Who is the fanatic, really? Yes, it's one of those threads again

[gilang01]

the cheaper the PSU, and the closer you get to MAX capacity, the more voltage ripple you get.

As a rule of thumb when it comes to power supply, or even electrical installations. Never, ever exceed 80% of electrical conductive capacity.

Above 80%, you start to wear components in normal house installations. It will take years to show up, but heat buildup and the insulation on wires will deteriorate faster.

For powersupplies, it has a different effect. In their case, you end up with more voltage ripple. So the voltage spikes and dips more the higher the load.

Do you know why most AMD card vendors, like XFX, Sapphire, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus etc RECCOMENDS at least 650-750w for a R9 290x?. Sure, the 290X uses 375w in most games, maybe 400w in furmark. Add a i5 that barely ever exceeds 75-80w unless under full load where it MIGHT reach around 100w power consumption....

At most, these companies reccomend setups where you have, after accounting for RAM, HDDs, FANS, Pumps etc... still 150-200w in reserve... Do you know why? Because they need to offer some leeway for your system, but also because even if they managed to figure out that at most you need 550w in a rig using several HDDs and fans and stuff. That would be too close.

Most PSUs, even the good ones, really starts to wear itself out when they run 100%, because they never really is cooled effectively enough. And while overall efficiency may be within rated specifications, certain parts such as the AC to DC converters may run at a much much lower efficiency, or they may become very slightly unstable and cause rippling. And voltage ripples CAN KILL YOUR SYSTEM. Depending on the motherboard you are using, and the type of protective mechanisms the motherboard has.

So, those who build a PC with the aim to skimp a little on the PSU, maybe get a smaller one because they do not need lots of headroom. Think again, Real world power draw IS NOT what it says on the paper specs and often NOT EVEN what is shown in reviews. Usage, system configuration, hardware used impact things a lot....

So as a rule of thumb, if you can find a PSU that is 150-200w above what you need that doesnt cost that much more, OR if you can find a 80+ Gold or higher rated PSU within your pricerange, then GET THOSE. As once you start to OC your parts or get close to or over the 80% load limit on the PSU, the PSU may not behave like you think it would.

That's why people are being put off by the 390 and 390x (at least where I live).

[Prysin]

That's why people are being put off by the 390 and 390x (at least where I live).

because you gotta get a 600-650w PSU that in MOST CASES cost the same or less then a 550w one?

[gilang01]

because you gotta get a 600-650w PSU that in MOST CASES cost the same or less then a 550w one?

Prices depends on where you live, and budgets are tight. Real tight.

Here most people build from the ground up, mostly builds with small wattage PSUs (below 600watt) and mid range hardware. Once they have the money for an upgrade, they would choose the best performance they can get WITHOUT changing their system, because replacing units such as PSUs aren't cheap.

Prices aren't as low as the US... Add the low currency rate to the mix.. And you'll be spending more on a 390 and psu than a 970. Some people still buy the 390 though, even if they have to replace their old PSUs.

The 390 and 970 costs the same here btw, prices vary from vendor to vendor.

[Prysin]

Prices depends on where you live, and budgets are tight. Real tight.

Here most people build from the ground up, mostly builds with small wattage PSUs (below 600watt) and mid range hardware. Once they have the money for an upgrade, they would choose the best performance they can get WITHOUT changing their system, because replacing units such as PSUs aren't cheap.

Prices aren't as low as the US... Add the low currency rate to the mix.. And you'll be spending more on a 390 and psu than a 970. Some people still buy the 390 though, even if they have to replace their old PSUs.

The 390 and 970 costs the same here btw, prices vary from vendor to vendor.

If budgets are that tight. Just downgrade the CPU or GPU, get better hardware on average and OC it.... It makes no sense cramming things into a build, just to get it and skimping elsewhere, like PSUs, which are THE worst place to skimp.

 

Skimping on the PSU is like asking for a budget pacemaker. Sure it will work, but for how long, and how will it go out? With a fiz or a bang?

[D2ultima]

well, look at the bright side. Carizzo APU laptops are supposed to start shipping pretty soon (AMD has had HUGE delivery probs due to low yields of the super high density chips it seems)... Now, a APU that has onboard H.265 decoders on-die just to stream/play 4k media content... Sure, its a AMD APU, it will be good for gaming. But when 4k YT/Twitch streaming is also "enabled" by hardware features that save battery... man, that is a DREAM for laptop users.

I remember my old Fujitsu laptop... its so old HD wasnt even part of consumer products, but its still alive... Just trying to play 720p content on it sucked the battery out of it within 2 hours (when the laptop was just 2 years old)... Now, i cannot imagine a laptop having a good day dealing with 4k content when most of them doesnt even have a display higher then 768p....

