If AMD could produce something that wasn't as loud, power hungry and crass as a drag racer that'd be something.

Nvidia are supposed to be working on crypto specific graphics cards, not ASIC but cards that can be used for general pc use but specialise in crypto mining. That should split the graphics card market and the "normal" cards should hopefully coome down in price. hopefully.

Hmm I think it's worth saying something about the continuing situation and perception of AMD graphics.

Very sadly it seems like the release of the latest Vega 56 and 64 cards has been a complete flop, at least from a 'gaming' consumer perspective. Massively more power hungry (and therefore hot and noisy) compared to the Nvidia equivalents for the same FPS performance. They haven't been particularly available at all either, due to getting snapped up by miners, and models with proper coolers (i.e. dual/triple fan and fat heatsinks) have been mostly absent also. Apart from the performance, and demand, there was also the issue of lack of supply of HBM memory for the cards too. Oh and Apple taking many of the chips for their Imac Pro machines... So yeah, no competition at the high end at all really.

The RX 570/580 cards I would like to still absolutely recommend for their very comparable performance to the 1060s, and they often sit ahead in Vulkan and DX12 titles. Except that you definitely can't get them for a reasonable price right now, only a year and a half ago or thereabouts you could get a 470 for around £160-170, now it's pretty much twice that. So they've been basically out of the question for a midrange option.

Vega being the way it is certainly doesn't help the rhetoric of "AMD cards are always hot and noisy", which has persisted for a very long time now, despite AMD actually leading over Nvidia a bunch of times in the past -


(That guy is often seen as a little inflammatory, perhaps biased. But I don't think any bias for the underdog really gets in the way here, the information is solid.)

Nvidia basically has the greatest "mindshare" over the mass-market, leading to their cards seen to be the better option by default. In that vid at 26:10 there's the interesting observation that many 'enthusiasts' knew that the RX 480 was actually the better option in many cases (certainly arguably on par), yet the 1060 still massively outsold it. AMD has now fallen behind in the last few years due to lack of money, so they are a year or two behind what Nvidia is up to in terms of the GPU silicon process, which does mean they are running hotter than they should be.

So this coupled with anticompetitive practices of GPP (- https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/03/08/geforce_partner_program_impacts_consumer_choice), and continued pushing of proprietary shit such as Gameworks and G-Sync, means AMD is going to have to pull off another Ryzen in order to somehow claw themselves back into some kind of relevancy in the GPU market. Which might well happen, market leaders often get complacent, and AMD has been a little more forward looking in terms of things like asynchronous compute. Some have been a bit puzzled at the lack of performance from Vega given the die size and number of transistors, some thoughts that maybe more performance could get unlocked via driver optimisations, not super likely now though.

It really looks like AMD might just largely stop bothering with much of the consumer graphics card stuff for a bit, focus on integrated graphics in consoles and APUs and that partnership with Intel for that dual CPU/GPU thing. Probably a good idea honestly.

I've currently got an Nvidia card, and plan to get another despite all this because there really isn't much of a reasonable option at the moment. Which sucks honestly, I was very happy with my previous three or four AMD cards, and only switched due to there being nowhere decent to go in terms of an upgrade. I preferred the AMD drivers a fair bit, better interface, less bloat and installed faster. If there was a good new option from AMD then I'd switch back in a heartbeat

So this is partly how we got to the pretty shit position we are at now, with Nvidia having a near stranglehold on the market. Monopolies are generally a bad thing of course. So perhaps just be careful with blanket statements, and hardware tribalism. This is where the excesses of "which bit of hardware is the bestest!?" get us.

What year was that?

Of course they've improved it since then. 2015 saw a complete overhaul with a new unified UI, honestly much better than the current Nvidia setup of separate control panel and Geforce Experience app thing, which is shite.

Pretty silly point of view that's only limited your options IMO, things change very fast in software and hardware, the whole driver team is probably totally different now.

AMD are still fighting against history and all those forum comments of 'AMD drivers suck.'

