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Wait for radeon 8000 series or buy a new build now?
Mellowicious
Member Posts: 11
in Hardware
Hi everyone,
I was wondering if it would be a smart choice to wait for the new radeon series, which is supposedly to come out in december?
Thanks in advance
Comments
Its really up to you if its worth waiting. Once the Radeon 8000 series is released, the 7000 series will go into low supply and the prices probably would not go down by much. The offerings for the Radeon 8000 series would probably not get good for 6 months after its release. I would probably be swayed to build now with a 7870. The performance improvement to the 8000 series will not be much, and the technology that comes with the 8000 series will not be used for another 4 years.
The benefit of waiting until the 8000 series is released is that the price of nVidia parts will go down. If you want to get a nVidia it might be better to wait. It also might be a good idea to see what is offered new with the series and if it makes it worth it.
The 8*** series cards aren't releasing in December. The current rumour is 2nd quarter 2013.
Without a new process node to move to, the Radeon HD 8000 series won't be that much better than the 7000 series. It will be like moving from the 5000 series to the 6000 series: a marginal improvement, but not a huge deal. Moving from the GeForce 600 series to the GeForce 700 series will likewise be a marginal improvement, but not a huge deal.
If you weren't looking to spend more than about $240 on a video card, then don't wait. Just get a system with a Radeon HD 7750, 7770, 7850, 7870, or GeForce GTX 650, 650 Ti, or 660 today, depending on budget and what happens to be a good value that day. (At the moment, the GTX 650 isn't and never has been, but the rest are available at good prices.)
Even if you were looking to spend more than that on a video card, I probably still wouldn't wait. On a larger budget, the interesting options are the Radeon HD 7950, GeForce GTX 670, Radeon HD 7970, and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Only if a top of the line Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition isn't good enough for you, and you want to pay $800 for a card that is 30% faster than that and has a 300 W TDP should you definitely wait. And no, I'm not kidding about the $800; the top GK110-based card isn't announced yet, but it's going to cost a fortune.
I should add that if you were to wait for the next generation to launch and you're looking to spend under $240 on a video card, the options will basically be the same that you have today, plus a Radeon card with the same price and performance as a GeForce GTX 650 Ti, another Radeon card with the same price and performance as either the Radeon HD 7770 or 7850 (not sure which, but no sense in waiting either way), and possibly a GeForce card with the same price and performance as the Radeon HD 7770 or 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti. And then everything else new will be more expensive than today's Radeon HD 7870 and GeForce GTX 660, so you wouldn't get it anyway even if you did wait. I expect current cards to continue to drop slightly in price as time passes, but realistically, most of the price drops that are coming have probably already happened.
Above $240, we'll probably see larger drops in prices for a given level of performance, as you'll be able to get the performance of a Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 670 or whatever without having to use a vendor's top GPU from the generation. For Radeon cards especially, that means you lose the GPGPU bloat and efficiency disadvantages of this generation's 7900 series cards.
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http://banglagamer.com/showthread.php?29108-ATI-Radeon-HD8970-to-be-released-in-this-December
According to this article, the 8870 is expected to rival Nvidia's gtx680 and the radeon 8850 is taking on the gtx670. I was planning on getting a gtx660 before I read this article.
These prices seem very low for that kind of performance and if it is only a month away I'll wait.
But if the information is not valid and the 8000 series won't bring that performance, then I'll just get the gtx660.
Consider the source. It's a several months old forum post on an obscure web site made by someone who may or may not know any more than you do, and citing a purportedly leaked slide that is unlikely to have existed to be possible to leak at the time.
Well, just because we don't have a new process node doesn't mean that we can't see some nice improvements. The jump from the 5000 to the 6000 series did bring us PowerTune in Cayman, which was a dramatic step forward. I may even argue it's one of the most significant advances in GPU technology in a long time. PowerTune lives on today in all the GCN-based cards, even though Cayman only lasted for that one generation (although it's development did lead to GCN).
However, in terms of performance, you were still looking at only ~15%, and that seems to be about the given boost in performance generation over generation, notwithstanding the feature set changes.
That, and I have no idea what changes the 8000 series will bring over the 7000 - rumors so far haven't hinted at anything major. Given that there is not really any buzz about it out there yet, I would guess it is still months away from launch. Usually we start to see leaked benchmarks and leaked reference photos about 3-4 months before launch, and some "official" statement about 2 months out.
You're right that a new process node isn't the only thing that can make a new generation into a big deal. Major architectural changes could, but that's not going to happen, considering that the 7000 series was already a major new architecture. If the last generation was badly broken (e.g., AMD Bulldozer, GeForce 400 series), then fixing it is a big deal even on the same process node, but the 7000 series was pretty good. If there are major new APIs to support, then that matters, but 7000 series cards already support DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4.3 (possibly only 4.2 at the moment, but 4.3 drivers are coming if they're not here already).
