Damn it...
Time for an upgrade!
AMD has unveiled a massively powerful, water-cooled graphics card that it says "manhandles today's and tomorrow's games in maximum settings at 4K resolution." AMD R9 295X2 graphics card with cooling system Two fans and a closed-loop cooling system keep the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 from melting down "The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 …
How bout good stable drivers? I keep seeing reports of people having issues with AMD drivers.. Maybe they fixed them for the most part by now. I have been a Nvidia user since 1999 or so (for the most part Linux exclusive). Very few issues for me on nv over the years. I hear NV has issues too on linux at least on some bleeding edge systems (my desktop+laptop runs Ubuntu 10.04 with 2.6 kernel still). I do have one Radeon at home (onboard graphics) though all it does is a picture slide show (though it is stable at doing that - I did install the proprietary drivers on Linux in order to get HDMI audio working through the card)
@Eddy Ito - It's an interesting proposition. Build around the GPU rather than the CPU.
I like the fact that AMD have thought a bit about cooling and keeping the card quiet, often just a big noisy fan is the only cooling.
It would be interesting if the card's cooling system can be integrated with liquid case cooling setups, taking the liquid from the card to the case liquid cooling box rather than the GPU's cooling box. If so, using this as the base for cooling the CPU and memory would make for an interesting design.
"To be fair, if this thing eats around 500W, three of them eat 1500W"
I was being (mostly) facetious. But....total system power including PSU efficiency will be around 2.5 kW, before your screen (say another 300W). So like having a 3 kW fan heater on without thermostatic control. Use that in a room for any length of time and you'd need powered cooling anytime other than having a window open in a fairly cold winter. If the cooling system is aircon then you'd be consuming 7.5kWe to dump 2.5 KWth, making for 10kW continuous demand (in the UK average consumption is about 1kW - peaks are higher, but this system could still push the peak up by double.
Or you could use a very powerful (250W?) fan to change the air in the room. 2.7kW is still two and half times the average UK usage and the fan might not be as effective as you hope (because it is surprisingly difficult to actually clear the volume of air in a room by a fan). It'd be like sitting inside your PC.
I'm running a 7770 and it's doing me fine.
That said, I recently watched some playthrouigh of Metro Last Light, and as it's on Linux, I think my birthday present to myself this year might be a slightly newer GPU, now that the current crop of fast-as-feck and low power (in comparison to previous GPUs in watts-per-FPS terms) cards seem to have hit real world (IE sub £200) prices.
Don't think it'll be this though, seeing as the only other games I really play are half Life and Serious Sam 3, natch.
I have an x1950 Pro. It's done me well but it's starting to show it's age in the latest (and not so latest) stuff. But I rarely game any longer not entirely sure I will upgrade with anything > £60 when I get around to it as it's simply not worth it for my habit any more. $1500 is simply insane, that's more than my entire system cost when assembled back in 2007
Anandtech tested it in their standard overclocked i7 test rig, total system draw at load was under 700W under either gaming or Furmark (which was the only thing that made it throttle).
Given that an OC'd i7 can draw 90w by itself, I'd say the 500W figure is pretty much on the nose.
oh, and idle power draw for the system? Under 100W.
We've come a long way, baby...
One of the boxes here that i use as gateway/firewall and simple surfing has a venerable
Voodoo 3 .. One day ill change ( maybe ) but like for anything else the use drives the purchase. Nice card for those that can afford it but afaic , 4k can go to hell. Ill wait till all my gear is borked and 8k or 16k is in . The video quality difference between 1080 and 4k does not warrant shelving gear.
Most importantly, what's it's hash? Better than a pair of 290x?
Because no-one in their right mind buys an AMD card for gaming. For mining and gaming, sure :)
I use r9 270, since you can often get 270x performance out of them, if you're lucky 500 khash/s, for ~130 watts. Depending a bit on what undervolt and overclock you can get out of them.