AMD: Volcanic Islands R1100/1200 (8***/9*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

Sapphire released a "performance boost" bios for their R9 290. The max fan speed is still the same at 47%, so it sounds like they have changed the fan speed curve. I have it flashed, but haven't played anything yet so I don't know what's changed.

 

Call me optimistic but that doesn't sound like from mid-january to me
(and, just because club3d isn't receiving gpu/ram kits yet, it doesn't mean the same thing applies to tier1)

 

Future AMD ref/highend gpu should come such design by default...!



http://www.techpowerup.com/195160/a...d-with-air-liquid-hybrid-cooler.html#comments

 

only if I can hook it up to a self contained water loop like on my cpu. I just bought the corsair h120 and put it on my cpu. Would love one for my gpu

 

NZXT just introduced Kraken G10 GPU Bracket for those

 

Every brand of Radeon R9 280X is out of stock on US Amazon and Newegg.

There is some speculation that they are being bought up as 'litecoin miners' during the current boom in price of that virtual currency.

 

Yup, around here is the same. Any Tahiti-based SKU is in short supply. Some after-market cooling solutions are also running low. The Hawaii boards have apparently worse "profit" ratio than Tahiti and are not such good shelf flayers.

There seems to be no end to the hashing madness.

 

Talk about wasted energy. I'd be happier if they were doing folding@home or something.

 

In a forum I visit frequently, the entire distributed computing section is now overrun by topics about bitcoin & co. For better or worse, all that computational power is now simply a "printing press".

 

It'll die down in a week or two when people realise they are on the bandwagon 2-3 years too late, even for Litecoin.

Bitcoin is almost unpossible these days, but less than 2 years ago a friend managed to "mine" 50 in one go in about a week using just a CPU miner. He sold them at the time for ~£600. Would be worth ~£30,000+ now.

 

Tahiti based video cards seem to be the talk at Slickdeals black friday deals thread. I'm guessing AMD are glad they just pushed it down a rung instead of totally replaced Tahiti.

 

I wonder how much of an impact this may have on AMD's bottom line. In any case, it must be nice when people buy a whole bunch of your products for reasons you hadn't even thought of.

 

It would be really smart of AMD to add some kind of bitcoin hardware and/or hardware optimisation for it.

 

They will never be as competitive as those chips designed solely for that workload, but I suppose they could implement some new instruction that helps those hashing workloads (BTC/LTC).

 

What really has folding@home type distributed computing produced to justify the significant expenditure in electricity? Especially if that electricity is produced using non-renewables.

 

am... Meaningful scientific data?

 

http://folding.stanford.edu/home/papers

IMO, much more usefull that BTC/LTC mining.

 

Is it anywhere enough to justify the electricity consumption? Distributed computing is merely an inefficient method of using inefficient hardware to solve a task.

 

ultimately who gives a crap amount efficiency. that only becomes important when you stagnate. what matters is cost/outcomes. last time i checked F@H costs Standford very little

 

Only because it has people donating substantial amounts of computing time and electricity. And the actual outcome is hard to quantify.

But ultimately going back to the main point, I doubt very many people investing substantially into GPU mining would ever bother with scientific distributed computing if there was no mining available. Instead, they would have never bought the GPUs in the first place. So there is no wasted energy.