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

[LittleJ]

Yes, but that wasn't my point. My point was that AMD is relying very heavily on pricing to generate interest. The problem is that price is not an inherent quality of the product and can be easily matched by a competitor. Contrast that with other releases where a product earns a premium on its own merits.

The 290 only stands up well if nVidia chooses not to follow them down that path, which of course remains to be seen. At this point it's obvious that with the same disregard for power consumption and noise GK110 will be much faster than Hawaii.

Will nVidia play that game? I hope so cause I wouldn't mind a dirt cheap fully enabled 780 with a DCIII cooler.

Will NV release a 11th hour driver that magically enables GK110 based cards throttle point at 95C and enable full power target, along with aggressive fan curves?? I wouldn't put it past them to encourage reviewer's tests with power and temp targets fully raised via MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision. NV quiet vs AMD quiet. NV Fermi vs AMD Uber modes.

In all seriousness though, Hawaii is pretty impressive and even more impressive on the price. But its pretty obvious they chose to run these chips at the limit in order to make reviews more favorable.

I bet old Huang at NV is gonna have a few sleepless nights......

 

[jimbo75]

Exactly...back then. Tolerance for noise at a given performance level can change over time. Therefore it is relevant.

Yes with most people tolerance would rise as hearing got worse as they aged. In this case Ryan must be some kind of superhuman as his hearing has improved over the past 3 years by so much that 57.2 dB is now so much worse than 64.1 dB.

And you still ignore the different results for the 5870, hinting at changed testing methods. ALL other cards tested back then would be much much quieter if measured the same way the 290(X) are measured today.

You're making a lot of assumptions when we have simple data. Let's say the case is quieter now, that still doesn't matter as it wasn't back then - but if anything that should be a good thing for the 290 as noise will lower in future with better chassis.

Anything else that has changed? Feel free to point out where this happened, all the reviews are still there to be dug out. Until that point we must assume everything that we don't have data for stays the same from review to review.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I have seem quotes like this one littering the forums and follow-ups to reviews and this begs the following question(s):

First, are the AMD design teams really incompetent in designing proper cooling?

Because statements like "begging for 3rd party coolers" seem to imply that they are.

Second, how will these "3rd party coolers" manage to both lower the noise and at the same time not have the GPUs throttle?

The title in your post seems to imply you're skeptic about 3rd party coolers, but why don't you see and hear the difference yourself?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290-review-benchmark,3659-19.html

Lower noise and lower temperatures while doing a 17% overclock. How does that sound?
And this Accelero Xtreme III is actually quite old and not that good. AFAIK, it stays on par with Asus' DirectCU, MSI's Lighting/Hawk and Sapphire's Toxic/Vapor-X coolers.


I don't think AMD's cooler design team is incompetent (besides, do they even have an internal team for that or do they pay someone else to do it?).
I just don't think they're given a proper budget to place a deserving cooler in there.. and that decision comes from the top.


Regardless, looking at those tomshardware results I stand by my original opinion:
These cards are begging for adequate 3rd party coolers.

 

[DieH@rd]

Well it averages to around 21,5% but many have 23-25%
edit:
I'm not familiar with French stores but in Finland, with 24% VAT, cheapest R9 280X is 280.80€ including shipping, which is $378.91

Currently in Serbia we have 8% ! But that will jump to 20% on January 1st, so I will most likely grab reference 290 model if I can collect the money.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Yes with most people tolerance would rise as hearing got worse as they aged. In this case Ryan must be some kind of superhuman as his hearing has improved over the past 3 years by so much that 57.2 dB is now so much worse than 64.1 dB.

You're not getting it. Nowadays with solutions that are quieter (NV reference) and more and better partner designs are available than ever before, the general consensus seems to be that noise is important, more than before. It is this consensus that likely influenced Ryans recommendation (or lack thereof). It's the same with power consumption: 5+ years ago nobody cared about it, but today it is important for many people, and the reviewer has to take that into account - even if he/she doesn't particularly care.

You're making a lot of assumptions when we have simple data. Let's say the case is quieter now, that still doesn't matter as it wasn't back then - but if anything that should be a good thing for the 290 as noise will lower in future with better chassis.

No, I'm simply saying you cannot compare the absolute values of those measurements and gave a reason why. Why exactly it has changed, if it is because he measures from a greater distance or not, is unknown. There is no immediate reason to think that a new chassis would make the 290(X) less noisy.

Anything else that has changed? Feel free to point out where this happened, all the reviews are still there to be dug out. Until that point we must assume everything that we don't have data for stays the same from review to review.

I don't know, but it doesn't change the fact that old and new noise values cannot be compared, because they are different. That much you should understand.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Irrelevant, we're talking about noise plain and simple. If this 290's is unacceptable now then all those cards above it (what's that, about half of them?) must have been unacceptable back then.

There are no cards above the 290 except the 290X in uber mode and the 6990, every other card has been quieter than them, including the GTX 590. Furmark is a different story though. You just have to know how to read those graphs a little better...

