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Retail Radeon R9 290X Graphics Cards Slower Than AMD's Press Samples
crookedvulture writes "AMD's recently introduced Radeon R9 290X is one of the fastest graphics cards around. However, the cards sent to reviewers differ somewhat from the retail units available for purchase. The press samples run at higher clock speeds and deliver better performance as a result. There's some variance in clock speeds between different press and retail cards, too. Part of the problem appears to be AMD's PowerTune mechanism, which dynamically adjusts GPU frequencies in response to temperature and power limits. AMD doesn't guarantee a base clock speed, saying only that the 290X runs at 'up to 1GHz.' Real-world clock speeds are a fair bit lower than that, and the retail cards suffer more than the press samples. Cooling seems to be a contributing factor. AMD issued a driver update that raises fan speeds, and that helps the performance of some retail cards. Retail units remain slower than the cards seeded to the press, though. Flashing retail cards with the press firmware raises clock speeds slightly, but it doesn't entirely close the gap, either. AMD hasn't explained why the retail cards are slower than expected, and it's possible the company cherry-picked the samples sent to the press. At the very least, it's clear that the 290X exhibits more card-to-card variance than we're used to seeing in a PC graphics product."
I mean its one thing to go against the crowd, but its another thing to cripple your computer with shitty parts because you want to be the special snowflake that doesn't go with the tried and true Intel/Nvidia combo.
Seriously. You're like the people that use BSD instead of Linux or Dvorak instead of Qwerty.
This has been discussed in many places like toms hardware. Essentially they found the cards volting is determined in the bios and the fan speeds can be altered. change the bios which many have released and the undervolting which occurs at lower temps is solved. Sapphire already released a new bios for the card to make these changes to keep them consistent yet keeping them from going above 95 degrees.
Because they aren't the same thing when dynamic clocking is enabled, and if you're serious enough to care you disable it. Duh.
If you glance at the Newegg reviews for the R9 280X you'll note someone found that the voltage was locked.
And cherry picks the best units to send out to reviewers.
Can't seem to care too hard. Unless this wasn't an industry standard way of doing things... But it is.
Not just in computer related things either. The stuff sent to be reviewed is always the absolute best and pre-tested before the reviewers get it.
What i do care about tho. AMD cards still get me the best for my dollar.
So far my 9750 has had zero problems with any game. From directx to opengl. From old ass abandonware dosbox games. To every single latest game thats come out since i bought it.
And i don't have to do the nvidia driver shuffle to get everything from ancient games to the latest greatest to work. That shit got old when i was an nvidia user. This game needs this version. That game needs that driver version. This other game only works right with the default driver that came in the box with the card. I even had a little chart just to keep track of that shit. Looking thru my archive cd/dvds recently i found dozens of nvidia driver versions i kept around for the driver shuffle.
But on amd? So far using the driver that was new when i got win7. Everything has worked flawless. Good nuff. Fps is high. Games run perfectly.
When i find a problem i'll bitch loudly. But so far.. nope. good nuff and good price. I have no loyalty to any product. So long as what i buy does what i want with no problems.
And for this generation of hardware that turned out to be AMD/ATI. Mobo chipset and video.
Cherry-picking would be a bad thing; but if it turns out that the junior thermal past application technicians get less attentive once the first production batch is finished and the people who've been babying the project leave, that wouldn't be a total surprise.
This is becoming a habit for AMD. You can't even trust their FRAPS measured frame-rates. Seriously. I will never ever own another AMD card. Their graphics cards are nothing but empty promises and bad drivers.
I'm s1ck of it. its Corpse turned Mire of decay,
Oh gosh I hope this doesn't result in some poor sap attempting to play Battlefield 4.7 and while thinking they should achieve a pure 115fps they only hit a measly 92fps and their lives are ruined forever. The consequences will never be the same.
This probably happens more often than we think. Frankly, it makes sense to validate that a card is going to run solid for someone before you send it to them if they're going to be blabbering all over the interwebs about it. It's just in this case they got burned (and justifiably) due to the fact that the software/driver adjusts the frequency independently instead of being a static clock speed (something they should have disclaimed to the reviewers).
I'm a huge fan of market competition and AMD. If this is not not a slashvertismemnt then I'm a noob.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It seems like this is a recurring problem for AMD. I recall a similar issue with the bulldozer cpu's
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -Carl Sagan
Toms Hardware covered this pretty extensively a month ago.
The short story is that AMD is throttling clock speeds to hold within a temperature limit. They learned the hard way that 40% PWM does not equal 40% fan speed, especially across all fans the OEMS used. There's a driver fix for that now measures fan speed and adjusts accordingly when in quiet mode that eliminates most of this performance discrepancy (retail cards can now see higher performance in line with review samples).