So you're just part of the problem outlined above.

@gurt: /shrug

I should bloody well hope they’ve improved it since then, but I’m not in the habit of throwing good money after bad.
“Maybe this, maybe that, maybe it’s better now”, I just don’t care. Happy to buy their cpus and, for the cost saving, their apus, but not gonna touch their standalone gpus.

Graphics card deal alert for ya - GTX 1080 for £525

Not a bad deal considering these times really, that's just about at RRP which is nice. Palit is often one of the cheaper manufacturers, but they seem to make pretty decent stuff. I think Tempy has a Palit 1070 and I guess that's still doing alright.

Obviously that's still a lot of money, more than the cost of an entire console (has as much as twice the graphical power though), but is a reasonable price for a card that will easily smash through any game for a few years to come. The GTX 1080 was always one that seemed to be affected the least by the the crypto stuff, I think due to the type of memory it uses it wasn't that effective at mining compared to the cards either side of it.

Prices have started to stabilise and fall a little bit over the last couple of weeks, and might continue to improve. So there could be better deals to come, but at least that's not a total ripoff. Novatech is a good seller too, bought a bunch of stuff from there, decent customer service as I recall.

Is there much of a difference for card X if its made by MSi/Asus/Zotec/Gigibytes etc.

I have enough credit at cex to buy a 1060 gtx 6gb or a ps4 pro....

At Cex its £325. Which i know is overpriced, but im not in a rush. i can be patient and wait for a drop in price hopefully.

I'd like a asus strix 1060gtx to go with my asus mboard.

Dinostar77 wrote:

At Cex its £325. Which i know is overpriced, but im not in a rush. i can be patient and wait for a drop in price hopefully. I'd like a asus strix 1060gtx to go with my asus mboard.

Yeah £325 definitely feels painfully overpriced to me, they can be had for £270-280 (new) just now, though I think you said you have CEX vouchers which I can appreciate. I would hope to see some substantial drops soon, so keep an eye out.

It's just such a big markup over what it should be, normally the midrange cards are the price/performance kings, but for less than twice that you can have a 1080 which isn't that far off being twice the performance..

This is how graphics options menus should be done -


Remarkably pretty game. Would like to play it some day, despite some of the nonsense AI that I've seen.

By the way there is a Folding@Home promo thing that EVGA has been doing for years, started running it myself for the fun and science of it - https://www.evga.com/folding/promo.asp

Basically you just run the folding software in the background on your PC, it simulates complex protein interactions, helping science to understand and combat various diseases and conditions. You join with the EVGA "team" number, then all the people using it contribute points to their total on a leaderboard. If you earn 2 million points in a month that's 5 EVGA 'bucks', 4 mil gets you 10 bucks. That converts to either euros or dollars which can be spent on stuff from their store, and I think you can collect a max of 120 bucks (after a year of doing it, 10 is the max you can get per month as far as I can tell). Would be enough for a power supply for a new build, a cooler, or a decent chunk to some future GPU.

If you have a particularly high end card such as a 1070/1080/1080 ti or similar, then you can amass the points rather quickly. A 1080 will apparently hit over 750000 points per day, so you can see that with a high end card you might only have to run it for a handful of days in a month to hit the 4mil. Plus you'll be contributing to actual science! Which is nice. Nicer way to burn some power compared crypto mining which is still rather dubious at this point.

I would like to point out that you should be reasonably familiar and confident with your system's cooling setup to run this, ensuring enough airflow so that VRM's and capacitors aren't getting cooked. As always HWiNFO is the best software to use to keep an eye on things.

Here's what the web interface looks like -



If you have it on full then you may notice some lag when using the system, but on low it seems to just use 40-50% CPU, and you can do other stuff no problem.

List of good games (and owlboy) to play on low spec pcs: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2018/04/03/25-great-games-you-can-play-on-laptops-and-low-end-pcs

Crap list; no Portal 2.

Rimworld and Factorio are the only games you need.