Hardware
Ask GN 76: AM4 B450 Boards & What It's Like Working with AMD
By Steve Burke
Our Ask GN series was put on hold during the onslaught of Ryzen 2, Hades Canyon, and X470 coverage of late. We're back in force, though, with two back-to-back episodes. The second will go live tomorrow, the first tonight. For this week's episode, we're talking B450 motherboard expectations (and Computex), realistic ways the GPU market might make a comeback, review sampling, HPET benchmarks, and more.
Separately, please note that we are planning a livestream for 5/1 at 7PM EST. The stream will be hosted on our YouTube channel. We will be attempting to overclock Hades Canyon further than our current record of 4.7GHz. We're hoping to push closer to 5GHz, but power may become a limitation at some point. We've already posted preliminary results over here. Be sure to tune in for the livestream! It'll be a fun one.
AMD Updates Warranty to Allow Aftermarket Heatsinks
By Steve Burke
Some controversy bubbled-up recently when reddit, as it does, found its newest offense at which it could express collective rage. That offense was AMD’s CPU warranty, which had previously indicated that any cooler aside from included stock coolers would violate the warranty – not that they’d be able to prove it, if we’re being honest.
We reached-out to AMD for comment when this story went public, and received a response today that AMD had updated its warranty terms for clarity. The original language was meant to prevent warranty replacements for scenarios where the CPU had been damaged by an out-of-spec cooler (think: something like an LN2 pot, or the jury-rigging we do at GN). It was not meant to block warranty replacements for issues unrelated to coolers.
HW News - AMD Going DDR5, HBM for CPUs, & 7nm Challenges
By Eric Hamilton & Steve Burke
This week's hardware news recap primarily focuses on some GN-exclusive items pertaining to AMD's plans with system memory in the future, mostly looking toward DDR5 for CPUs and HBM integration with CPUs, creating "near memory" for future products. All of this, of course, is before the major Ryzen 2 review publication timelines on Thursday this week, 9AM Eastern, when you'll find still more CPU news to look over. Be sure to check back for that.
In the meantime, today's news covers memory stories, laptop updates, AMD staff changes, Spectre patches, and more.
Ryzen 2 Pre-Test: X370 & X470 Memory Scaling on R7 2700X, 1700X
By Steve Burke
AMD’s impending Ryzen 2 CPUs – not to be confused with Zen 2, the architecture – will launch on April 19, 9AM EST, and are preempted by yet another “unboxing embargo.” We’re not technically covered under these embargoes, as we’ve sourced parts externally and are operating independently for this launch. That said, as we’ve stated in a few places, we have decided to respect the embargo (although are under no obligation to do so) out of respect for our peers. This is also being done out of trust that AMD has rectified its preferential media treatment exhibited for Threadripper, as we were told the company would do.
Still, we wanted to share some preconditions we’re considering for test cases in our Ryzen 2 CPU reviews. Some of that will be covered here today, with most of the data being held for the April 19 embargo lift. We have been testing and iterating on tests for a few weeks now, updating EFI as new versions push and collecting historical data along the way.
The core specs – those regurgitated all over the internet, undoubtedly – will follow below.
The CPUs discussed today include (Amazon pre-order links below, although we never recommend pre-ordering PC hardware):
HW News - NVIDIA’s Disingenuous GPU Naming & “New” AMD GPUs
By Eric Hamilton & Steve Burke
The past week of hardware news primarily centers around nVidia and AMD, both of whom are launching new GPUs under similar names to existing lines. This struck a chord with us, because the new GT 1030 silently launched by nVidia follows the exact same patterns AMD has taken with its rebranded RX 460s as “RX 560s,” despite having significant hardware changes underneath.
To be very clear, we strongly disagree with creating a new, worse product under the same product name and badging as previously. It is entirely irrelevant how close that product is in performance to the original - it’s not the same product, and that’s all that matters. It deserves a different name.
We spend most of the news video ranting about GPU naming by both companies, but also include a couple of other industry topics. Find the show notes below, or check the video for the more detailed story.
Find the show notes below, or watch the video:
Ask GN 75: X370 vs. X470 Tests, Balancing Criticism vs. Samples
By Steve BurkeAsk GN 75 is an excellent episode. We had great questions for this one, including discussion on X370 vs. X470 benchmarking for Ryzen 2000 series CPUs (e.g. R7 2700X, R5 2600X), which we’ll get in to more detail with in the near future. As noted in the episode, we’re technically not under embargo for the Ryzen 2 CPUs, but we’re planning to hold our review until embargo lift out of respect for AMD’s decision to stop giving special treatment to some media, for this round. That said, we still talk a bit about X370 vs. X470 benchmarking in the Ask GN episode.