Remaining differences between cards may be due to different heatsink grease, also already examined by replacing the grease on a retail card for a significant performance gain.
Someone obviously didn't buy the turbo liquid nitrogen supply option.
I believe the entire R9 series of cards are little more than rebranded versions of older cards AMD just discontinued. The R9 280X for example? It's just a 7970 card. Sure, it may have a few BIOS tweaks and such, but you can even peel the label off the circuit board of many of them and find 7970 etched on the board underneath the R9 280X label.
Personally, I think AMD should have waited until it had legitimate improvements to offer before releasing anything, rather than trying to fool people with the R9 series.
I would expect the retail NVidia cards vary considerably from the press review cards. Each vendor has their own tweaks and adjustments.
Nope. The 290/290X is a much larger chip - similar architecture, but bigger (and mildly improved).
Slashdot is a PAY-FOR-PLAY site disseminating either pro-war propaganda for Team Obama and Israel, or simple pro-company PR 'dressed' as technical analysis.
The rubbish about so-called Journalist 'golden samples' being used for review versions of AMD's 290 family was discussed weeks ago, and dismissed and Nvidia paid for FUD at sites like Tom's.
The TRUTH is that all modern high end cards from Nvidia and AMD use thermal and power throttling, and that the 'reference' cooling solution on AMD 290 products is sub-standard when attempting to push the GPU to maximum performance. Some cards have variance in fan cooling ability (manufacturing variance) and by default allow the card to clock up less well under load.
The problem has been partially addressed with updated drivers, and is best handled by user selected fan spin rates. However, the whole world is waiting for 290 cards with cooling solutions from OEMs, NOT cheapskate, badly designed rubbish from AMD's own people.
Meanwhile, Nvidia is meeting major tech sites once a week with concocted FUD campaigns against their major competitor, and the promise of large monetary rewards if the bullet points of the FUD documents are repeated in so-called 'independent' editorial content on the site. Anandtech took a massive pay-off, for instance, to declare the cooling solution of the current 290s was so LOUD, the cards were not worth considering under any circumstance.
Remember, AMD technology, CPU, GPU, Northbridge, Southbridge, sound etc, is in ALL THREE of the major consoles- PS4, Xbox One, Wii U. Nvidia and Intel are nowhere- complete and utter losers, and neither Intel nor Nvidia were in the running for the console contracts because neither company could offer even a 50% solution to the hardware needs. If AMD had a target on its back before, now Nvidia and Intel are gunning for AMD with a FUD PR spend that makes it into billions of dollars yearly in negative press.
Nvidia sells the lousy 4GB 770 for what you can expect to pay for a current, vastly more powerful, 290 card from AMD. Below 450 dollars, all Nvidia sells are TWO GIGABYTE CARDS- completely useless for 2014 AAA gaming at 1080P or above. Meanwhile, AMD has been selling multiple 3GB cards at the same 2GB per rendered frame. Xmas 2013 (now) sees current games hovering around the 2GB mark for 1080P with reasonable graphics options selected.
However, no technical site is warning their readers that buying 2GB Nvidia cards is horribly short-sighted, and will lead to terrible performance issues (unless graphics options are cranked down to 'medium') with next-year's AAA games (remember, both new consoles have in excess of 5GB available to their GPUs). Nvidia simply pays such sites to NOT even mention the issue when recommending which current expensive card to buy.
Benchmarking: If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.
What a surprise that Wasson couldn't be bothered to figure out what's actually going on this time, either.
Silicon varies. A lot, really. Some chips run faster and cooler than others, simply by chance. This is why they're sold at different speeds, core counts, etc. The process of separating the chips into these categories is called 'binning', but it's not perfect in that there will still be some variation within a bin. That variation won't go lower than the bin's minimum standards, but it will go higher. With the number of review cards AMD - or any other chipmaker - ships out, it would follow that several of them would be of this better quality. The only way to avoid that, in fact, would be to specifically select the minimally-performing cards, which would be silly.
The reason that we haven't seen these chips in retail boards - and, to be fair, you wouldn't expect to find one in a sample of two, more like one in ten or twenty or even fifty, and Nvidia would surely know this - is that the board manufacturers that buy the chips from AMD hold those best chips back for their special, overclocked cards that have fancy cooling solutions. Rumors point to those coming out sometime in the range from Christmas to January for the R9 290/290X.
