AMD Cashes in On GTX 970 Drama, Cuts R9 290X Price

[btarunr]

But the game is stored in your PC so technically you bought him. Also physical copies have to be activated through Steam.

Technically you don't buy the game. You buy the license (a permission) to play the game. The physical copy is a piece of plastic containing the software. You pay money for the license. Just because the software is on your hard drive doesn't mean you bought it.

Look at it this way. You don't buy a passport from your government, you apply for it, you pay the required fees, and then they give you a passport TO HOLD. Your government still OWNS your passport. Same with credit cards. Your bank OWNS your credit card. When you buy games on Steam, or buy a physical copy, and you have it installed, you're HOLDING the software, along with a LICENSE to use it. You don't own the game, even if it came in a $200 collector's edition set with a gold disc, sitting on a satin pillow, in an expensive wood box.

That's why you can't compare Steam purchases with graphics card purchases. It's a tangible commodity that isn't subject to any EULA. You buy it, and then you can use it to play games, watch videos, create CGI, or use as paperweight (like W1zzard does).

 

[RejZoR]

Thanks for the link. It seems to tell a similar story as the Newegg reviews, with the Nvidia cards getting fewer returns:


- Radeon HD 7850 : 2,69%
- Radeon HD 7870 : 12,45%
- Radeon HD 7950 : 5,32%
- Radeon HD 7970 : 7,24%

- GeForce GTX 560 Ti : 1,43%
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti : 3,06%
- GeForce GTX 670 : 3,42%
- GeForce GTX 680 : 2,66%

- Radeon HD 7850 : 3,74%
- Radeon HD 7870 : 5,48%
- Radeon HD 7870 XT : 4,25%
- Radeon HD 7950 : 5,75%
- Radeon HD 7970 : 5,31%

- GeForce GTX 660 : 1,01%
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti : 2,81%
- GeForce GTX 670 : 2,87%
- GeForce GTX 680 : 1,99%

The Pudget Systems results were very unfavorable to AMD for initial reliability, but that was a small sample size.



I don't know if it is heavy, but not super light either. There is +8W in idle. The 290x uses 67W more just running a bluray, and ~100W more in typical gaming. If I gamed for 2hr/day and watched 2hr/day of video that would be an average of 14W, or 22W total adding the idle consumption, or $22/yr. Maybe $50 in two years is a bit much but it isn't that crazy either.

I'd take these statistics with a pinch of salt without knowing why users actually returned them. I've returned my HD7870 Toxic as well, because it was loud as hell despite their famous VaporX cooler (could be defective, I don't know). And bought a HD7950 afterwards. Meaning the card wasn't returned because the chip performance was flawed (it was in fact really fast), it was because Sapphire somehow managed to fuck up the cooling on that particular model. The current HD7950 WindForce3X is by far the best card I've owned in years despite also having few minor issues.

 

[Devon68]

This is what makes me kind of mad and said at the same time:
1 card cost's 300$ converted into my countries currency it's:
300 dollars is = 25560.06 rsd
25560.06 rsd x2 is = 51120.12 rsd

and this is how much one card cost's in my country:
http://www.winwin.rs/racunari-i-kom...vi-hdmi-dp-512bit-gv-r929xoc-4gd-1189519.html

BTW the price in red is the price if you order it online
the green is the price if you want to buy it from the shop.

 

[64K]

This is what makes me kind of mad and said at the same time:
1 card cost's 300$ converted into my countries currency it's:
300 dollars is = 25560.06 rsd
25560.06 rsd x2 is = 51120.12 rsd

and this is how much one card cost's in my country:
http://www.winwin.rs/racunari-i-kom...vi-hdmi-dp-512bit-gv-r929xoc-4gd-1189519.html

BTW the price in red is the price if you order it online
the green is the price if you want to buy it from the shop.

Yikes, the online price is 52,000 din. That's about $476 US. I doubt that the difference is solely due to an import tariff. I would be mad too.

 

[rruff]

Yikes, the online price is 52,000 din. That's about $476 US. I doubt that the difference is solely due to an import tariff. I would be mad too.