The other excellent topic pertained to receiving review samples and balancing hardware criticism – basically behind-the-scenes politics. Find the episode below:
Intel’s i9-8950HK CPUs in Laptops at 6C/12T, 4.8GHz
By Steve BurkeIntel has migrated its new i9 processor family to the portable market, or semi-portable, anyway. The i9-8950HK is an unlocked, overclockable 6C/12T laptop CPU, capable of turbo boosting to 4.8GHz when power and thermal budget permits.
The new i9-8950HK runs at a base clock of 2.9GHz, with single-core turbo boosting to 4.8GHz. We are unclear on what the all-core turbo boost max frequency is, but it’s clearly lower. TDP is rated at 45W, though note that this is more a measure of the cooling requirements and not the actual power consumption; that said, Intel’s TDP ratings almost always explicitly coincide with power consumption numbers. The 8950HK will move away from the quad-channel support of its desktop brethren, and instead move down to dual-channel memory at a base frequency of 2666MHz. Unlocked motherboards should theoretically permit higher memory speeds, though we are uncertain of the market options at this time.
NVIDIA Announces Dual-GPU TITAN W, New Weissman Architecture
By Steve BurkeRevealed to press under embargo at last week’s GTC, the nVidia-hosted GPU Technology Conference, nVidia CEO Jensen Huang showcased the new TITAN W graphics card. The Titan W is nVidia’s first dual-GPU card in many years, and comes after the compute-focused Titan V GPU from 2017.
The nVidia Titan W graphics card hosts two V100 GPUs and 32GB of HBM2 memory, claiming a TDP of 500W and a price of $8,000.
“I’m really just proving to shareholders that I’m healthy,” Huang laughed after his fifth consecutive hour of talking about machine learning. “I could do this all day – and I will,” the CEO said, with a nod to PR, who immediately locked the doors to the room.
NVIDIA Announces 18-port GPU Switch & "World's Largest GPU" at 32GB HBM2
By Steve BurkeNVidia today announced what it calls “the world’s largest GPU,” the gold-painted and reflective GV100, undoubtedly a call to its ray-tracing target market. The Quadro GV100 combines 2x V100 GPUs via NVLink2, running 32GB of HBM2 per GPU and 10,240 CUDA cores. NVidia advertises 236 TFLOPS Tensor Cores in addition to the power afforded by the 10,240 CUDA cores.
Additionally, nVidia has upgraded its Tesla V100 products to 32GB, adding to the HBM2 stacks on the interposer. The V100 is nVidia’s accelerator card, primarily meant for scientific and machine learning workloads, and later gave way to the Titan V(olta). The V100 was the first GPU to use nVidia’s Volta architecture, shipping initially at 16GB – just like the Titan V – but with more targeted use cases. NVidia's first big announcement for GTC was to add 16GB VRAM to the V100, further adding a new “NV Switch” (no, not that one) to increase the coupling capabilities of Tesla V100 accelerators. Now, the V100 can be bridged with a 2-billion transistor switch, offering 18 ports to scale-up the GPU count per system.
GN Takes 3rd, 4th Records in 3DMark Overclocking (#RIPLTT)
By Steve BurkeA few days ago, we ran our most successful, highest-watched livestream in the history of GN. The stream peaked at >5300 concurrent viewers for around 2.5 hours, during which time we attempted to outmatch the LinusTechTips 3DMark score submitted to the 3DMark Hall of Fame. This was a friendly media battle that we decided to bring to LTT after seeing their submission, which briefly knocked us out of the Top 10 for the Hall of Fame. As noted in this recap video, we're not skilled enough to compete with the likes of K|NGP|N, dancop, der8auer, or similar pro XOCers, but we can certainly compete with other media. We made a spectacle of the event and pushed our i9-7980XE, our RAM, and our GPU (a Titan V) as far as our components would allow under ambient cooling. Ambient, by the way, peaked at ~30C during the stream; after the stream ended and room ambient dropped ~10C to 20C, our scores improved to 8285 in Timespy Extreme. This pushed us into 4th place on the 3DMark official Hall of Fame, and 3rd place in the HW Bot rankings.
The overclocking stream saw guest visits from Buildzoid of Actually Hardcore Overclocking, who assisted in tuning our memory timings for the final couple of points. We think there's more room to push here, but we'd like to keep some in the tank for a retaliation from Linus and team.
More...
We moderate comments on a ~24~48 hour cycle. There will be some delay after submitting a comment.
Advertisement:
