 780ti does indeed throttle but not below the 928MHz mark which is how it is advertised as shown here. (I’m not counting the furmark result as most would agree that is not real world usage)

Here you have the R9 290X clock speeds just for comparison, as you can see it only reaches speeds well below the advertised 1000MHz in most cases.

I just really hope this doesn’t catch on and become the normal way of advertising.

 

[SiDeards73]

tbh this blatant nvidia fanboism is getting really old and dull now... dress it up however you like, if you want to waste money on an nvidia do it, if you want to save money and buy an amd, do that also, at the end of the day, the cards are both close performancewise, all the charts, graphs and pictures can be manipulated to show whatever you want, end of the day people will buy what they are comfortable with paying for, different people have differing needs.

 

[ubersonic]

The way I see it, yes AMD did cut a corner with the cheepo cooler, but seriously it's a good thing as it gives us choice, you can get the same or better performance for less money in exchange for a trade off (and when custom coolers hit that should hopefully even be eliminated).

Isn't that better than if they had fitted a beasty/costly cooler and charged the same money for the same performance and no trade off?

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Did AMD get this wrong, Yes, but not for the reasons that everybody thinks.

First up this cooler issue, is it up to the job?

Well the general consensus would be no it isn’t, I mean how often do shops offer a new launch card with the choice of an aftermarket air cooler. To be honest we won’t really know how good/bad the stock cooler is until we see cards with non stock coolers.

Now in my opinion the biggest issue is one that has only briefly been touched upon.

Clock speed. How can AMD think it is alright to sell a card that advertised as up to 1000MHz, in fact I have spent most of the last hour looking at various vendors and I am yet to find one that one that has the 290X advertised as up to 1000MHz, they all have them as 1000MHz. Which is something that AMD should clamp down on; if they insist on advertising up to 1000MHz then they should make sure that vendors do the same.

Even if people think that ‘up to’ is acceptable, just think back to the whole broadband issue.

Imagine if you bought a 4 pack of mars bars and it only had 3 in it, would you just shrug it off or would you take it back and complain?

Before anyone says that the Nvidia cards also throttle, yes they do but have you looked at the figures, first off Nvidia advertise the 780ti cards as 876MHz with a boost of 928MHz, rather than an up to figure and secondly having looked at the reviews we see that the nvidia 780ti does indeed throttle but not below the 928MHz mark which is how it is advertised as shown here. (I’m not counting the furmark result as most would agree that is not real world usage)

Here you have the R9 290X clock speeds just for comparison, as you can see it only reaches speeds well below the advertised 1000MHz in most cases.

I just really hope this doesn’t catch on and become the normal way of advertising.

Nvidia used non-deterministic boosting which had no upper limit. Dependent on the quality of the chip you got and the conditions,there was big variance in performance,as it was a lottery on what clockspeeds you got. I remember talking to some of the review and mod crew on Hexus about it.

It also meant Nvidia press edition cards tested in open air test benches had artificially inflated scores in reviews.

Nvidia cards use non-deterministic boots,which had a minimum limit of boost frequency and no upper limit in practice. Looking at the last three generations of AMD GPU boost(it was first done on their IGPs),it has a defined upper limit.

People really need to look at the articles from Hardware Canucks,hardware.fr,pcgameshardware and other websites,where they showed the GTX660TI,GTX760 and Geforce Titan having throttling issues with the stock cooling,especially after longer runs,where there were clockspeed drops over time.

This lead to many websites,making pre-warming runs before testing current cards,so they would heat up and is also why some websites attempted to lock the clockspeed at fixed values.

Here are some of the articles:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...roundup-asus-evga-gigabyte-galaxy-msi-21.html
http://translate.googleusercontent....s.html&usg=ALkJrhj8G8JD8-Rfoq7gPcX-0XdORhBOyQ
http://translate.google.com/transla...97980/Tests/Test-Geforce-GTX-Titan-1056659/4/
http://translate.google.es/translat...013/nvidia_geforce_gtx_760_im_test/index8.php

Some of the drops over time are quite large.

This brings whole exercise could bring up some worrying points about benchmarking NVIDIA’s Kepler-based cards in reviews (and charts) where every single FPS counts. Sites benchmarking with a single run or shorter sequences will likely achieve the “best” results rather than realistic performance. Luckily, we have been able to avoid this issue by using four run-throughs of every benchmark, each with somewhat long testing times. We’ll have a full article looking at GeForce Boost and AMD’s equivalent in the coming weeks but for the time being, this is certainly food for thought.

As mentioned in the introduction, with Anno 2070 as extreme an example, the GeForce GTX Titan is able to reach its maximum turbo frequency as the GPU does not reach 80 ° C. And it reaches this temperature in all games we tested on a bench bench, with and without additional cooling around the map. If we measure the performance of a traditional way, we would get results more pupils and non-representative of the playing conditions in all our tests.

We had to take the time to observe in detail the behavior of the GTX Titan in each game and on each resolution to make sure we do performance measures in representative conditions.

