ASUS has today surprised everyone and decided to launch the first custom design of AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. Previously, the word was that AMD was debating with AIBs whatever to open the GPU to custom designs or keep it AMD PCB exclusive. However, thanks to today's launch, we now know that AMD will allow its partners to design their PCBs and push the Big Navi silicon to its maximum. So when it comes to pushing to maximum, enter the world of ASUS TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards, designed to fit in the line of ASUSes TUF principals.

Featuring a triple fan, triple-slot (2.9 slots more precisely )body, the graphics card is built around Navi 21 XTX GPU. This means that only the best needs to be brought to the card as it is a premium product. That is why the company says that "The TUF GAMING Radeon RX 6900 XT is a tenacious beast with a tough metal exterior, super-efficient cooling, and components that offer enhanced endurance." The built-in cooler offers 0dB cooler technology, meaning that fans will not spin unless the GPU reaches 55 degrees C temperature. The card is powered by two eight-pin connectors, so it seems that power supply requirements are not changed compared to the reference card. While the exact specifications are not known, you can expect the card to boost over the standard 2250 MHz frequency, as it is factory overclocked. Pricing is also not yet confirmed but a slight premium is expected as well.

ASRock has today published a new product on the company website. The new ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card is the latest addition to the company's offerings. Featuring regular, reference-designed PCB found in the Made-by-AMD (MBA) cards, the ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT even features all of the same specifications as the reference model: base clock 1825 MHz, game clock 2015 MHz, boost clock 2250 MHz, memory clock 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective). The card itself isn't changed one bit. Even the stickers found on it (which are usually AIB's logos) are still AMD's. The only thing that differs this card from AMD's offerings is the box that the graphics card comes in. That is the only part that features ASRock's branding. When it comes to the pricing and availability, we do not know when this card will arrive, however, assuming the reference PCB design, it will feature a reference price of $999.

PowerColor, the creator of the iconic "Red Devil" flagship designs of AMD Radeon graphics cards, has today posted a teaser for the upcoming Radeon RX 6800 XT GPUs. With their custom PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil graphics card, the company is bringing consumers their best engineering and design. Today, we are getting the first glimpse of what is to come. Pictured below is a backside of the GPU, with a dark metallic backplate, illuminated by the Red Devil logo. The teased picture shows a bit more of the card as well, where we can see the printed Red Devil logo. This custom design is expected to be a triple-slot and triple-fan design. With AMD reference designs being priced at an MSRP of $649, this custom card is possibly going to be pricier. Below you can see that the Red Devil has awoken amid the wait for custom cards to arrive:

Just a few days ago AMD has announced its Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards based on the new RDNA 2 architecture. While AMD has given out the "Big Navi" chips to its partners to design custom boards and give users designs with better cooling and possibly higher overclocking capabilities, that doesn't seem to extend to the highest-end parts. So far, we have seen custom designs from companies like ASUS, MSI, etc., and all of them have one thing in common - they only do designs for Radeon RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT. So one would wonder where are the highest-end custom Radeon RX 6900 XT designs.

The first wave of the "custom" cards will be on November 18th, when manufacturers will release designs that are MBA (Made-by-AMD), meaning that the PCB is a reference design, just with a custom cooler installed. When it comes to the custom RX 6900 XT cards, AMD is now in talks with its partners whether to keep the biggest "Big Navi" design available for custom designs, or to keep it as AMD exclusive, with the most likely scenario being the AMD exclusivity. AMD partners could carry the models in their stores and offerings, however, the PCB and cooler design would be AMD's. The situation is yet unresolved so we have to wait and see what comes out of it and if we are getting any custom designs of the Radeon RX 6900 XT model.

AMD is preparing to launch its Radeon RX 6000 series of graphics cards codenamed "Big Navi", and it seems like we are getting more and more leaks about the upcoming cards. Set for October 28th launch, the Big Navi GPU is based on Navi 21 revision, which comes in two variants. Thanks to the sources over at Igor's Lab, Igor Wallossek has published a handful of information regarding the upcoming graphics cards release. More specifically, there are more details about the Total Graphics Power (TGP) of the cards and how it is used across the board (pun intended). To clarify, TDP (Thermal Design Power) is a measurement only used to the chip, or die of the GPU and how much thermal headroom it has, it doesn't measure the whole GPU power as there are more heat-producing components.

