What a year it has been for us builders! Many have been hailing this as one of the best years ever. But is that indicative of the overall hype that has been thrown around over the course of 2017? Read on as I look back on the year that was 2017, and evaluate how the biggest releases have stacked up against their hype.
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.
With AMD’s Threadripper CPUs tearing up the rule book on the processor market, it’s now the RX Vega’s turn to disrupt the GPU market. Now, the question is, are the new RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 graphics cards good, and what sort of PC should you build with them?
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 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.