Let's be honest here... NOBODY looking for a gaming laptop worth its salt is studying about 4K streaming content on battery, or 4K screens, or anything "AMD" (who, I might add, have yet to add a single new mobile GPU since late 2011).

 

We're trying to tend toward this: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5023396

and not this: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5432285  (it even has a 980Ti in this run)

Hell even my 2 year old laptop whoops it http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3489139

 

The whole performance and good card sector is being nothing short of gutted happily.

[Prysin]

Let's be honest here... NOBODY looking for a gaming laptop worth its salt is studying about 4K streaming content on battery, or 4K screens, or anything "AMD" (who, I might add, have yet to add a single new mobile GPU since late 2011).

 

We're trying to tend toward this: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5023396

and not this: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/5432285  (it even has a 980Ti in this run)

Hell even my 2 year old laptop whoops it http://www.3dmark.com/fs/3489139

 

The whole performance and good card sector is being nothing short of gutted happily.

I know that the 950m and 960m is trash and that only 970m and 980m makes even remotely any sense at all. However, those are not APU shots...

And carizzo isnt even out yet (well, technically it is, paper launch back in june, but no OEM parts out yet due to AMD being unable to deliver the chips)

, so you have NO benchmarks on it. That being said, Carizzo is aimed to bring gaming performance to the 400-700 USD market, not the 1000-2000 USD market. So expect Nvidia to get competition in the 950m and 960m sector...

[D2ultima]

I know that the 950m and 960m is trash and that only 970m and 980m makes even remotely any sense at all. However, those are not APU shots...

And carizzo isnt even out yet (well, technically it is, paper launch back in june, but no OEM parts out yet due to AMD being unable to deliver the chips)

, so you have NO benchmarks on it. That being said, Carizzo is aimed to bring gaming performance to the 400-700 USD market, not the 1000-2000 USD market. So expect Nvidia to get competition in the 950m and 960m sector...

Except that I don't have problems with the 750 and 750Ti-like performance of the 850M/860M/950M/960M range. In fact, those cards for the most part are fine. The problem is the terrible treatment we get otherwise, and in the high end sector. It wasn't like this before. 780M era was even considered something of a golden age. Then it literally just snowballed downhill.

[Hieb]

With all due respect, you are wrong, drivers are THE thing that makes the difference, remember when the 290X used to get beaten by quite a margin by the 780 Ti ? Well, it performs nearly on par with it now, beating it in most games, all due to, wait for it, driver updates.

 

 

The R9 290X will beat it in some games at 4K, but in most cases the GTX 780 Ti is better still by a healthy margin.

 

Again, can you find a source demonstrating 15.7 making a significant difference? That was my primary question, drivers in general not making a big difference is just a personal observation... the only driver that's ever made a noticeable difference for me or my friends was Nvidia's driver that improved DX optimization and reduced CPU usage (about a year ago I think?).

[incarnate]

Yeah coil whine was more frequent but isn't really that big of an issue... Actually it is a 256-bit bus, the bandwith is 224GB/s.

Actually it is a 224+32 bit bus. That's the reason the last .5 gb is slow. But that is just splitting hairs

[Dinkleberg]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1441?vs=1438 Not to mention that most, if not all, non-reference R9 290X's are clocked higher than the reference card's "Über" mode.

[D2ultima]

Actually it is a 224+32 bit bus. That's the reason the last .5 gb is slow. But that is just splitting hairs

It's not splitting hairs. Memory bus width + memory clock is how you find out your effective memory bandwidth (though you tack on 10-15% for Maxwell GPUs after the math). 224-bit memory bus * 1750 * 4 / (8 * 1000) = mem bandwidth in GB/s. 256 * 1750 * 4 / (8 * 1000) is a bit of a larger number here.

 

Don't take these things lightly. Telling me a card has 256-bit memory bus when it doesn't is not true. It has 8 x 32-bit memory controller chips, sure, but if they're not all connected they don't add up to 256.

 

Also, its ROP and TMU counts are lower than the 980's; they were previously thought to be the same. It's not that ROPs/TMUs make a HUGE difference for most gaming applications, but they do make a difference sometimes. It's why I don't let off the pressure of the 970. Anybody wants it? Fine. As long as they know what they're buying, and they're not allowed to complain about it after either. You don't have someone telling you that a kettle is hot and you decide to grab it anyway and then complain that you got burned.

[Hieb]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1441?vs=1438 Not to mention that most, if not all, non-reference R9 290X's are clocked higher than the reference card's "Über" mode.