So the break down of the Navi 21 XT graphics card goes as follows: 235 Watts for the GPU alone, 20 Watts for Samsung's 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, 35 Watts for voltage regulation (MOSFETs, Inductors, Caps), 15 Watts for Fans and other stuff, and 15 Watts that are used up by PCB and the losses found there. This puts the combined TGP to 320 Watts, showing just how much power is used by the non-GPU element. For custom OC AIB cards, the TGP is boosted to 355 Watts, as the GPU alone is using 270 Watts. When it comes to the Navi 21 XL GPU variant, the cards based on it are using 290 Watts of TGP, as the GPU sees a reduction to 203 Watts, and GDDR6 memory uses 17 Watts. The non-GPU components found on the board use the same amount of power.

In the anticipation of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs launch based on Zen 3 architecture, AMD has just released the updated drivers for its chipsets. Covering a wide selection ranging from B350, A320, X370, X399, B450, X470, X570, B550, and TRX40 Chipset, the updated chipset drivers include some bug fixes and new features. Now there is an updated power plan for AMD Ryzen CPUs that coordinate with chipsets, which means that AMD engineers have developed a new plan for Windows 10 OS which provides the best performance and power usage. You can check out the fixes listed below and you can go to the download link to install the new drivers.Download: AMD Ryzen Chipset Driver 2.10.13.408.

Summer is traditionally a season for togetherness - family vacations, backyard barbeques and outdoor festivals. Of course, all things traditional have been upended recently and the concept of togetherness has been redefined. As a father of two young girls whose job requires experiencing the latest Dell gaming systems and gaming titles, I've had to balance home with work. Sure, we might take turns playing our favorite games, but even in our cozy family ecosystem we all need space to do our own things. It's that recognition of individual needs that brings families together and makes me appreciate the Dell G Series even more - this is a product ecosystem designed for gamers at every level.

With its myriad of form factors, colors and configurations, the G Series stands out as one of the broadest selections of gaming systems Dell has ever offered. Its appeal parallels the strong growth of the PC gaming industry and the big tent of gamers it welcomes. What's consistent across the G Series ecosystem is the upscale design, performance muscle and great value - ultimately delivering the best gaming experiences without a significant investment. Dell is introducing the new G7 15/17, a powerful gaming laptop that stands out with its own sophisticated style that can easily go from classroom to gaming.

AMD's upcoming RX 5600 XT will bring about a much needed power increase over the current baseline RX 5500 series, slotting smoothly between it and the mainstream, high-performance RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT. New benchmarks spotted by Videocardz place AMD's upcoming graphics card (which could feature a 6 GB VRAM with higher capacities likely to be offered as well) some 35% ahead of the RX 5500, as well as on the overall performance level of AMD's RX Vega 56. That AMD card debuted at $399 and now has performance 8% to 15% higher than NVIDIA's current GTX 1660 SUPER, exactly where AMD would want the RX 5600 XT's performance to land.

Other details come courtesy of another publication, where Igor Wallosseck over at Igor's Lab says that AMD could be looking at harvesting the Navi 10 dies that power the company's RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 by disabling one of four Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACEs). These four ACEs are found two each on one of Navi's Shader Engines (SEs), and disabling one ACE and subordinate hardware from the full Navi 10's 40 RDNA Units, 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs), 160 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 64 render output units (ROPs) would make up for an RX 5600 XT with 30 RDNA CUs, 1,920 SPs, 120 TMUs, 48 ROPs and expected 3 MB of L2 cache. AMD could be looking to position the AMD RX 5600 XT in the $249 price range, since top tier RX 5500 XT tend to go for $200.

AMD today released a newest update to its Radeon Adrenalin driver. Dubbed version 19.10.1, the new release brings many new bug fixes and improvements to the table. For starters it will enable support for the newly released Radeon RX 5500 an 5500M desktop and mobile graphics cards, so now the buyers of these cards will have a driver from day one to start their experience smoothly. Additionally, support for the upcoming game "GRID", set to release on October 11th, is also included with this driver release.

Download the Adrenalin 19.10.1 Driver here.The change-log follows.

HP has listed new desktop consumer prebuilts that use previously unannounced hardware from AMD, namely the Radeon RX 5300 XT graphics card and the B550 chipset. B550 has been expected for a while — it's a lower-cost chipset for Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processors with reduced feature set. HP calls the chipset "AMD Promontory B550A" in their sheets which seems to be designed and produced by ASMedia (unlike X570, which is a fully AMD in-house design). One of the major differences between X570 and B550 is that the latter has no support for PCI-Express 4.0, which won't matter one bit in its target segment. This move not only reduces chipset cost, it also drives down the cost of motherboards significantly, as the more stringent signal integrity requirements for PCIe 4.0 won't apply here.