Here are two examples with Anno 2070 and Battlefield 3 with a rapid test, a test temperature stabilized after 5 minutes and the same test as the latter but with two 120mm fans positioned around the map:

Anno 2070: 75 fps -> 63 fps -> 68 fps
Battlefield 3: 115 fps -> 107 fps -> 114 fps

The drop in performance once the temperature reaches cruising can be considerable. An efficient cooling may partially offset this decline, but are there not a contradiction in having to add noise to compensate for a graphics card is trying to remain discreet at all costs?

It also raises the issue of reliability of performance comparisons that you can read here and there, since this may be the big difference based on test conditions (ventilation card but wait or not temperature rise of the GPU for measurements) between extreme cases the gain is 19% in Anno 2070 and 7.5% in Battlefield 3!

Here are the frequencies that we obtained in practice for two selected scenarios: limited to 889 MHz without additional / card capable of up to 1006 MHz with additional cooling cooling card. 3DMark is only able to maintain the maximum frequency due to loading time between scenes that allow the GPU never have time to reach 80 ° C.

It is worth emphasizing that a typical benchmark behavior, immediately after starting the game in all situations almost always has a GPU clock speed of 1137 MHz result. After 15 minutes in a static scene is an entirely different value is emerging, which is on average only in the range of about 1000 MHz and this at 21 ° C room temperature. Thus we see an agent that acts still below the NVIDIA naming of 1032 MHz.

The speed of the fan behavior is interpreted here in a maximum noise level of about 2190 revolutions per minute. After that, then usually provide a further clock reductions, which are also observed in the course of the game that way. The regular course can cause a very different behavior than a static benchmark scene, as used in the present case. The example we have here demonstrated.

Geforce GTX Titan review: Benchmark Boost

The following is an excerpt from our book-article GTX titanium in PCGH 04/2013 (6 March in the trade):

For our benchmarks, however, GPU Boost 2.0 is a major limitation. We usually test on an open test bench, in which the graphics card always has enough cooling air to room temperature available - Optimal conditions if you will. But inside of housings often prevail considerably different conditions, particularly in the summer, even in well-ventilated enclosures significantly higher values ​​than our reach around 22 degrees Celsius.

Since the GTX titanium the temperature falls to a central role, we have taken the test a lot of effort and recorded the achieved clock rates at 28 ° C inlet air is warm for each benchmark game in each resolution separately and enforced consistently for the benchmark runs via Nvidia Inspector . For an additional point is added:
Usual benchmark sequences are 30 to 60 seconds long gameplay snippets, preceded by a loading process usually. Here, a GPU Boost Technology 2.0 "gain momentum" so to speak for the benchmark and drive a part of the test with higher clock speeds thanks to the cooler through the idle GPU loading phase. However, this does not correspond to what the player will see in everyday life, since it incurred longer playing periods when the temperature rises higher and the clock continues to decrease accordingly. Therefore, would such a "standard test" hardly does justice to our claim to provide meaningful game benchmarks.

In summary, we have the GeForce GTX Titanium why shooed in four settings through our course to cover every possible scenario useful:

• Standard method with artificially limited-on the Nvidia "guaranteed" Boost clock rate of 876 MHz. Similarly, we handle it since the GTX 670 These values ​​are also the basis of our tests represent ("@ 876 MHz")
• Free boost development on our open test stand with enough cooler air ('dyn. Boost ")
• Individually applied to the minimum clock rate at 28 ° C inlet air is warm, and after 30 minutes of warm-up phase at constant load in-game map set. This corresponds to the housing operation in summer temperatures ("28 ° C")

And last but not least, we use the OC potential of the map something out, by increasing the offset clock to 100 MHz via EVGA Precision, the Power Target to 105 percent and the target temperature is raised to 85 ° C - all relatively safe levels .

That is three different SKUs alone,ie,the GTX660TI,GTX760 and Geforce Titan with reference coolers.

All these false crocodile tears over the R9 290 and R9 290X were not made into such a big thing over multiple Kepler based cards. Did we see threads on this forum specifically about Nvidia stock coolers not doing the job?? Unless I missed them that would be a no!

I also remember that I linked to one of the articles on Titan a few months ago,ie,the Hardware.fr one, in the body of another thread. People said why would anyone use a reference cooler for such a high end card anyway and you would get better cooling anyway?? It was of no importance back then. With that logic accepted I would say its the same in this case.

The simple way to solve the problems is to raise the fanspeed for any Kepler or GCN based card using a reference cooler,or just buy a card with a better cooler or install one yourself. Simples and melodrama is over.

Edit!!

Another thing:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040349752&postcount=212

Cooling with the Jet Engine stock cooler is a non-starter for me, will reconsider when QUIET alternatives come out. I already have a box with 4 previous ATI/AMD stock coolers in it ... and some NVidia coolers too of course.