 

Hmmm interesting. I'll have to investigate further. Most of AnandTech's reviews, especially more recent ones, have the GTX 780 Ti outperforming it.... not sure what the deal is here o_0

[Dinkleberg]

Hmmm interesting. I'll have to investigate further. Most of AnandTech's reviews, especially more recent ones, have the GTX 780 Ti outperforming it.... not sure what the deal is here o_0

I think Anandtech update their benchmarks after each driver update, I may be wrong though.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

No one's cheaping out on PSUs lol. It's just cheaper to get a for ex. 500 watt gold power supply than a 650 Watt one.

I've tried recommending the 390 and 390x to the folks at my forum but they won't budge. People here are all into the "green pc" image lol, not because the can't afford the electricity, but because they wanted to.

Plus the ambient temperature here are already high enough being smack in the middle of the equator, no one wants a heater in the house. My 280x turned my room into an oven hahahaha thankfully after switching to the 970, the temps are a bit lower.

Superflower PSUs have a pretty good prices... From what I see in rakitan anyway...

[Zulkkis]

 

The R9 290X will beat it in some games at 4K, but in most cases the GTX 780 Ti is better still by a healthy margin.

 

Again, can you find a source demonstrating 15.7 making a significant difference? That was my primary question, drivers in general not making a big difference is just a personal observation... the only driver that's ever made a noticeable difference for me or my friends was Nvidia's driver that improved DX optimization and reduced CPU usage (about a year ago I think?).

 

All of those are pre-Maxwell games. At least the Gamersnexus 980 TI benchmark and review shows that 290X is ahead in both Witcher 3 and GTA V when compared to the 780 TI. That's what people have been talking about.

 

To be honest a fair amount of the benchmarks are a mess. Some include the reference model of the 290X or 290 which just isn't the same card as the models with aftermarket cooling. It could be that some reviewers "got real" with whatever the model they were using to benchmark the 290X.

And on the other hand, the driver version in question can skew the benchmark results of a card quite heavily. Kepler cards might have had genuine problems but I also wouldn't really dismiss the idea that nVidia, since Maxwell, left Kepler optimizations very much in the backburner.

[gilang01]

If budgets are that tight. Just downgrade the CPU or GPU, get better hardware on average and OC it.... It makes no sense cramming things into a build, just to get it and skimping elsewhere, like PSUs, which are THE worst place to skimp.

Skimping on the PSU is like asking for a budget pacemaker. Sure it will work, but for how long, and how will it go out? With a fiz or a bang?

No one is skimping out on the PSUs, sigh. They just prefer getting smaller wattage PSUs because it's cheaper. That's why the 970 is so popular.

[gilang01]

Superflower PSUs have a pretty good prices... From what I see in rakitan anyway...

Yeah, but they're almost always out of stock hahaha

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

Yeah, but they're almost always out of stock hahaha

That would be your choice now wouldn't it? A golden green unit can easily handle the 390/x

[incarnate]

It's not splitting hairs. Memory bus width + memory clock is how you find out your effective memory bandwidth (though you tack on 10-15% for Maxwell GPUs after the math). 224-bit memory bus * 1750 * 4 / (8 * 1000) = mem bandwidth in GB/s. 256 * 1750 * 4 / (8 * 1000) is a bit of a larger number here.

Don't take these things lightly. Telling me a card has 256-bit memory bus when it doesn't is not true. It has 8 x 32-bit memory controller chips, sure, but if they're not all connected they don't add up to 256.

Also, its ROP and TMU counts are lower than the 980's; they were previously thought to be the same. It's not that ROPs/TMUs make a HUGE difference for most gaming applications, but they do make a difference sometimes. It's why I don't let off the pressure of the 970. Anybody wants it? Fine. As long as they know what they're buying, and they're not allowed to complain about it after either. You don't have someone telling you that a kettle is hot and you decide to grab it anyway and then complain that you got burned.

Ummmmm.... I was replying to someone saying it was actually a 256 bus and I was saying it wasn't. But ummmm ok. So it's not splitting hairs then

[D2ultima]

Ummmmm.... I was replying to someone saying it was actually a 256 bus and I was saying it wasn't. But ummmm ok. So it's not splitting hairs then

Yeah I was agreeing with how you said it was different; I was just trying to explain why it wasn't simply "splitting hairs". Too many people defend that card wholeheartedly.

[incarnate]

Yeah I was agreeing with how you said it was different; I was just trying to explain why it wasn't simply "splitting hairs". Too many people defend that card wholeheartedly.

 

Yeah. I mean hell, I'm a stalwart defender of the 970 myself. It is a great card. However, I don't like how nvidia wasn't upfront about the memory structure and all. That doesn't change how the card performs though. However i do agree with you that people should know what they are getting with the 970.