While we have heard rumors that AMD is working on a smaller chip for their "Navi" architecture (Navi 12 and Navi 14), it's uncertain whether RX 5300 XT is really based on Navi, or whether it will be yet another rebrand — we wouldn't be surprised if Polaris is making a comeback yet again. Both systems are listed for € 699 and € 899, with shelf availability expected for October 8th.

Alphacool today introduced two new products to their Aurora lineup. The first is a waterblock that has been especially designed for the RX5700 graphics card. The waterblock features a nickel-plated base and a Radeon RX illuminated logo. It has been designed with a thinner 1 mm heat conduction pads for better performance, and the full copper cooling block has also had a 1 mm shave in materials for better performance.

Concurrently, Alphacool also announced a cooling solution for your system's RAM. The Aurora Plexi can support up to four memory modules., and adds a stop to your watercooling system's flow that removes heat from your operating DRAM. The material is the usual nickel-plated copper, and the Aurora Plexi features compatibility with Alphacool's D-RAM cooling modules. The RX5700 Aurora waterblock will be available for €109.95, while the Aurora Plexi DDR cooling kit will go for €54.95.

ASRock will be showing the world's first Thin Mini-ITX form factor - RX570TM-ITX/TBT graphics card, which adapts with AMD Radeon RX570 graphics card and supports Intel Thunderbolt 3 technology. The RX570TM-ITX/TBT graphics card is not only the first graphics card with a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C interface which supports 40Gb/s transfer rate and power delivery, but it also features 4 USB 3.1 Gen1 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and SATA 6Gb/s interface.
The RX570TM-ITX/TBT graphics card is based on the Thin Mini-ITX concept. With this graphics card, All-in-One PC manufacturers can develop their own Thunderbolt monitors with 3D performance and power charging with less effort. Moreover, it would be able to fit in a mini ITX chassis. By connecting a notebook through Thunderbolt 3 Type-C interface, it helps to increase the notebook's 3D computing power and charge the notebook at the same time.

AMD today made available the latest version of their Radeon software drivers, Adrenalin Edition 18.11.2, for supported graphics solutions. This brings with it support for the hotly anticipated Battlefield V game title, as well as some fixes to issues that users have been awaiting. Driver software notifications no longer list erroneously the current installed driver version and, more importantly, the annoying bug affecting some RX Vega users of elevated memory clocks even during system idle states has been resolved.

The driver also brings with it support for a Vulkan extension, VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior, that "allows controlling whether explicit overallocation beyond the device memory heap sizes is allowed or not" as AMD puts it themselves. Things are not all rosy, however, with known issues including potential crashing of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey at some locations on Windows 7 systems and possible mouse lag with multi-display setups with at least one display enabled but powered off. This is disappointing considering an older driver update from September had seemingly fixed it too. The drivers are up for download at the link below, hosted directly on TechPowerUp for your convenience, and the change log is available past the break for those interested.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.11.2

As the expected November 15th release date for AMD's Radeon RX 590 inches closer, more leaks of AIB cards have started trickling in. Sapphire's Radeon RX 590 NITRO+ is just the latest to appear. Much like the ASUS ROG STRIX version leaked earlier, Sapphire design is using a hefty cooler for what amounts to a mid-range graphics card. The design looks to be the exact same as their RX 580 NITRO+ with just a fresh coat of paint to spruce things up. They are using the same shroud, dual fans, large aluminum heatsink, and full cover backplate on both graphics cards. That said, the change to a bright blue shroud gives the RX 590 NITRO+ a unique appearance that should at the very least help it stand out against its more mundane black and white designs of the competition.

In regards to actual specifications, the RX 590 features the same 2304 Stream processors, 144 TMUs (texture mapping units), and 32 ROPS (render output units) as the RX 580. This is because the Polaris 30 design used in the RX 590 is just a die shrink of Polaris 20 used in the RX 580. Obviously with a die shrink typically comes improved performance, usually via higher clock speeds. Currently, the final clock speeds for Sapphire's Radeon RX 590 NITRO+ are not known. However, if the rumored reference boost clock of 1545 MHz is correct, an overclock pushing that a step further is likely. Meaning performance should be improved compared to what we have seen in variousleaks thus far.