This sounds exactly like an NDA meeting I was in last week. The fan was referred to multiple times as "jet engine" etc., but all performance comparisons shown were with the card in Quiet Mode. Funny stuff when you are reaching for straws.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

tbh this blatant nvidia fanboism is getting really old and dull now... dress it up however you like, if you want to waste money on an nvidia do it, if you want to save money and buy an amd, do that also, at the end of the day, the cards are both close performancewise, all the charts, graphs and pictures can be manipulated to show whatever you want, end of the day people will buy what they are comfortable with paying for, different people have differing needs.

To be fair most htreads in the graphics card section seem to turn into the same basic thing. In threads on the 780Ti you get AMD 'fanboys' posting pro-AMD/anti-Nvidia stuff and in 290X/290 threads you get Nvidia 'fanboys' posting pro-Nvidia/anti-AMD. One are as bad as the other really.

I wonder if we'll see a day when a thread about one sides new product gets fans of the other sides products come and and say "This looks good. The more good products each side makes, the better for us as it'll drive up performance and down prices (hopefully)"?

 

[BubbySoup]

I wonder if we'll see a day when a thread about one sides new product gets fans of the other sides products come and and say "This looks good. The more good products each side makes, the better for us as it'll drive up performance and down prices (hopefully)"?

IIRC, the 8800GTX had some of that.

In my opinion*, still the greatest leap forward in GPU's from the previous gen.






*Just my opinion, I don't want to start another flame war claiming it wasn't!!

 

[SiDeards73]

Googaly, we would have seen that thread i believe, had AMD's 290 been released with 290X performance and a fan and temps to match a watercooled version, im pretty sure both sides would all upvote ANY manufacturer who produces a card that not only costs less than anything currently at the top end, but delivers more performance, is quiet and doesnt consume tons of power or generate tons of heat.

That day that happens, im pretty sure everyone will applaud, as we are all consumers and ultimately want the best bang for our bucks.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

IIRC, the 8800GTX had some of that.

In my opinion*, still the greatest leap forward in GPU's from the previous gen.






*Just my opinion, I don't want to start another flame war claiming it wasn't!!

Most likely in recent history TBH as it had great longevity. The 9700 Pro was the last card before that which did the same in being relevant.

 

[Scougar]

If you take sides when it just boils down to performance and image quality, then you are a fool. You aren't driving it down the street, you are playing games with it, or whatever. Pick the best product at the price you can afford within the criteria you want, then just crack on and play games.

 

[b 2the enneh]

In a way I regret now just waiting for AMD to come along, if I was in the position of buying a card I'd of got myself a 290x or even two for that matter and saved myself some money.

I certainly wouldn't be bothered by all these people try to smear AMD that's for sure.

 

[Jakus]

For me they had a good little card but they thought it necessary to push it too hard with the available cooling and tell us it's fine to run it that hot.

The card has a dual bios, why did it not have a sensible setting and a benchmark setting ? People could then see it's full potential and still enjoy a good 24/7 performance up to a reasonable temp/noise balance.

 

[chaparral]

There mean quiet a few GPU's released that have ran at 90+c through the years with the stock cooler..

Just a a few of the ones I can remember right now..
X1900xt-x
7800gtx
GTX 480

 

[Jakus]

There mean quiet a few GPU's released that have ran at 90+c through the years with the stock cooler..

Just a a few of the ones I can remember right now..
X1900xt-x
7800gtx
GTX 480

I well remember think it was Toms, cooking an egg on a 480 cooler and rightly so
X1900xt-x, I had a Crossfire setup with them and they ran quite reasonable temps IIRC.

 

[LtMatt]

Edit!!

Another thing:

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1040349752&postcount=212

Cooling with the Jet Engine stock cooler is a non-starter for me, will reconsider when QUIET alternatives come out. I already have a box with 4 previous ATI/AMD stock coolers in it ... and some NVidia coolers too of course.

This sounds exactly like an NDA meeting I was in last week. The fan was referred to multiple times as "jet engine" etc., but all performance comparisons shown were with the card in Quiet Mode. Funny stuff when you are reaching for straws.

Lol good find again Cat!

Its amazing to hear this kind of thing, something which we probably don't realise that goes on. Especially when they were parading the 780TI against the 290X in Quiet mode in all of their graphs.

My respect for HardOCP rises once more.

 

[arc@css]

Aside from the usual naff AMD release cooler, I don't see how they did get anything else wrong. The card is designed to handle those temps so no worries there either.

 

[TheRealDeal]

Lol good find again Cat!

Its amazing to hear this kind of thing, something which we probably don't realise that goes on. Especially when they were parading the 780TI against the 290X in Quiet mode in all of their graphs.

My respect for HardOCP rises once more.

Something's definitely changed over there. The r9 290x/pro both got gold awards where as the gtx780ti got a silver. Was only a few month's back an AMD card could not buy an award where as just about every NV card got some kind of award.

 

[Freddie1980]

I wonder if its possible to test just how 'good' Nvidias stock hsf that its used on the 780/690/titan by putting onto a 290x and see if it performs any better.

 

[chaotic_uk]

is it as hot as the ref 6970? , mine hit over 90c at times in games and sounded like concord at full power . thinking of getting the non x model but will wait for better hs/f versions