Weird things is, being in the US I can buy stuff from overseas, doesn't matter what country, and I don't pay any tariff or extra fee. But I also sell stuff overseas, and in every case the country I ship to requires a hefty tariff or tax. Like 30% or so. Even shipping to poor countries. I thought "free trade" was supposed to go both ways?

 

[Hyphen]

Today's "Daily Deal Slasher" over at TigerDirect is this card at $300.

 

[rruff]

Meaning the card wasn't returned because the chip performance was flawed (it was in fact really fast), it was because Sapphire somehow managed to fuck up the cooling on that particular model.

Those sort of defects are not specific to AMD, but there seems to be a consistent trend of defects of some sort being higher with AMD cards. Maybe driver related?

 

[TRWOV]

I'd take these statistics with a pinch of salt without knowing why users actually returned them. I've returned my HD7870 Toxic as well, because it was loud as hell despite their famous VaporX cooler (could be defective, I don't know). And bought a HD7950 afterwards. Meaning the card wasn't returned because the chip performance was flawed (it was in fact really fast), it was because Sapphire somehow managed to fuck up the cooling on that particular model. The current HD7950 WindForce3X is by far the best card I've owned in years despite also having few minor issues.

Also remember that AMD has a smaller user base so 1 AMD card accounts for a higher percentage than 1 nVidia card.

 

[rruff]

Also remember that AMD has a smaller user base so 1 AMD card accounts for a higher percentage than 1 nVidia card.

Been looking at percentages.

 

[GhostRyder]

Thanks for the link. It seems to tell a similar story as the Newegg reviews, with the Nvidia cards getting fewer returns:


- Radeon HD 7850 : 2,69%
- Radeon HD 7870 : 12,45%
- Radeon HD 7950 : 5,32%
- Radeon HD 7970 : 7,24%

- GeForce GTX 560 Ti : 1,43%
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti : 3,06%
- GeForce GTX 670 : 3,42%
- GeForce GTX 680 : 2,66%

- Radeon HD 7850 : 3,74%
- Radeon HD 7870 : 5,48%
- Radeon HD 7870 XT : 4,25%
- Radeon HD 7950 : 5,75%
- Radeon HD 7970 : 5,31%

- GeForce GTX 660 : 1,01%
- GeForce GTX 660 Ti : 2,81%
- GeForce GTX 670 : 2,87%
- GeForce GTX 680 : 1,99%

The Pudget Systems results were very unfavorable to AMD for initial reliability, but that was a small sample size.



I don't know if it is heavy, but not super light either. There is +8W in idle. The 290x uses 67W more just running a bluray, and ~100W more in typical gaming. If I gamed for 2hr/day and watched 2hr/day of video that would be an average of 14W, or 22W total adding the idle consumption, or $22/yr. Maybe $50 in two years is a bit much but it isn't that crazy either.

Your talking about a very small difference in returns though comparing both with one exception in that test. Not enough to really count as severe differences in reliability besides one out of the bunch in that chart (Which can be seen going back on different models of cards from both sides). Problem with most failures still is as stated by others it depends on why they were returned more than anything because cooler malfunctions or many other reasons including things that are not the cards fault. I have met many people who return cards for random reasons as being faulty when it turns out to be their fault and those returns are calculated into many statistics counting it as faulty because the card has to go through a testing process/refurb process before it can be sold or used again. Again we can say that both sides get those problems but AMD tends to get a brunt of it more than others because many people tend to blame AMD/The card first before checking for other issues because that is how they get labeled on the internet. You see a dozen posts regarding a certain problem with a card, that must be what's causing your issues right? Same thing will happen with the GTX 970 unfortunately where the VRAM problem will be associated from this point on with every problem a user faces which in many cases will not be the case.

As far as wattage goes though, I can say that $22 a year is still asking a lot for a power difference between cards though. I can tell you I have 3 R9 290X cards, I game at 4K pretty often when I am not working including BF4, LoL (Though that only uses 1 card), and others and my electric bill has not gone up at least that I have noticed from my last couple of builds. But then again I have had Dual HD 6990's, 2 GTX 580's, 2 GTX 460's, 2x GTX 295 (Dual PCB variants), etc so maybe I am a bad matchup for that however power usage generally on computers while one can use significantly more than another under load those loads fluctuate so much on top of the fact that while the numbers sounds high in the grand scheme comparing to most other household appliances (Even just lighting) it really is not as much as you would think.

