Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Sapphire R7 250 Ultimate - Completely Silent Gaming" video.

Hum, would it be possible to test this card in different cases? And possibly in an all passive (no case fan) build?
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***** It depends on the software running on it. You still get some single threaded tuff out there and some dual threaded stuff. For those the single threaded performance matters the most and the anniversary pentium will actually do well. Other things are well threaded with no single thread being overtaxed and keeping the others back. There the FX 8XXX chips will do well. DX12 games are likely to fall more into this category then DX11 games did. These processors also handles situations with heavy multitasking better. Both scenarios can cause bottlenecks. Both can outperform alternatives in specific use cases. Of course a 4 core 8 thread Intel chip is less likely to bottleneck then either extreme approach to processors. And that favours the pentium due to the upgrade path. That said I'm really looking forward to seeing the zen chips and comparing them with Intels finest in multitasking and other historic strong points of AMD chips.
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***** Actually, buying a anniversary pentium (they can be overclocked quite well) can be quite a good idea, it outperforms the i3s and even the lower i5s and i7s in some use cases. with a good OC) Of course personally I'm partial to AMD and also partial towards multi-threading so in both regards the FX 8350 serves me well. The anniversary pentium on the other hand would probably do just great in my mothers computer or the computer of someone else who just use their computer for light office work as it'll actually feel snappier then more expensive chips like the low end i7s as long as you don't give it too much work to do. http://www.anandtech.com/show/8232/overclockable-pentium-anniversary-edition-review-the-intel-pentium-g3258-ae
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***** The 1150 being a dead socket is kind of exaggerating. Fair enough there won't be anything new on it, but you'll get up to the 4790k easily and that's more then enough for anyones need for the foreseeable future. As for why not buying the 4460? Well, it depends on use case and price concerns. For some people the 4460 simply isn't worth their money there and then. And while the pentium might be unreliable it still have better single threaded and dual threaded performance then the 4790k in a lot of cases when overclocked if you get a good chip. (Fewer cores means less head produced so you can actually overclock a dual core more then a quad core in a lot of cases, that said the 4790k has some instructions the pentium doesn't and it has more cores, both features that speaks to its advantage) Also, believe it or not, but the price difference between these processors is actually a lot of money for quite a few people on this planet. And also, it's not everyone that need quad core performance. I happen to be one of the people who do need that (and more), and you too, but I know plenty for whom a i5 would be overkill but who would get a much better experience with this pentium then an i5.
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***** Sorry, but on intels side I very much doubt that we'll see any major performance boosts anytime soon. AMD with their Zen processor probably will have a major performance boost, but then they're kind of behind intel in single threaded performance anyway so they have a lot to catch up with. The expected single threaded performance of Zen is roughly on pare with haswell but hopefully with more cores and threads pr dollar then Intel. AMD also tends to be more open to taking risks with their designs and might introduce things like APUs with HBM and already have their first fully HSA compliant APU, that will probably give them an edge in some applications, potentially making the situation more complicated then just "Intel has more performance but AMD got better value" like it used to be... But in any case we're not going to see any significant boost in single threaded performance over what we got right now. What we'll probably see is that six core and eight core processors will become more common and that the iGPU will increase in performance as well as a continued reduction in power consumption. But I suspect that we won't really see much else change in that space... Perhaps more of a move towards SoC designs with more features on the chip and less on the motherboard itself. But even there you're running into issues. Processor node upgrades simply isn't as viable as it used to be and it takes longer and longer to get an economically viable production out of the new nodes.
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***** When I'm talking about IPC I'm talking about how many instructions one core can do in one clock cycle. After all, there's no reason why two cores need to have the same clock speed so the IPC metric might not be that suitable for a multi-core system in that light. And at any rate it's limited how much you can really utilize more cores or threads with a single program like say a game. A 16 core system is quite frankly wasted on a regular consumer the next five years or so. 8 cores? That might be useful to regular users soon when multitasking. Even enthusiasts would probably struggle with finding anything to use a 10 or 12 core system on that would not leave some of the cores completely unused... in their day to day usage. Of course there are exceptions like BOINC... But still... And yeah, I'm glad that AMD is still there. I intend to get myself a 8 core Zen CPU or APU when the time comes. I'm currently on a FX 8350 with a slight OC.
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***** There's been some speculation in the possibility of some of the Zen enterprise APUs possibly having a iGPU comparable with a 290. That would be a chip with several CPU, GPU and HBM dies all on the same chip. So it's too complicated to produce cheaply (that is cheap enough for people like us to afford it) but something like that being out there bodes well for us further down the line. =)
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***** That wouldn't be a laptop APU... We're talking datacenter hardware here...