Thanks to some photographs by Andreas Schilling, of HardwareLuxx, it is now confirmed that AMD's Radeon RX 590 will make use of the 12 nm FinFET process. The change from 14 nm to 12 nm FinFET for the RX 590 brings with it the possibility of both higher clock speeds and better power efficiency. That said, considering it is based on the same Polaris architecture used in the Radeon RX 580 and 570, it remains to be seen how it will impact AMDs pricing in regards to the product stack. Will there be a price drop to compensate, or will the RX 590 be more expensive? Since AMD has already made things confusing enough with its cut down 2048SP version of RX 580 in China, anything goes at this point.

AMD is giving final touches to the new Radeon RX 500X-series graphics cards. Product page placeholders for RX 580X, RX 570X, RX 560X, and RX 550X surfaced on AMD website. The specifications tabs on these pages are blank, so there's no official information on what the "X" denotes. It's curious to see AMD give the extension to even lower-end SKUs such as the RX 560 and RX 550.

The company has, in the past, come up with extensions such as "D" to denote OEM-specific SKUs with different specifications than the retail-channel (AIB) products. Going by the convention of "X" denoting higher performance on certain AMD Ryzen processor SKUs, the RX 500X series could have one of several improvements - a new silicon fabrication process facilitating a clock-speed bump, or faster memory, or even some speed boosting feature similar to Ryzen XFR (extended frequency range). We'll know soon enough.

Remember that awesome Vega Holocube that made its way around the web some time ago? How it looked like a über-cool tachometer of sorts for GPU utilization. Well, as you might have noticed, AMD's RX Vega pricing is extremely competitive in regards to the technology they offer on-board; this, coupled with AMD's play for a higher price-performance ratio than the competition, means that AMD is left with less wiggle room for bundling this kind of extras with their RX Vega graphics cards.

However, AMD has released a statement, which while confirming the sad news of no Holocube bundling or availability to accompany RX Vega's launch come August, leaves the door open for a later-in-time launch. The statement reads "AMD appreciates the excitement and curiosity surrounding the Radeon Holocube. The Radeon Holocube was developed as a prototype and at this time, it is one of very few that exist in the world. The Holocube will not be shipping with Radeon RX Vega in August." You can check some videos of the Holocube in action after the break.

Videocardz is running a story where some of their sources have seemingly confirmed the Radeon RX Vega model's codenames according to the particular GPU that's being run, with some juicy extra tidbits for your consumption pleasure. Naturally, as Videocardz themselves put it, codenames be codenames, and are always subject to change.

However, what is arguably more interesting is the supposed segregation between models. Apparently, the RX Vega XTX is the same GPU that ticks inside AMD's Vega Frontier Edition, only with a reference water cooling solution attached to it. They report that the board should pull in 375 W of power, with the GPU pulling in 300 W of those. The Vega XT will reportedly be a more mundane air-cooled version of the graphics card, as are the until-now launched Frontier Edition versions of it (with a reduced 285 W board power, with the ASIC now pulling 220 of those watts.) The most interesting point, though, is the Vega XL. Videocardz is reporting that this will be a cut-down version of the Vega XTX and Vega XT's 4096 Stream Processors, down to 3584 Stream Processors, and that it will be sold exclusively in custom variants designed by AMD's AIB partners. Board power and ASIC power are the same as the Vega XT version, though, which seems strange, considering the not insignificant cut down in graphics processing resources. It is unclear as of yet the amount of HBM 2 memory the AIB-exclusive Vega XL will carry, but the Vega XTX and Vega XT should both deliver 8 GB of it.

In a bid to increase interest and feed the Radeon rebels with hope for their latest high-performance GPU architecture, AMD is beginning a celebration of sorts, a road trip that will span two continents. Now this community tour won't be a non-stop travel and showcase - it's really only going to stop in two places. Still, AMD will be giving those lucky enough to be in attendance a chance to visit their Radeon RX Vega Experience area, where you'll be able to game on the upcoming graphics card and take in the experience, trade-show-style.