More specifically to the 290-series, this chip variance will show up more readily in that better chips will throttle a little less - but it's usually not going to be as dramatic a difference as, say, the variation in fan speed that they had to solve (whether this was AMD's mistake in not considering variation in fan performance or the manufacturers using cheap, crappy fans is uncertain). Or using crappy thermal paste. The neat thing about this method of dynamic frequency is that, aside from the limitation that a chip can never draw more power than its maximum safe limit, performance is entirely controlled by cooling power. Want to never throttle? Well, nothing can be done about Furmark - it draws too much power and you'd burn your chip out. But for every game out there, just turning up your fan speed will suffice, and the cards even have a built-in switch to do that if you don't want to simply adjust a slider in the control software. And when the custom cards with those nice, top-grade chips turn up, they'll run at full speed and be nearly whisper-quiet, too. Except full speed could be between 1050 and 1100 megahertz. Or you could use water cooling - running at 1300 megahertz on water isn't unusual from what I've heard, though you would also need to overclock to do that.
In the end, this is just Nvidia using a shoddy journalist to do a little bit of mud-slinging.
The 280X is just the 7970 and it's not really a secret. The reviews I read pointed this out (I also just bought a 280X two weeks ago). The 280X even shows up in your device manager as 7970.
There are lots of alt-coins in addition of bitcoin.
Some are easier to mine on GPU than other.
You need to pick up a coin that plays well with it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're joking but that's more or less what's happening.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you bothered to RTFA (I know!), you'd see that they indeed checked this out. They flashed the BIOS of their sample card onto their worst performing retail card. There was a small difference, but far from enough to make up for the gap between that card and the sample unit they received from AMD
Not that BIOS. As other have pointed in the thread, the variation in performance is more or less linked to the variance of thermal management.
Not all PWM Fan behave the same. There's a *newer* BIOS version (not as in "use the one that came with the sample" but as in "download the latest version that was made available on the manufacturer website, betwen when you bought it and now").
This version of BIOS is better at computing what signal it should send to the fan to have better cooling.
And once the cooling is improvent, the card will automatically scale up its speed.
Also, there can be difference in thermal grease, etc.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that AMD cherry-picked the cards they sent reviewers to make sure they were as good as they could be.
Or, instead of cherry-picking, maybe there's some build quality between the first engineering sample sent by AMD, and the mass-produced card by NONAME asian manufacturer ? (Or even mass-produced cards by very popular brands that have to fulfill lots of orders ?)
Difference in quality of the fans (NONAME will pick whatever is currently the cheapest, and even with popular big-names, there's going to be some variance, depending on where the current batch was sourced).
Difference in quality of thermal conduction of the interface. Difference of quality of thermal grease (NONAME will pick the cheapest, bigname might have variation in batches, specially if they source batch from several manufacturer to keep up with the pace). Difference in quality of work (NONAME might even do a sloppy job in applying the thermal medium to the radiator).
You end up with exactly the same chip produced by AMD, but vastly different thermal condition, all this with a firmware and a driver which isn't yet best at fan throttling, and you end-up with some measurable difference in output. ...BUT...
Pick up Nvidia cards, and you're going to see exactly the same effect.
Either card that vary in their performance (or that have big variation in temperature, depending on how the current firmware throttles the card)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
but if it turns out that the junior thermal past application technicians get less attentive once the first production batch is finished and the people who've been babying the project leave, that wouldn't be a total surprise.
Now add in the mix that some parts, like fans, might be sourced from several different manufacturer (and according to source, BIOS wasn't until latest update so good at operating them), add also that there might be variation in quality between the different batches of thermal paste (which got very probably sourced from several productors) and the output variation is clearly expected.
But also fixable (newest BIOS to compensate fans with better throttling, manually replace thermal paste. Now cards works as good as benchmarking sample or even better)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
due to the fact that the software/driver adjusts the frequency independently instead of being a static clock speed (something they should have disclaimed to the reviewers).
It's well known that these cards operate at a fixed temperature and push the clock and voltage as high as they can within these thermal limits.
It's so well known among professionnal, that some like Tom's are giving advice about BIOS replacement (newer have better and more consistent throttling or fan accross all the varied parts) or thermal paste replacement (to improve cooling and thus performance).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Personally, I think AMD should have waited until it had legitimate improvements to offer before releasing anything, rather than trying to fool people with the R9 series.
The problem, is that AMD got too busy doing legitimate improvement under contract for the coming generation of consoles (Xbox One, Play Station 4, and some of the upcoming Steam Box, all run the same combo of AMD CPUs and GPUs).
With that work, there was going to be some delay for their PC's Radeon HD 8xxx serie.
So it was either:
- have absolutely nothing to sell.
- do some small upgrade on the older board (R2 270/280 are simply older board slightly upgraded) and older chips (R2 290(X) are GCN1.1 chips, slightly newer than the GCN1.0) and have something to sell until the real new gen comes, while still taking advantage of the time to add some improvements.
