RichardF

Like that Nvidia sold a card with incorrect specs, OCZ switched the NAND from 32-bit to 64-bit without telling anyone in the Vertex 2 (leading to a big loss of performance and also a loss of capacity), and a leading ssd maker recently was found to have swapped out the controller it used in the drives it sent to review sites with the cheaper slower Sandforce controller?

I just read his latest comment. It sounds like his argument now is that there needs to be a database in the driver that has settings that are compatible with each monitor model. He says the differences between monitors is the reason why his modified driver won't work for most people. There is more but I think this covers the main idea.

No, they're bad. 1) They're still on 32nm which means worse efficiency. 2) They have far fewer transistors than Intel chips. 1.2B for "8 cores". Even a Sandy Bridge E quad has more with 1.27B. A true six core Sandy Bridge E chip has 2.27B. AMD's "8 core" chips sound massive, but they don't have very many transistors. 8 core Haswell E has 2.6B transistors — twice as many as AMD's "8 core" Vishera. There is only so much you can do with clockspeed when you're dealing with a chip that has so few transistors. However, Lynnfield quads have just 774M transistors and they're faster per core than Vishera even at a lower clockspeed! A 4 GHz Lynnfield quad will beat a 4 GHz Vishera in gaming benchmarks, and that's a 45nm chip with so few transistors: FX 8350, 4 GHz i5 760 quad (Lynnfield), 2.8 GHz Cinebench R10 single thread benchmark: FX: 4338 Intel: 4512 Dragon Age Origins 1680 x 1050, Max, no AA or Vsync FX: 139.2 Intel: 142 Dawn of War II 1680 x 1050, Ultra FX: 70.5 Intel: 70.8 WoW FX: 91.5 Intel: 89 Starcraft 2 FX: 47.9 Intel: 44.9 Now, keep in mind that the Lynnfield chip has no hyperthreading, is from 2009, and is running at a 1.2 GHz slower rate. FX is competitive with a gimped quad from 2009. That says a lot. I realize these are older games that are not heavily threaded like newer ones, but I don't have better benchmarks in front of me (using Anandtech's CPU bench). It still says a lot that single thread performance of a tiny old Lynnfield chip beats FX clocked 1.2 GHz higher, or is around the same performance. Lynnfield also has 7 MB less L2 cache. The one thing in Anandtech's CPU bench that FX chips seem to really excel at is 7-zip. I assume this is because each of the four modules has two integer threads and one fpu. FX: 23223 Lynnfield: 11641 Lynnfield also falls well behind when an app can take full advantage of the eight FX threads: Cinebench R10 multithreaded FX: 22674 Lynnfield: 15060 But, let's look at 4 core Haswell at 4 GHz... (4790K, 88W) Cinebench R15 multithreaded FX: 640 Haswell: 894 single-threaded FX: 64 Haswell: 181 Bioshock Infinite SLI, minimum FPS (1080p max, 2x 770) FX: 12.1 Haswell: 28.3 single GPU, minimum FPS FX: 9.6 Haswell: 28.6 Battlefield 4, minimum FPS (1080p max, 2x 770) FX: 63.6 Haswell: 82.3 If you have a water loop and can push enough voltage into an FX to get near 5 GHz then you can game at 4K relatively well because of GPU-bound scenarios. It won't be as fast as Haswell, but it's reasonably competitive with Ivy Bridge E (4930K). But, you're going to pay for the power bill.

I'd wait for the next batch of AMD cards to come out, if they're going to come out in the near future (unlike Intel's Skylake which keeps being delayed). If any of them are competitive, Nvidia may drop the price of the 980.

Perhaps some are, but the bandwidth for that last 512 MB of memory is horrendous in comparison with the rest of the RAM. Consumers shouldn't have been kept in the dark, especially given how important VRAM is to SLI purchasing decisions.

Very interesting. Something like this should be part of the standard monitor spec in the first place. We shouldn't have to rely on proprietary stuff to get decent 3D quality.

I am interested is trying a dual radiator setup similar to this one but with 180mm fans instead. Do you know if anyone has tried that? Eight fans seem as if they would be not only less expensive but also less prone to clicking. However, I'm not sure if the efficiency will be good enough to keep them at low enough speeds to avoid significant noise. Also, could you use a decibel meter to quiet the skeptics who say there is no way your system is going to be quiet enough? One other question... Do you think the flow rate from using two 60mm radiators rather than just one would enable a pump to run at a lower rate? Skeptics have said there is no way the pump noise can be low enough to manage to pump through two radiators at a distance like that, especially if only one of them is 60mm. Thanks.