Thinking of building a new gaming PC? Struggling with whatever random error your desktop is throwing up this week? Under The Hood gives you a quick and concise run-down of the most important things that happened to the PC master race in the last seven days.
PC Rumours: NVIDIA Will Unveil Their First Pascal GPU In April
The general consensus was that AMD would get first dibs at consumers in 2016 with their Polaris line of GPUs, but it turns out that might not be the case with a string of reports popping up over the last 24 hours suggesting that NVIDIA might beat them to the punch.
The reports come not long after AMD announced a substantial price cut to the Radeon R9 Nano to $849, and adds an extra touch of spice for anyone who was preparing for a GPU upgrade to go with their early adoption of VR this year. Techfrag ran with the supposed leak that NVIDIA would use the Pascal architecture (which is built on the FiNFET process) for all of their releases in 2016. Furthermore, the first of those releases will come in April.
AMD Drops Radeon R9 Nano Price To $849
AMD’s Radeon R9 Nano was the most interesting card in the company’s most recent graphics refresh — not because it was the most powerful (that’d be the watercooled R9 Fury X), but because it was the most efficient, and used its power in a tiny footprint that would fit a Mini ITX motherboard. Now, it’s had a pretty significant price cut in Australia.
Dropping from its original $1099 manufacturer recommended price, which was significantly higher in the real world after companies like XFX made their own iterations and retailers like PC Case Gear added their own middleman handling and shipping fees, the new official price for the R9 Nano is $849. We’re still seeing the original $1100-plus price tags all around the ‘net, but some retailers have reacted; Mwave, for example, has a Sapphire card priced at $799.
AMD Takes A Swing At Intel’s SysMark Benchmarks
t always fun when major corporations decide to publicly slag the other one off. So to help round off your day with a smile, let’s enjoy AMD having a good old whinge about benchmarks and bias towards Intel. The video starts out with AMD saying “why the Federal Trade Commission has required Intel to use a disclaimer” on the SYSmark 2014 benchmark. “Choosing the wrong benchmark could result in overpaying for technology or getting a less performing PC,” AMD’s director of computer client products, John Hampton, starts out by saying.
Hampton and AMD engineering manager Tony Salinas then compare the biased SYSmark benchmark with others they think is fairer, namely the work accelerated test in the PCMark 8 benchmark and a “set of scripts that walked through the office suite [of programs]”.