possible 390X availabity time?

[Heini]

Supposedly the new Radeons will be announced this week. If so....
1) How long before the reference cards are released?
2) How long before the OC'd, aftermarket cooler models follow?

I know anything would be a guess and maybe price sky rocket due to miners but please give me your
best guess because I'm so angry with nvidia I'm considering a 290X just for spite.

[elesde]

Personally I don't think the new cards will be released before April.
When it finally happens the reference cards should be available within the first few days since the cards themselves have been ready for quite some time apparently.
Custom designs should follow within a couple of months maybe even sooner depending on how long AMD has been waiting for the remaining 290 inventory to clear out.

Most of it is still speculation unfortunately 😕 Only thing more or less certain is that the top end cards come with stacked memory.
Do miners still go for GPUs these days? Thought they all switched to some sort of ASICs or gave up completely 😄

[Heini]

A 290X will be here in three days. When/if my current 980 (#5) goes I'm off the nVidia wagon for a while.

ps..... I don't know what the miners are doing, if anything. But I do remember what happened with prices
at the 290 series release.

[Korth]

I wouldn't rush into buying first-gen product releases, personally. Always full of teething pains, issues, and design flaws which later revisions correct. New memory technology looks great, but tradeoffs and drawbacks are not immediately apparent. I'll let others pay royal sums to beta test new hardware before I buy, lol.

AMD's roadmap statements are always cryptic, but they have admitted that refinements and revisions of proven 28nm GPUs will continue to be their main revenue staple throughout most of 2015. Next-generation AMD cards built around a new GPU design and smaller fab node won't be available until Q2-Q3/2015 at the very earliest, and these will represent only a few of AMD's highest-end cards until well into 2016.

I think this R9-390X is just the latest incremental tweaking layered onto ye olde R9-280X, HD8970, HD7970 designs - so I expect "ultra-enthusiast" performance gains to be as decidedly unspectacular on the 390X as it was with each previous rebadge. And I think AMD reluctantly revealed this card earlier than planned as a half-panicked next-day response to NVidia's TITAN X announcement - AMD usually rolls out whole product lines spanned across every market segment so they can sell more of their underspec silicon yields, announcing a single enthusiast product (while hinting at another) is not AMD's style. AMD is just not in a position which allows them to take too many risks, a lousy new product would shake consumer confidence (in this niche) more than AMD can afford.

I hope I'm wrong. I like uber performance, I like more options, I like competition-driven prices.

[Heini]

Korth wrote:
I wouldn't rush into buying first-gen product releases, personally. Always full of teething pains, issues, and design flaws which later revisions correct. New memory technology looks great, but tradeoffs and drawbacks are not immediately apparent. I'll let others pay royal sums to beta test new hardware before I buy, lol.

Don't worry, I jumped on the GTX980 wagon at it's start and I'm regretting it. That was the first and last time in one trip!

[elesde]

For me it was actually the exact opposite.
Went for a Gigabyte 7970 about 8 months after the series was released and prices started to drop. Of course GB by then switched from the reference design PCB to a custom layout with cheap voltage locked VRMs and a custom bios. Guess I should have done more research or sent the card back the moment I got it...
At least with a reference card you can cross flash almost any bios of the same design and are not dependent on the vendor to provide you with a "bugfixed" version.

But yea I totally agree that buying a product on launch day is a bad idea, especially since the launch reviews cannot be trusted anymore either these days.

[Korth]

I have always suspected that the product samples deployed to the media for reviewing are cherry-picked, exceptional pieces which aren't properly representative of the part run. "Look at this new processor/GPU/blender, it's the king of performance and OMGZ0rz it is teh leet overclocking pwnage!"

It's how I got sucked into a 5960X, lol. Silly me, expecting it to reach 5.0GHz with easy tweaks because that's what the reviewers accomplished with their samples.

[Vlada011]

Some reviews are still OK, I notice Techpowerup, they want to show everything and what people think about NVIDIA false advertising and now in middle of hype when people talk that every TITAN X OC on 1500MHz, they show model capable for OC only 100MHz, they could ask another sample as many people sponsored by some brands do. No they show what will most of people get.
Example for me that's only prove that I want stamp and warranty on something really good more than reference, better to say a lot more than reference speed. And if someone say You can OC, OK I will, but I want to start from 150-200 not 0 Offset, for luck and silicon lottery we will try more.
And on TPU site for me is easiest way to compare fps in games on different models and results in tests.
.

[elesde]

Vlada011 wrote:
Some reviews are still OK, I notice Techpowerup...

As someone on Semiaccurate pointed out they do have some weird practices as well, in the R9 290X review they test the performance bios with an undisclosed load covering up the fan with their hand.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/R9_290X/30.html

I mean seriously we don't know what kind of program is stressing the GPU (not furmark doesn't help) and then they show a graph with the fan being covered to simulate a higher case temperature. Imo that makes the test not only impossible to reproduce but also pretty worthless to the average reader.
That alone would probably not be bad since it shows the card throttles depending on load and temperature over time so benchmarks that last only a couple of seconds are quite useless.

The weird thing though is that they use an entirely different graph when it comes to NV cards: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_980/30.html
I for one would love to see the same time dependant tests done on both cards.

To get not too far OT it looks like the 300 series (at least the Fiji flagship) is going to be unveiled at Computex in June with availability shortly thereafter.
With so many delays we can at least hope for some mature drivers 😄

[Korth]

Smoke and mirrors, eh? I'm still of the opinion that AMD is rushing, they weren't ready, their product wasn't (and isn't) ready, they need more time. It's really hard to believe they have a working product when they do childish things like keep it locked under wraps, deny anyone from even photographing or touching the cards, and photoshop/obscure screenshots. Grownups would just admit they're not ready, lol.