And as I said above, if you're looking for greater performance at the high end, then that matters. But to take your 6000 series example, if a Radeon HD 6950 was out of your budget, then what did you gain by waiting for the 6000 series? The rest of the lineup merely filled holes in the previous lineup (while two of the 5000 series GPUs continued to be produced and sold!) and offered modest efficiency gains.
Posted the wrong link. This is the actual source: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/amd_readies_new_flagship_radeon_hd_8000_series_graphics_card
my bad.
That's a fake, and it's not even a good fake.
2304 shaders / (64 shaders per CU) = 36 CUs.
128 TMUs / (4 TMUs per CU) = 32 CUs.
Either 36 or 32 CUs is plausible for a GPU chip (though Tahiti already has 32, so I'd expect more than that), but it can't simultaneously be both.
If we assume it's 36, we get 128/36 ~ 3.56 TMUs per CU. That's impossible.
If we assume it's 32, we get 2304/32 = 72 shaders per CU, which would make 18 groups of 4. That's at least technically possible, but AMD has had 16 groups of shaders per SIMD engine/CU/whatever else they've called it for the last four generations, and 8 groups for the two generations before that. 18 isn't such a binary-friendly number, which makes it highly implausible.
Decoupling shaders from TMUs is at least theoretically possible, but is extremely unlikely on the basis that it would give poor performance in exchange for no upside. Shaders and TMUs have to work together closely, and even a single shader will bounce back and forth between them. Both AMD and Nvidia have linked shaders to TMUs in their architecture for as long as they've had unified shaders--and they linked pixel shaders to TMUs even before that.
The page also claims a 250 W TDP, and 4.5 TFLOPS of single-precision floating point performance. You don't know how good silicon will be until you have it, and the slide claims that it was computed in March 2012. There's no way that AMD had working silicon back then.
The site also claims that it's 20% faster than "the current flagship part". Assuming you're talking about single-GPU parts, that would mean the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, which is just over 4.3 TFLOPS. 20% faster than 4.3 TFLOPS would put you a little over 5 TFLOPS.
Meanwhile, the site claims that clock speeds are unknown, even though it can be computed from other information that they give: (# of shaders) * (clock speed) * 2 = (# of FLOPS). The T in TFLOPS is just a metric prefix for trillion. Technically, architectural changes could change the 2, but it's extremely unlikely that AMD would, say, implement various SSE or AVX instruction sets in a video card, as that sort of parallelism is already built into the architecture. Besides, it has to be an integer, and no integer other than 2 gives a plausible clock speed.
And even if AMD did know all of that, why would they have made a marketing slide way back in March 2012? Fancy graphics are for marketing purposes, not internal ones. You don't need them to inspire your engineers.
Well in that case I'll be getting my build now, thanks. I hope you're right though.
http://www.4launch.nl/shop/#p-17-productid-112260
What do you guys think about this build by the way.
What build? Your link just goes to a monitor.
http://www.4launch.nl/shop/winkelwagen/71957
Sorry about that.
If that's representative of your budget, then you should definitely not wait for the 8000 series. Even if you were to wait, you'd probably still end up buying a 7000 series or GeForce 600 series card.
First of all, the 620 W version of the same power supply is a lot cheaper than the 520 W version:
http://www.4launch.nl/shop/winkelwagen/71957#p-4-productid-131549
You don't need the extra wattage, but if it's cheaper, why not?
The case you picked only comes with one fan. That's not what I'd want for a powerful gaming system that is going to put out a lot of heat. If you want that case, I'd grab an additional fan for it.
I don't think that buying an aftermarket cooler is spending money in the right spot while you're trying to cut back elsewhere. If you're going to give up overclocking anyway, I'd sooner put the money toward a higher bin of the processor:
http://www.4launch.nl/shop/winkelwagen/71957#p-4-productid-128955
That processor can't be overclocked, either, and the motherboard doesn't allow it, anyway. Intel's B-series chipsets are meant for business use, and also disable overclocking. I'm not sure exactly how the internal differences are, but it's probably cheaper for a reason. I'd usually recommend a Z77 board for Ivy Bridge, like this:
http://www.4launch.nl/shop/winkelwagen/71957#p-4-productid-128471
But if you'd rather save the money, that's all right, too.
There's no SSD, and I'd personally prefer to cut back on the processor (FX-4300 with an AM3+ motherboard) or video card (e.g., Radeon HD 7770) rather than give up an SSD. But that's a personal preference, and opinions will vary. Alternatively, if you're willing to spend more, than it's easy enough to tack on an SSD.
There's also no OS license.