With the RX Vega 56 and 64 release comes something new in the form of Radeon Packs. As the Radeon GPU range as a whole is suffering with stock thanks to the cryptocurrency shortage, this seemed like a good idea on paper to limit hoarding for cryptocurrency mining. Yet, I have to ask: Are they worth it to builders? Read on as I try and solve the Radeon Pack riddle.
AMD’s RX Vega, the gaming version of AMD’s long-awaited high-end GPU architecture, finally saw its release this month. While RX Vega 56, the smaller brother of the full Vega GPU, offered great price-to-performance compared to NVIDIA’s price-equivalent GTX 1070, the story is different with RX Vega 64 when comparing it to its price-equivalent, the GTX 1080.
AMD has launched a huge amount of disruptive hardware recently. Here’s the official Logical Increments™ analysis you have all been waiting breathlessly to absorb.
AMD first mentioned the Vega GPU architecture over a year ago, even before the launch of its Polaris graphics cards. It was slated for an early 2017 release, but due to mysterious circumstances was pushed back and back, theoretically coming to market in late June with a Titan X-style Frontier Edition — a prosumer Vega GPU-based graphics card starting at $999.
Now, it’s mid-August, and AMD has finally released the gaming-oriented RX Vega 64, with its smaller brother Vega 56 coming on the 28th of August. But how do they compare to the current competition, the GTX 1070 and 1080? Let’s find out.
The AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU
This year is a good one for the AMD CPU department. Starting from March, AMD has been throwing one punch after another at Intel with their Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 3 line-up of desktop processors.
Last week, the final uppercut has been struck with the Threadripper line-up of high-end desktop (HEDT) CPUs, going up to 16 cores and 32 threads in one package. Let’s look at what different reviewers have to say about the Threadripper 1950X and 1920X while comparing it to Intel’s current highest-tier CPU, the Core i9-7900X.
The Ryzen logo
Ryzen 7 released nearly half a year ago in March, with Ryzen 5 coming out a little while later. AMD has finally unleashed their lowest tier Ryzen 3 processors: the Ryzen 3 1300X, coming in at $140, and Ryzen 3 1200 at $110. Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 are considered the better buy for the general user, unless their desire is gaming and only gaming, in which case an i7-7700K is the better choice. It is now Ryzen 3’s turn to face off against Intel’s similarly priced dual-core hyper-threaded Core i3 CPUs.
With the launch of Ryzen 3 1200 and 1300X, we finally have a full range of Ryzen CPUs to choose from. Before you get building, you need to know what these new Ryzen 3s can do, and that’s where I come in. So read on to view some awesome PC’s for a tiny cost!
We all wondered exactly how Intel would react to AMD and the Zen architecture. Would we see a professional company, or would things get ugly? Read on as I delve into what on earth is going on at Intel right now.
In June, Intel released its new Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X CPU architectures based on the X299 platform. We talked about the current flagship 10-core, 20-thread i9-7900X, comparing it to the previous Broadwell-E flagship, the i7-6950X, and the AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs. Alongside the flagship 10-core, Intel released an 8-core, 16-thread i7-7820X, which costs “only” $599, compared to the previous $1000+ of last generation’s i7-6900K. Alongside these processors there are also the AMD Ryzen 7 8-core 16-thread CPUs, costing from ~$320 to ~$499, depending on the model.