The first stop is in the old continent: the Radeon Experience will be setting up shop in the Akvárium Klub in Budapest, Hungary, from 2 to 7 CET. Then, the Radeon team will travel across the pond towards the USA, more specifically, towards PDXLAN in Portland, from July 21st to July 23rd. Finally, the last stop is one we knew about already: SIGGRAPH in the City of Angels. As we knew, they confirm that "Details on the Radeon RX Vega are coming during SIGGRAPH 2017, so you'll want to pay attention to what's happening during this technology summit taking place in the last week of July." So now you know. Are you going to go out of your way to attend?

Disclaimer things first: take this with a grain of salt, since this hasn't seen the amount of confirmations we'd like. 3D Center has come out with a table that supposedly demonstrates the schedule of RX Vega manufacturing and integration work from AMD's add-in-board partners (which includes the likes of Sapphire, XFX, PowerColor, and others.) Remember that manufacturers receive a suggested reference design from AMD as to how to incorporate their GPUs into an actually operable graphics card, with varying degrees of customization according to the particular partner we're talking about. And this process takes time.

According to the leaked schedule, the BOM (Bill Of Materials) for the required parts to properly manufacture an RX Vega graphics card was to be released sometime in June, with engineering validation tests going through the end of June towards the beginning of this month (July.) Actual working samples from AIB partners are scheduled to be available in the middle of this month, with product validation tests (PVT) stretching towards the beginning of August (you'll remember AMD has confirmed they'll be formally announcing the RX Vega graphics card(s) at SIGGRAPH 2017, which stretches through July 30th and August 3rd.)

New benchmarks of an RX Vega engineering sample video card have surfaced. There have been quite a few benchmarks for this card already, which manifests with the 687F:C1 identifier. The new, GTX 1080 beating benchmark (Gaming X version, so a factory overclocked one) comes courtesy of 3D Mark 11, with the 687F:C1 RX Vega delivering 31,873 points in its latest appearance (versus 27,890 in its first). Since the clock speed of the 687F:C1 RX Vega has remained the same throughout this benchmark history, I think it's fair to say these improvements have come out purely at the behest of driver and/or firmware level performance improvements.

AMD's Raja Koduri, leader of the company's Radeon Technologies Group, has somewhat informally confirmed on Twitter the overall die size of AMD's Vega chips. After PC Perspective updated their prognosis regarding Vega's die-size to a beefier 512 mm², Twitter users plied Raja Koduri with questions regarding this subject. Koduri declined to answer directly, actually opting for a somewhat cryptic response, in that " (...) the answer [to Vega's die-size] is the closest perfect square number actually:)".

For the math-savvy around here (or even just for those of you who have read the headline), that particular equation should solve towards a perfect 484 mm² die area. Good news for AMD: this isn't the company's biggest die-size in consumer GPUs ever. That dubious honor goes to the company's Fiji XT silicon which powered the company's R9 Fury X, coming in at a staggering 596 mm² in the 28 nm process. For comparison, AMD's current Polaris 20 XTX-based RX 580 chip comes in at slightly less than half the confirmed RX Vega's die-size, at a much more yield-friendly 232 mm². NVIDIA's current top-of-the-line Titan Xp comes in at a slightly smaller 471 mm² die-size.

In a series of tweets, the official Radeon RX Twitter (and AMD employees) have confirmed what we were already told: that the gaming version of the company's Vega architecture would make its debut at this year's SIGGRAPH. Also, when asked about the Frontier Edition's (lacking) gaming chops, AMD's Jason Evangelho has come out with the warning that we all expected, and that we ourselves conveyed here: "it's premature to worry about a product's gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming."

We've waited a long time already, why not just a few more days? SIGGRAPH will take place between July 30th and August 3rd.

It's here. The Radeon Vega that's not for gamers, that is. After what seems like a year of waiting forward to AMD's next generation GPU architecture, so it has finally appeared. As we all knew was going to be the case, Vega's first foray in the market is geared at the more profitable professional sector of the market. The good news for professionals: the pricing is lower than previously reported. Instead of the expected $1,199 and $1,799 for an air cooled or water-cooled version of the card respectively, AMD is commanding a much less demanding price tag of $999 for the air cooled version (available now) and $1,499 for the water-cooled one (to be available in Q3.)

One thing that deserves to be placed before the break is a software feature of the new Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards: AMD has changed their driver scheme into a single-package installer (available in the source), with both the professional-geared drivers, and the gaming ones as well. This means that after all that Raja Koduri told us to wait for AMD's consumer, gaming-oriented RX Vega graphics cards, these will probably work just as well for gaming as for professional workloads.