Note that this was pretty much announced that way, and well known for people in the field.
now look at the bright side of the things:
even if they are coming with some delay, that means that next year, you're going to finally see the newer GCN2.0 chip based card, that have taken advangtage of all the R&D done for consoles to improve the performance and quality for radeons.
A little bit later, but a little bit more R&D money poured on the steps leading to them (specially the latest step)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
ok, so I checked the price of the Radeon R9 290X. It is about $550. wow. Not trying to start an argument but do people really need a $500 video card? Just asking. I thought a $200 would be enough for most users including heavy gamers. I remember when gamers bought $200 AGP cards and were satisfied.
The latest ones crash ALOT if you read maximumpc.com or tomshardware.com and my Nvidia fanboys I raid with.
AMD has better quality hardware with less flaky voltage regulators. I went through 2 nvidia cards over 8 years that failed and switched all AMD/ATI in 2010 with the phenom II (better that steamroller per clock tick sadly ) and an ATI 5750.
Had one bizaare issue with black edges on the screen when switching to HDMI. That problem went away after I went into the drivers and configured my screen to not do underscanning.
NO issues for 2 years! Just upgraded to an ATI 7850 and it runs GREAT. No black screens, no overheating, no wierd driver issues at all. This was true in 2002 with the ill fated ATI Rage Pro 128 TV adapter. The Mac version was the only one that worked ok.
But damn that was 11 years ago!
I admit I do not like steamroller, but over all I got a nice $600 system that is 6core, runs VMWare accelerated, back in 2010 back when I would need an Intel extreme edition for $700 without anything else but the damn chip!
What they do not tell you is Intel cripples the bios and turns off hyperthreading and Virtualization support to force you into the more expensive units. AMD chipsets never do this.
IF AMD gets their act together and not create underperforming space heaters I will consider AMD again for a CPU purchase. But what I have works great and the phenom II was a pretty competitive chip for its time.
Raedons are great GPUs and are very competitive with Nvidia. Drivers are worse today with Nvidia unless they clean things up.
http://saveie6.com/
or whether review cards come from the initial run, probably the one where AMD's people are mostly tightly and nervously observing the process, rather than the potentially more variable just-another-day-slapping-chips-on-cards production that follows.
I would indeed agree with your first post and this part. To me, a big conspiracy to manipulate results is far less likely than simply slopiness of a mass-produced good, where speed of production counts, in order to quickly meet the demand.
To quote a variant of Hanlon's Razor (often attributed without sources to Napoleon Bonaparte):
"Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence."
Merely variation is only inconvenient, and may well mean that the usual 3rd-party overkill heatsinks actually help significantly.
Yup very probably. Specially with modern card that try to go as fast as they can, while still within target thermal envelope.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I listened to a Maximum PC podcast about this a couple of weeks ago. Is this a slow news day?
I'm talking about all the above being GCN 1.x chips.
The GCN 2.x chips (which was initially what was going to be inside HD 8000, before they delayed everything) will be here early next year.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Will gamers see that much of an improvement? The PS4 and Xbone being x86 hardware is nice as the excuses on why a port to PCs can't happen, but both consoles are pretty sad when compared to current mid-range PCs let alone a high-end rig. The Xbone one is struggling to hit 1080p while the PS4 is hitting it, but at 30fps. This is matching or lower than the performance of a current mid-range PC and the performance gap will only widen.
...all this done with intergrated GPU. That's the key point. These performance are pulled using just an embed chip, that pulls minimal amount of power.
Now scale this thing up, move one generation next ( to GCN 2.x ) and the discrete card that will be getting next year from AMD are going to be quite interesting.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Yeah, and that's the main exchange where I trade mine.
A few other thing:
- much smaller scale, but cryptsy has almost the whole zoo.
- lots of trader are playing around and speculating with minor coin.
- That means there's a lot of exchange traffic between major and minor alt coins.
- That means it's easier to exchange whatever you mined with whatever is more usefull to do transaction for you.
- LTC is starting to grow big enough to get some indenpendance from BTC. ...thus it's starting to get more acceptance (more payment processor are accepting it too) ...its fluctuation vs. fiat isn't so thighly couple to BTC as before.
-
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"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And according to Tom's, that exactly what the last BIOS update was all about. Taking better into account the tacho feedback.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I've just ordered a R9 290X, before I saw this (oh no!). If this effect is reducing the 290X performance, and 290X is just a higher clocked 290, could I expect similar performance on the 290 as the retail 290Xs? If so I just want to return the 290X and recoup 25 % of the cost... Advice greatly appreciated