Also remember that AMD has a smaller user base so 1 AMD card accounts for a higher percentage than 1 nVidia card.

But there are a lot more OEM machines with NVidia inside than AMD which is where a lot more of those numbers tend to come from especially on the mobile market. Many times as well those numbers when a machine is returned for a problem even if it is the GPU those numbers do not hit most of the polls when a manufacturer finds a bad GPU.

 

[efikkan]

Let's look at the simple facts here for a moment:
GTX 970 has 13 SMMs with a computational power of 3494 GFlop/s (75.76% of GTX 980), with a theoretical memory bandwidth of 196 GB/s vs. 224 GB/s (87.5%). When a GPU accesses a single tiny block of memory, it will never read it at 224 GB/s. A single block will be placed in one of the eight memory chips, where each one is accessible at 28 GB/s (on separate 32-bit buses). Let's say you have a hypothetical GPU of 32 SMMs and a 512-bit memory bus(total), loading the same single block of memory from one SMM will still be just as slow as on GTX 970. The reason for this is the GPU allocates a single block on one memory controller. If you think about it for a moment, you'll realize why every single SMM can't load from memory at 224 GB/s, that would make the GPU extremely complex and defeat the purpose of a GPU processing different data as efficient as possible.

When looking back on GTX 970 and GTX 980, simple maths shows the GTX 970 has more memory bandwidth per GFlop (0.056 vs. 0.049 GB/flop), meaning in a gaming setting where each frame time is limited, each SMM has more memory bandwidth at their disposal than on an GTX 980. Even though each GPU can store 4 GB in memory, no game will ever come close to using all of that in a single frame rendering, and typical load is generally around 1.5 GB per frame or lower. So provided that the GPU/driver is smart enough to store appropriately in the two memory pools, the last slow 512 MB can be completely transparent to the end user. Heck, even if the GTX 970 had only 3 GB of fat memory it could still be achieved. Given the fact that GTX 970 has more memory bandwidth per SMM than GTX 980, GTX 970 is still less bottlenecked by the memory bus in a gaming setting. This is why the slowdown for GTX 970 vs. GTX 980 is negligible, and the slowdown we can see has more to do with fewer SMMs than the memory bus.

When using the GPU for computing(CUDA or OpenCL) the consequences of the slower memory might be a bit different, in specific situations where the program accesses randomly across all of GPU memory.

But for gaming, the GTX 970 still remains just good of a choice as two weeks ago. If it weren't for the specific compute situations, no one would probably ever notice the slowdown. Any any minor issues resulting from this memory configuration can be fixed in software (if any).

 

[newtekie1]

LOL

 

[The N]

AMD want to get in between Nvidia users and NVidia . so they can get something outta it. with effective meaningful advertisement. thats called, strategy. effective move to some extend.

 

[dj-electric]

LOL

Yup. Hypocrisy at its very best. The text there should be much bigger

 

[Jurassic1024]

For those who don't know, top-of-the-line CPUs and GPUs are cash cows with huge margins compared to mainstream models. Only enthusiasts or Biz buy the very high end, high margin products. Lowering the price slightly is a no brainer and will more than be offset by the increased volume. It's not difficult to do the math when you know the margins and volume.

Cash cows? Keep dreaming. The greater chunk of revenue comes from low and midrange. EVERYONE knows this but you?!

ie: Have you seen a Steam Hardware Survey... ever?!

 

[R-T-B]

Cash cows? Keep dreaming. The greater chunk of revenue comes from low and midrange. EVERYONE knows this but you?!

ie: Have you seen a Steam Hardware Survey... ever?!

He was speaking in a per GPU context. Completely different..

 

[SK-1]

Dang.... I just saw one for 229.00 after discount. I spent almost as much on a R9-270X less than a year ago

 

[HumanSmoke]

I'd take these statistics with a pinch of salt without knowing why users actually returned them. I've returned my HD7870 Toxic as well, because it was loud as hell despite their famous VaporX cooler (could be defective, I don't know). And bought a HD7950 afterwards. Meaning the card wasn't returned because the chip performance was flawed (it was in fact really fast), it was because Sapphire somehow managed to fuck up the cooling on that particular model. The current HD7950 WindForce3X is by far the best card I've owned in years despite also having few minor issues.

