Don Karnage
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- Oct 11, 2011
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For the record my link led to a photo of a cat!
As for OP I think it's obvious AMD's response will involve pricing.. it's not that 7xxx is a horrible product, it's competitive, just not worth more than the 6xx's. I'm sure there is a market for 79xx at the right price.
is 8 Ghz effective memory available?
XDR DRAM is a high-speed memory IC that turbo-charges standard CMOS DRAM cores with a high-speed interface capable of 7.2Gbps data rates providing up to 28.8GB/s of bandwidth with a single device.
I'm not sure about GDR5 but XDR memory has been out for years now. It just doesn't get used much partially because the company, Rambus, are douche-bags.
http://www.rambus.com/us/technology/solutions/xdr/index.html
is 8 Ghz effective memory available?
7 Ghz effective is the fastest gddr5 available last time I heard anything about it.
Surely AMD and NV's pricing strategy is determined purely by which will make them the most money? U say AMD can't drop their prices so easily because they are bleeding money in their CPU division, so therefore u are saying they would make less money if they dropped their prices? But Nvidia did drop their prices and therefore made less money then they would have done? Is there some award given to the company who sells the most video cards or something? Cuz I'm pretty sure that NV and AMD price their cards wherever they think they will make the most money and I put it to you that the shape of the company has no relevance what so ever to do with their pricing strategy.Why are you surprised? When NV dropped GTX460 prices by $20 the day HD6850 launched, AMD didn't follow suit. AMD has always been less able to drop prices than NV; they have a money-bleeding CPU division and their GPU division is only strong in gaming cards. Meanwhile NV's high-profit HPC/pro graphics divisions can subsidize their gaming division. Not to mention how AMD has tons of debt and NV is essentially debt-free.
You make it sound like AMD's going to release a magical driver update that will make everyone's 7970s run at 1 GHz. This isn't going to happen. Not without some potentially serious legal repercussions. Such an update would raise the TDP of the cards, and it could potentially kill a lot of hardware in cases that aren't designed to handle the extra heat. This would affect OEMs most notably.I think once AMD updates the drivers so that the 7900 cards run at 1Ghz or higher it will level the field on pricing. I'm seeing 7970 OC models for $450 and that seems more than fair to me.
Adding faster memory would also be a big help.
Yep, they would never do that. It's the bios that sets the clockspeed anyway. They could do it in the driver, but it's just going to be in the new cards' bios.You make it sound like AMD's going to release a magical driver update that will make everyone's 7970s run at 1 GHz. This isn't going to happen. Not without some potentially serious legal repercussions. Such an update would raise the TDP of the cards, and it could potentially kill a lot of hardware in cases that aren't designed to handle the extra heat. This would affect OEMs most notably.
Toyota is correct; 7ghz is the fastest gddr5 ram available. Even if their memory controllers, on the whole, can't handle 7ghz, 6.5-6.6ghz seems generally doable as things are now. The point is, Nvidia is going to *need* higher memory bandwidth if/when they decide to update & rebadge GK104 with some sort of respin and higher core clock speeds, otherwise (unless they make incredible optimizations that I am not technically inclined to understand) the performance gain with just higher clock speeds - as has been shown - will not scale well.
You make it sound like AMD's going to release a magical driver update that will make everyone's 7970s run at 1 GHz. This isn't going to happen. Not without some potentially serious legal repercussions. Such an update would raise the TDP of the cards, and it could potentially kill a lot of hardware in cases that aren't designed to handle the extra heat. This would affect OEMs most notably.
While my experience could be resolution related, the 680 scales much better from higher memory clocks than core.
Overclocking the memory gave me nice gains in FPS, core not so much at all. Totally different from Fermi. Also the memory overclocks pretty well, while the core does not, but that is because you can't give it more voltage over stock I assume.
The best 680s hit 1300, most are about 1250. It's pure luck of the draw based on the core you get. If we could put more voltage through them it would be interesting, maybe it would kill the cards though, got to be a reason the 680/670 has such draconian controls over voltage.
LOL @ OEM computer manufacturers using 7970's
Have you got your 680's under water yet? What are your 24/7 base and memory clocks?
41 degrees?? LOL! That is ridiculously low. You need to volt mod those suckers!
Water makes no difference for overclocking the cards. I had the same results on air with the difference being temperatures and noise.
Believe me I have been tempted. There is a relatively 'easy' way to volt mod the 680 if you have a ROG motherboard. Rather than a bunch of wires being soldered, you just just attach one that plugs into a voltage outlet on the motherboard.
It's a very, very tiny location that you attach the wire to on the back of the 680 PCB though and my soldering experience is encompassed by replacing two giant caps on the PCB for my LG246 monitor when it stopped powering on. That was a serious hatchet job that only worked because the points to solder were giant.
I don't have much confidence in being able to attach a wire to the very small location you need to without shorting it to the surrounding pins and killing the card.
I think these cards would really fly on the core with a little more voltage. I think you may be right though in thinking that the gains may not be that huge because the memory could hold it back. The memory is basically at the wall with current OCs. 7000mhz is about as good as it gets.