Graphics 390X Specs released, 8GB of vRAM, 4000+ cores

I'm with Parge, I don't think 4GB is going to be an issue because the pipe to the ram is so wide.
If your interested AMD’s Joe Macri explained the 4GB limitation here.

 

That reads like the memory system will easily accommodate anything the GPU can throw at it.

Now, we can expect HBM to be good, but I wonder is it that good, or does AMDs new chip struggle to meet capacity for different reasons?

I do hope the 390 is up to the task - it'd be nice for them to steal a march on nvidia.

 

4096 GCN cores - all watercooled - its going to be fast. The question is just how competitively can the afford to price it.

 

I considered going team red for a build I'm putting together now. I've always been an Nvidia user but all this stuff about Gameworks is making me kind of want to want to switch.

I'm buying next week so I don't really want to wait for the 390x. The 290x was competitive but the higher power consumption and heat made me go green team once again since it's for an mATX case.

I'd like to see AMD focus on getting power/heat under control as well as upping the performance but that might be a having your cheesecake and eating it too wish at the moment.

 

Heat is not the same thing as hot. The card might not run hot but the power usage and heat dissipation of the card is clearly poorer than nVidia's solution, but unless you're concerned about your electricity bill it doesn't really matter that much.

 

You would basically not have to pay the bill to not care. I know the 2 480s I had added around £20 a year to our bill. ( not a great amount really) the 680s I have now have knocked £20 off the yearly bill so there is savings to be had .

Over the lifetime of the cards usage you could well save or spend £100 either way.

After HMB was listed I expected nothing but a 4gb card. Do wonder how AMDs drivers will cope as they will need to be optimised for this.

 

The amount of heat put out is DIRECTLY proportional to TDP, and damn near equal to it (a tiny amount of energy goes into the kinetic energy of air movement and the electrical energy of the interfaces). How hot the card is depends on a combination of the TDP and the cooler. With the same cooler, a card with a higher TDP will be hotter.
That AMD have dropped their air cooler design for a CLWC (if the rumours are correct) would indicate the card's TDP is too high for their existing air cooler design to handle. A 120mm radiator, or even an 80mm radiator, is more than enough for a few hundred watts of cooling at a comfortable temperature, so the card will not 'run hot' unless there is some other source of thermal resistance in the path (e.g. the variable-height interposer heatspreader). All that thermal energy moved to the radiator will still have to be dumped somewhere though, so it will need to be placed so as not to exhaust hot air back into the case.

 

The Tech Report has a fairly decent write up on HBM and how it may effect the thermals, on page two they say...

 

If it performs close to the Titan or above I'd expect Titan level prices. When AMD have had leads in the past they have made us pay.

Can't see a gpu with AIO been cheap to buy period though.

 

Or more likely, they need a flagship card to compete with the 980 (ti) and Titan X on an even footing, and unlike Nvidia they can't just clock-bump (no more power envelope) while waiting on the next generation to implement HBM (Pascal is waiting on HMB 2). AMD were left with either putting a LOT of development effort into refining GCN1.2 (taking effort away from the next generation) in order to gain efficiency to allow for speed increases, implementing HDM on GCN 1.2 to grab some performance from the memory bandwidth increase AND gain some experience working with HBM in practice, or doing nothing and selling current cards with rebrands and price-drops at barely any profit (notice how much the price of the R9 range have dropped since launch? Margins are slim) until the next generation is ready.

 

Yeah, I'd read that somewhere a few days ago, can't quite see this being cheap TBH, as rollo say, if its got an AIO on it, its unlikely to be cheap.

Either way, look forward to what the new cards are going to be like on performance. Quietly also want to see if there's been a slight change to the reference cooler?

 

You can buy and AIO for £30 retail. Probably costs £15 to make or less. The inclusion of an AIO doesn't have to add much to the cost of the card, unless AMD wants it to.

 

Depends on what the all in one cools full cover blocks are £80+ for most new cards not add in the actual AIO and you could easily add £100 to the price.

Depends how it performs to what it will cost. If it can get towards or above Titan level performance id expect it to cost just as much sadly.

Think the days of the top single gpu been sub £400 are over. 980 which is not even top and looks more mid range compared to the Titan x is £500 average on most sites with a good cooler.

I hope the 390x is competitive and we can get some realistic pricing as Titan level pricing for the best is way above what most are willing to pay.

 

Sure,, but they have room to bump up Maxwell 2. They're not power or thermally limited, so they can release a new line of rebranded Maxwell 2 chips with higher clock speeds and higher performance (e.g. the 980 becomes the 1070, the 970 becomes the 1060, and a clockbumped 980 or a cut-down GM200 becoems the 1080). Without architectural changes, AMD can release a new line of rebranded chips, but they'll be moving down the performance chain and will need something new at the top, because the 290x is knocking at the PCI-E power limit and (with the default cooler) is thermally constrained.

 

True dat!

 

and I hope you're right.

I doubt it though. If this thing has Titan level performance, you can bet it'll be bloody expensive too.

 

looks sexy, too bad I can't afford one.