The actual answer in many cases, especially Sapphire, lies in the model number. A high number of the Sapphire cards being returned are reduced BoM models, where Sapphire had done stuff like putting the Vapor-X shroud over some pretty basic componentry in some cases (coil whine seems a large factor in some of SKUs). A keen eye would see that many of their reduced BoM cards feature the blue PCB, while the premium cards often sport the black PCB.
Anyhow, returns usually fall under two categories - failure or customer dissatisfaction. Whichever the reason, the numbers are pertinent to those who might purchase.
As an aside, those numbers are for an older timeframe. I actually aggregated the latest numbers from Hardware France in a post a week ago (I won't try to C&P here).

 

[RejZoR]

Interesting. I've never had any graphic card fail on me (neither AMD/ATi or NVIDIA based) if I exclude the HD5850 which i fried myself by fiddling with the cooling system. And then I at least had an excuse to buy HD6950

 

[HumanSmoke]

Interesting. I've never had any graphic card fail on me (neither AMD/ATi or NVIDIA based) if I exclude the HD5850 which i fried myself by fiddling with the cooling system. And then I at least had an excuse to buy HD6950

I had five HD 5850's. Started with two XFX Black Editions (returned one because of the GSoD issue, the other wouldn't hold the default OC), went with the three Sapphire Toxic 2GB - all three are still running strong today with their 2nd owners. Also had fails from a reference (XFX) 5970 which was a basket case from day one, as were two BFG GTX 280 H2OC's which hadn't been binned for the overclock they were running (a common BFG failing).
Of the machines I've been called on to diagnose and repair, most faults are from user error - assuming five minutes gaming is sufficient testing for a maxed out overclock. The largest card issues were from HD 4870's and 4890's, followed by GTX 280's running too high a clock, and those single slot 8800GT's with the cheapo 7-blade blower fan.

 

[RejZoR]

I've had a GeForce 7600GT to fail, but that was after I sold it to someone else. He called me that gfx card doesn't work (and I know it worked fine before I took it out of my PC). Luckily it was still in warranty when I sold it so he got a new one. I guess it was an issue with static electricity or something else that person messed up somehow. So, technically it wasn't NVIDIA's fault here either.

 

[AsRock]

I've had a GeForce 7600GT to fail, but that was after I sold it to someone else. He called me that gfx card doesn't work (and I know it worked fine before I took it out of my PC). Luckily it was still in warranty when I sold it so he got a new one. I guess it was an issue with static electricity or something else that person messed up somehow. So, technically it wasn't NVIDIA's fault here either.

Some times just replacing the user will solve the issue

Anyways, i have had 2 go wrong on me over the last 25 years. One was a 2900XT but that was my fault as i forgot to plug the fan on it to cool the ram chips top side which were overclocked as high as i could get them.

The other as on a XFX 4890 and when the cooler was put back on it the cooler would make a odd sound which was sent back to XFX and they replaced it with a newer series card and sent it directly to it's new user.

 

[rruff]

I actually aggregated the latest numbers from Hardware France in a post a week ago.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/927-5/cartes-graphiques.html

Good stuff. Definitely higher return rates for AMD cards.

 

[AsRock]

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/927-5/cartes-graphiques.html

Good stuff. Definitely higher return rates for AMD cards.

so they say, i have returned more nvidia cards than i have AMD, i had hell with the nvidia 7xxx range. Never mind the 4x0 range were on one the heatsink fell off.

Although it would not stop me from buying one, how ever i think it's more like hard drives some brands you have good luck with some others not so. I had my fair share of seagate and WD drives how ever seagate i have always gave e issues were as with some one else had bad luck with WD's.

 

[Ferrum Master]

What are those numbers? If only two 7970 are sold and one returned then RR rate becomes 50%, give me a break really.

There are not known manufacturing errors for both camps, and any responsibility should go to AIB partners anyway.