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***** Except the A10s iGPU might actually be useful with dx12.
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***** Post processing. You don't need that much of a GPU to do the post processing. So basically you got one beefier GPU that does the whole frame minus the post processing, then the frame is handed over to the iGPU where the last little bit is done while the dGPU starts working on the next frame. Since you have offloaded post processing to the iGPU the dGPU can do more frames pr second even if each individual frame ends up taking longer to make (since the iGPU isn't as strong as the dGPU the overlap of the work on the frames allows you to get more of them in total and therefore get a much better performance.
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***** Actually, it's one of the ways it can work. It's because of how DX12 (and Vulkan) allows the app developers close to full control over the hardware. And what the heck are you talking about with post processing making you feel sick? Oo What kind of post processing are you referring to?
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***** Also, the iGPU can be used to render individual objects on the screen du to DX12s support for asymmetric rendering. And, no why the heck do you think it'll cause flickering? Only a poor implementation would do that. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9307/the-kaveri-refresh-godavari-review-testing-amds-a10-7870k "The example we were given (which I have seen in the flesh) is with the Oxide Games/Stardock upcoming title Ashes of the Singularity. I spoke extensively to Dan Baker of Oxide Games and he states that the concept is relatively simple making it easier for programmers to dive in, and implementing it into their engine for the game took some time but they found a substantial benefit. Ashes of the Singularity is designed to be a more classical type of RTS based in the future, with plenty of units on hand as well as scenery and effects needing to be rendered. In the screenshot above, the red and blue colored items represent the different items that are rendered and the color shows which graphics in the system supplied the processing power. In this case the APU took care of the red units, while the discrete GPU did the scenery and a good portion of the effects. In the demo I was at, enabling the APU in this circumstance gave a 10% performance increase in a heavy 30 FPS scene to 33 FPS. It doesn’t sound like much, but any opportunity to use more of the system that the user has paid for is always a bonus. I asked regarding multiple discrete cards, such as dual R9 290Xs, and he said it wasn’t a problem by the way they had built their engine." -- quoted from Anantech And the same applies to Vulkan titles by the way. So, sure another dGPU might help performance, but that extra dGPU and the iGPU combined will give even more. And yes, you're right you have to code for it, so we're not going to get the benefits in all games coming out in the next couple of years, but some will. Ashes being one of them. With time game engines will start to include added support for the feature and some games made with those engines will get this feature enabled. The frequency of games where it's a useful feature will probably gradually increase over the next few years. Now, another benefit of the AMD iGPU is that from carrizo and onwards it can actually be used to take over some CPU tasks if you've compiled the code in a HSA compatible compiler. Anyway, I need to get some sleep. So, we'll talk later. =)
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***** shrugs I'll admit that I agree with that point. That said, an APU isn't that expensive, so meh... And it allow you to go without any iGPU at all in the start and then buy a iGPU later when you have more money. shrugs
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***** Not sure if the Athlon is really "better"... Remember that you can downclock the iGPU to get better thermals for the CPU.
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***** An Athlon is exactly the same processor as the A series APUs. The same number of cores (there's plenty of 4 core APUs) An modern Athlon even have the iGPU of the APUs still on the chip, they're just disabled. The only difference is that AMD saves money on being able to sell APUs with faulty iGPUs as Athlons being able to still earn some money, and if the Athlons sell well they can occationally disable the iGPU anyway even if they're working, just picking the worst performing ones meaning that the ones that they do sell are the best performing ones they have. Edit: Ok, just checked, you're talking about the previous generation processor arcitecture from AMD. And while they did beat the 8150 in performance they're behind the 8350 in single threaded performance due to higher clock speed on the FX series. And the modern kevari and so one processors have far higher single threaded performance then the FX series. And no a AMD module is not a core with hyperthreading. It's two cores. The definition of a CPU itself never included any requirement for a floating point unit at all. And each AMD core have two integer units for itself as well as two floating point units that is shared with the other core (meaning that whenever the core does low precission floats allowing the unit to do more calculations pr clock you actually have no interference between the two cores with regards to floats. shrugs Not sure about the price of those modern APUs with disabled iGPUs though... But I don't think it's that far of the Athlon...
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***** Well, in my case it's pretty much useless to use that site due to import taxes. I'm using the local version of pricespy. I'll look into those prices and stuff later though.
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