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

David Bisset said:
Eh? ALL graphics cards perform somewhat variability. There is nothing to deny. People are not denying that cards vary, just suggesting the conspiracy theorists are being a bit nutty cause one outlet got a better press sample than the retail ones they bought. OCUK are a counter example where the press samples were worse than the retail ones they tried. That's what happens with variance.

With the thermal throttling strategy AMD have chosen the different cards will vary more by clock speed and less by fan speed than on most releases.
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When you pay for something, then it throttles taking 30% off the advertised speed you'd be pretty annoyed.
You get a 30% drop in performance but you don't get a 30% discount when you buy it.

AMD need to sort it out otherwise customers will not buy due to fear of getting an inferior product.
 
Boomstick777 said:
Sweet, looking forward to the Ti review. Think non ref 290X's will be aimed at GTX 780ti performance level, so this is good for everyone. Well expect my wallet..
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Your pretty spot on and then 780Ti none reference will re-take that crown, hehe.
 
Gibbo said:
Agreed, boost is annoying, just give us a core speed and let the users do the overclocking.

In my view AMD would have done far better to have done:-

R290 Pro - 800MHz core with lower Vcore default, this would have meant cooler running, no throttling issues and even quieter.

R290X - 925MHz core again with lower Vcore default, same again cooler and quieter.

Then just let the customer overclock, even with the above clock speeds they'd still be damn quick and at the price points they are at people would be very happy. If they wanted to make the performance back up from the lower core, just default the memory speed too 5600MHz as they will all happily do that.
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Haven't AMD already done this on their 7950/7970, and they end-up being labelled as slower than GTX670/GTX680's thanks to Nvidia's GPU boost?
 
Gibbo i think AMD was/is after Titan thats why they went with 1000mhz.
One thing i still cant understand is why to hell did they went with that awful cooler !!!
Uber mode should limit it to 55% and that would sort throttling out.

As soon as i got my 290x under water i started to be happy with it even tho i cant get it to 1200stable where i was aiming. I am just hoping for better bios and afterburner or something.

At this time i could not recommend 290x to anyone thats not changing cooler.
 
Yeah agree with the boost comments above. We should have a standard speed and a set MHz out of the box guaranteed with a certain thermal limit TDP and no throttling until it hits that temperature. Any overclocking should be left to the end user with proper voltage control.

The 780Ti looks very interesting. Cant wait to check out your review. Surprised by the B1 stepping and GHz editions, dont seem to be able to go any further than the standard A1 rev. cards except the Classified.
 
Lord_ZED said:
Gibbo i think AMD was/is after Titan thats why they went with 1000mhz.
One thing i still cant understand is why to hell did they went with that awful cooler !!!
Uber mode should limit it to 55% and that would sort throttling out.

As soon as i got my 290x under water i started to be happy with it even tho i cant get it to 1200stable where i was aiming. I am just hoping for better bios and afterburner or something.

At this time i could not recommend 290x to anyone thats not changing cooler.
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Have you used the Asus BIOS? If so what are your load temperatures under-water?

Just tested an MSI R290X on stock cooler, 1220Mhz no problems, no throttling at all, but again with Asus BIOS.
 
shadow_boxer said:
Yeah agree with the boost comments above. We should have a standard speed and a set MHz out of the box guaranteed with a certain thermal limit TDP and no throttling until it hits that temperature. Any overclocking should be left to the end user with proper voltage control.

The 780Ti looks very interesting. Cant wait to check out your review. Surprised by the B1 stepping and GHz editions, dont seem to be able to go any further than the standard A1 rev. cards except the Classified.
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We were too and pretty un-impressed as the rumours were they were supposed to be amazing, but seem to clock no better at all, just very very quick out the box. :)
 
I'll chip in with official word on this.

Two outlets in hundreds sampled have uniquely reported instances of AMD Radeon R9 290(X) boards purchased in retail that have exhibited an uncharacteristic level of performance variance as compared to press samples issued by AMD. As retail products purchased by almost every other outlet (e.g. Sweclockers) do not demonstrate this phenomenon, we’re working to secure the aberrant board(s) in question for further analysis. In the meantime, we’ve identified areas where variability can be minimized and are working on a driver update which will minimize this variance.

We will be releasing that driver in the next 24 hours to fully correct this behavior by normalizing fan RPMs vs. PWM control. The 290X in Quiet mode should be at 2200RPM, and the 290 should be at 2650RPM. If anyone is seeing fan speeds below that, they are affected by this issue, and the driver will resolve the issue in 24 hours.

//EDIT: All boards should perform similarly to the AMD-issued samples seen in reviews. Period.
 
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doesn't unique mean 1, so 2 would in fact not be unique, by definition :D

and being unique, you decide to issue a patch just in case there are other unique cards out there
 
Marine-RX179 said:
Haven't AMD already done this on their 7950/7970, and they end-up being labelled as slower than GTX670/GTX680's thanks to Nvidia's GPU boost?
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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. I actually was talking with one of the staff on Hexus about this last year as it was quite interesting.

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.

Edit!!

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.
 
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Thracks said:
I'll chip in with official word on this.

Two outlets in hundreds sampled have uniquely reported instances of AMD Radeon R9 290(X) boards purchased in retail that have exhibited an uncharacteristic level of performance variance as compared to press samples issued by AMD. As retail products purchased by almost every other outlet (e.g. Sweclockers) do not demonstrate this phenomenon, we’re working to secure the aberrant board(s) in question for further analysis. In the meantime, we’ve identified areas where variability can be minimized and are working on a driver update which will minimize this variance.

We will be releasing that driver in the next 24 hours to fully correct this behavior by normalizing fan RPMs vs. PWM control. The 290X in Quiet mode should be at 2200RPM, and the 290 should be at 2650RPM. If anyone is seeing fan speeds below that, they are affected by this issue, and the driver will resolve the issue in 24 hours.

//EDIT: All boards should perform similarly to the AMD-issued samples seen in reviews. Period.
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Are these the only tweaks coming with this new driver? Anything for battlefield 4?
 
vUNREALv said:
Are these the only tweaks coming with this new driver? Anything for battlefield 4?
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Sounds more like a quick fix driver, not a main release.
Shame they can't do a quick fix driver to fix the cooler they went & put on the cards. Surely they should have known to update the cooler from the 7970 one :confused:
 
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