Why no news story on here about it? Every other reputable tech site has the story but not Bit Tech. SLOOOOWWWW!
AMD restricted reviews to the Sapphire only on day one. They also restricted people using the old vbios and etc. Watch the gamer's nexus review. That may be why.
we had a card but when flashing the new BIOS onto the card before testing it I managed to bork it and we couldn't get a replacement in time. We have another vendors card in the office and we were allowed to post it just didn't due to the above.
Talking of which... Does AMD guarantee that not a single card with the inferior bios will reach customers?
Yeah this whole having to flash it thing won't end well. Bet the RMAs will be crazy :s Good card though. Not from what I've seen. Lots of RMA here they come.
What does the BIOS flash do? Is it just a performance uplift or does it fix an actual problem with the release BIOS?
Increases teh everythings and makes it nip at the heels of the 5700. 11% overall but more importantly the RAM gets a big boost also. It makes it worth the asking price, whereas before the price was questionable. Nice card but they'll need to do much better to get me back.
Christ, that's a hot mess. I'm sure they had their reasons for doing things this way but it doesn't exactly scream "coherent strategy" to me. I mean, "free" extra performance is always good but confusing the customer by having different-performing versions of the same silicon floating around is not good. And if tech-savvy doges like @MLyons are bricking cards trying to flash the vBIOS then what chance does Joe Punter have? But more seriously, this is pretty poor stuff from AMD, even if the intent is good.
We were all set to post the review but I borked it so can't I could get old figures but they would be pointless. To me it's poor. If the review had gone up I'd have said the same in there. Asking your customer to flash a card is out of order. Especially if it's someones first PC which is more likely with the budget cards. The only saving grace is it's a dual bios card
You broke both of them? Absolutely agree that asking end-users to flash a card is not really on. It's different if you're unlocking extra performance at your own risk (flashing a 7950 to a 7970 or whatever it was back in the day) but on a launch card? Not on. Especially not on if you are going to sell your card on the basis of its flashed performance.
Yeah it's bad. It's bad enough flashing a mobo, but at least they have an app built in which is almost fool proof. A GPU though is hard enough for a seasoned flasher (fnarr) but could be costly to someone else. And it doesn't always go right either..... This is why I'm now back to being an nvidiot. Issues like this cost time and I simply CBA any more.
It actually raises a serious ethical question for reviewers... As cards with the inferior bios can apparently reach customers then can a review using the updated bios numbers be considered valid?
I guess you should really review the card on both BIOSes and heavily caveat your review. And not shy away from criticising AMD for allowing this to happen in the first place.
Lack of time and resources to do this. I bricked one of the cards and the second card I managed to correctly flash just before leaving for the day so I'll be doing the benchmarks tomorrow.
Funny thing is, the same can/should be done with the 5700 - There's an extra ~8% performance on the table to be had just using an XT bios of the same model (it's why I put "5700X" in my sig, it's going to have the XT bios on it when the machine gets up and running, but it's not quite the full XT!).
The plot thickens... https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/b...-xt-sku-at-gddr6-with-14-gbps-we-explain.html
It's an odd one - they should/could have just pulled the same stunt they did with the 5700/XT and waited for Nvidia to respond before dropping the price by $20-25. Leaving it up to end users to flash, as easy as it might be now for some, is going to lead to RMA's and a lot of unhappy customers...
A BIOS flash to me is scary. Sure it's automated but I've had loads fail. With a GPU you can try again by using another GPU to boot from, but that's all quite complicated and you could end up borking another. Then there's power cuts, kids thinking it's frozen and etc. Or basically not knowing the risks of a failure. That's all stuff you've learned from screwing stuff up.