 

[trinibwoy]

Will NV release a 11th hour driver that magically enables GK110 based cards throttle point at 95C and enable full power target, along with aggressive fan curves?? I wouldn't put it past them to encourage reviewer's tests with power and temp targets fully raised via MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision. NV quiet vs AMD quiet. NV Fermi vs AMD Uber modes.

I doubt nVidia will go to those extremes. They'll probably offer a $50 rebate on 780's and eventually push the price down a bit. Lower priced factory overclocked 780's will help close the gap too.

Anything else that has changed?

Yes, as has been stated multiple times people's expectations change as technology evolves. Or do you not remember when 60mm ear bleeding delta fans on CPU coolers were acceptable? Your argument is well taken but you're not doing yourself any favors by willfully ignoring this point.

 

[homerdog]

Yes with most people tolerance would rise as hearing got worse as they aged. In this case Ryan must be some kind of superhuman as his hearing has improved over the past 3 years by so much that 57.2 dB is now so much worse than 64.1 dB.

If you have a problem with Ryan's review please PM him instead of spamming the forum with this nonsense. He is an active member of this forum.

 

[Alexko]

Remember this?
(GeForce 4 Ti 4600)

The first thing I did on mine was to remove those crappy little fans and replace them with a single 92mm one.

 

[firstminion]

If you have a problem with Ryan's review please PM him instead of spamming the forum with this nonsense. He is an active member of this forum.

Wouldn't it be best for Ryan to respond a query about his reviews on a public forum instead of jimbo75 making it personal with a PM?

If not, would it then be ethical for jimbo75 to make public whatever response Ryan gave him?

If not, why would Jimbo75 send a PM for Ryan asking that?

I fail to see how your stance would make this forum grow, unless you are asking for jimbo75 to point Ryan to this topic.

 

[UniversalTruth]

And you should also take into account that the importance of noise can change over time. Fact is, the cards are very loud according to today's standards. Dual-GPU cards are a different matter since they just generate so much heat, that you have to make some sacrifices there.

The same is true for single-chip videocards which provide this high level of performance. Today's standards are... how to say... people start to use their silent but crappy performance-wise smartphones or tablets, or even low-end PCs that can do anything except providing these graphics quality levels...

I am perfectly happy with my Windforce 3X and comparing it with the noise other components in my CM generate, it is pretty negligible.

This discussion is ridiculous. It is like wanting to drive your car at 250 km/h but at the same time requiring silence in the coupe

Haha, please. If AMD lowers prices it's because they think it's in their best interest not yours. There's no entry for "customer appreciation" on a balance sheet.

I agree with you that they first think about their own interest but it is also important to mention that in this case their interest coincides with ours.
But if they are arrogant, then we can also be and simply stop buying new cards which actually we don't need.

Price is really the only weapon AMD has left though. They're just hoping that nVidia doesn't join them in a race to the bottom. Take away the $100 discount and all of a sudden the 290 story looks very different.

AMD will still be selling cards but at higher prices, the interest will be lower. For any company it would be like this and it is natural.

And, here you are speaking like a fanboy- the card is looking pretty fine and these complaints are because people got too high-fed.

The 780 has to drop in price though. That $100 gap provides a lot of breathing room for third party overclocked 290's with better coolers that will stomp on it even more. nVidia must be pissed.

 

[nutball]

Wouldn't it be best for Ryan to respond a query about his reviews on a public forum instead of jimbo75 making it personal with a PM?

AT have a public forum, do they not? Their reviews each have a comments section too. Those seem like the perfect public place to continue this noise-related noise.

I fail to see how your stance would make this forum grow, unless you are asking for jimbo75 to point Ryan to this topic.

I think the point is that this forum shouldn't grow in that direction.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I have seem quotes like this one littering the forums and follow-ups to reviews and this begs the following question(s):

First, are the AMD design teams really incompetent in designing proper cooling?

Because statements like "begging for 3rd party coolers" seem to imply that they are.

Second, how will these "3rd party coolers" manage to both lower the noise and at the same time not have the GPUs throttle?

Third party coolers are just better at getting the heat from the chip/card and radiating it away, whilst shifting more air at lower speeds and noise. The have bigger fans, and bigger cooling areas.

Look, for instance at the Prolimatech MK-26:

stock clocks and fan speeds

85'C in heaven on stock cooler

55'C in heaven on MK-26 cooler


Overclocked at 1200 Core + 1.4V

stock cooler at 85'c with 100% fan speed

MK-26 cooler at 72'C with silent fans.

Now obviously this is an extreme cooler, but there surely could have been something better than stock, without going all the way to the Prolimatech madness?

Now to be fair:

AMD used a design which will fit in anything and does not cost a fortune.

The MK-26 won't fit in many cases and is very expensive.

but still, I think AMD could have done a lot better than the stock fan. Instead they went for lowest common denominator, and are leaving third parties and card manufacturers to come up with quieter, cooler solutions. It's just a shame those better cooling solutions are not available at launch, because nowadays noise is an important factor to a lot of people.

 

[Dave Baumann]

http://techreport.com/review/25602/amd-radeon-r9-290-graphics-card-reviewed/9

We're apparently going to have to face this price/performance-versus-acoustics tradeoff for a while, so I spent some quality time with the R9 290 trying to get a handle on what I think of the noise, beyond the readings on the decibel meter...

...The quality of the sound isn't grating. Subjectively speaking, there are much more annoying coolers in this territory on the decibel meter. The impressively smooth, gradual ramp of fan speeds up and down in the new PowerTune algorithm helps make the noise less noticeable, too.

The changes to the PowerTune control mechanism alters the behaviors significantly from previous "loud(er)" products. One of the more annoying elements from prior solutions is both the ramp and then the cycling (fan speed going up and down as it cycles through the fan table curve); one of the primary objectives here is to remove the cycling and by keeping it at a constant temp and trying to speed set point we've minimized the initial ramp and also more or less removed the cycling (although that will occur to maintain a minimum clock threshold where it can).

 

[Alexko]

http://techreport.com/review/25602/amd-radeon-r9-290-graphics-card-reviewed/9



The changes to the PowerTune control mechanism alters the behaviors significantly from previous "loud(er)" products. One of the more annoying elements from prior solutions is both the ramp and then the cycling (fan speed going up and down as it cycles through the fan table curve); one of the primary objectives here is to remove the cycling and by keeping it at a constant temp and trying to speed set point we've minimized the initial ramp and also more or less removed the cycling (although that will occur to maintain a minimum clock threshold where it can).

And that's great, everyone agrees that it works well and is a significant improvement, but why didn't you use a better cooler too on such high end products? It's pretty much the only flaw on the 290(X), but it's a big one.

 

[homerdog]

Wouldn't it be best for Ryan to respond a query about his reviews on a public forum instead of jimbo75 making it personal with a PM?

If not, would it then be ethical for jimbo75 to make public whatever response Ryan gave him?

If not, why would Jimbo75 send a PM for Ryan asking that?

I fail to see how your stance would make this forum grow, unless you are asking for jimbo75 to point Ryan to this topic.

Like nutball said, B3D (this thread in particular) is not the place to go whining on and on about AnandTech's "NVIDIA bias". Ryan's opinion is what it is, he wrote a whole review to justify it.

 

[3dilettante]

Will NV release a 11th hour driver that magically enables GK110 based cards throttle point at 95C and enable full power target, along with aggressive fan curves??

Absent a new design for the power management system, I think that the existing designs can't take things that close.
I haven't seen the numbers for Titan, but Kepler's frequency and voltage scaling latency is on the order of a hundred milliseconds. Hawaii's controller is on the order of ten microseconds and it has a more pervasive on-die monitoring system, so it is can react far more quickly to keep things in check.

Significant fractions of a second are long enough to matter for the cooler and for the chip, either for scenarios where a chip might race past the shutdown temp or for the long-term reliability of the system. If a solution is fast enough, it can make adjustments before the temps of the heatsink and chip can change significantly, which then allows the design to ride closer to the edge.

 

[silent_guy]

Absent a new design for the power management system, I think that the existing designs can't take things that close.

It seems to me that Nvidia has been extremely conservative for the Kepler generation in pushing the thermal envelope. Much more so than for Fermi, which must have had a less advanced power management system. There must be plenty of leeway to kick things up a notch?

I understand that AMD can regulate the power supply within microseconds, and that's impressive, but I have not idea what the practical consequences are of this. Temperature ramps are typically measured in seconds, not microseconds. I have a hard time seeing how you can make a major difference by regulating a cause 3 orders of magnitude faster than the effect. How do you quantify this? Can you dial up the clock by 50MHz on average?

For all the smarts in the power management, it still puzzles me that R290 is an outlier compared not only Nvidia but also other AMD chips from a pure power consumption point of view.

 

[jimbo75]

Like nutball said, B3D (this thread in particular) is not the place to go whining on and on about AnandTech's "NVIDIA bias". Ryan's opinion is what it is, he wrote a whole review to justify it.

So what's stopping him justifying his decision here as well? Should he be immune to questioning like he is on AT forums just because he's a member here? That sounds like a nice way to get away with dubious behaviour to me - just sign up for every forum on the web and get impunity for any decision you make?

When you go around being a constant outlier like he is, you can't expect to get away with it without being questioned. He still hasn't answered my previous points about his dubious accounting either btw.

 

[Alexko]

It seems to me that Nvidia has been extremely conservative for the Kepler generation in pushing the thermal envelope. Much more so than for Fermi, which must have had a less advanced power management system. There must be plenty of leeway to kick things up a notch?

I understand that AMD can regulate the power supply within microseconds, and that's impressive, but I have not idea what the practical consequences are of this. Temperature ramps are typically measured in seconds, not microseconds. I have a hard time seeing how you can make a major difference by regulating a cause 3 orders of magnitude faster than the effect. How do you quantify this? Can you dial up the clock by 50MHz on average?

For all the smarts in the power management, it still puzzles me that R290 is an outlier compared not only Nvidia but also other AMD chips from a pure power consumption point of view.

The 94C operating temperature should have a significant cost in static power. I don't know if that can fully explain Hawaii's power consumption, however, especially considering how well Bonaire does in this regard. Loose binning, perhaps?