Continued Discussion over the GTX 970 and 980 / Leaked GTX 980M / 970M Specs

Some Experiences so far by users:

Now one of my friends happened to get the Gigabyte G1 Windforce Edition of the GTX 970 and fortunately for him, it was the final piece.

So big thanks to fellow Diablo III Kaki; Visco (who heads the Local Synarchy Team for Battlefield 4 Competitive matches) who shared his experience with Darryl who shared that with me. Darryl has and is selling a R9 290X to make way for either 2 of these in SLI or the Big Maxwell.

Mark "Visco" Lee shared his overclocking experience and man were Darryl and I impressed. Now I said before in a previous post that the Maxwell 900s overclock like a beast. But Mark got a really impressive overclock out from this one.

Now I'd be happy to get to Boost 1.45GHz, but Mark managed to get well beyond the 1.5 Ceiling, at 1552 MHz, that's a full Half a Gigahertz above the Reference Base Clock and 374 MHz above the base Boost. He's still finding the maximum Overclock that he can stretch to this graphics card.

Mobile Power: GTX 980M and GTX 970 Specs Leaked.

Now as to confirm that this is the true specs of the GPU, I'm gonna rule out absolute. However, judging from the leaked benchmarks we've seen, it does look legit to some extent. But having said that, this is not by any means confirmed.

So let's go over these pretty quick:

GTX 980M

Now the GTX 980M and the Desktop 970 share very similar core configuration, and similar Core Speeds but with obviously lower memory clocks. It has 1664 Cores which operates faster in proportion to the 1538 Cores based off the GK-104 from the GTX 880M, 780M, 680MX and the Desktop 770 and GTX 680. So the performance of this GPU should sit somewhere in between the GTX 680 and but closer to the GTX 780.

Now like the previous generations, the GTX 970M follows the #70's notion of having a 192-bit memory bus interface. And with some  shader blocks disabled, there should be fewer cores than the GTX 980M which makes obvious sense since they shouldn't perform too close in league with each other. Obviously it should fall behind the GTX 980M but I was impressed at how already capable even the GTX 970 is / will be.

As for power consumption of these cards, I'm expecting a lot more power efficiency even if they perform a lot better than the GK 104 based Mobile GPUs. Already proven with their Desktop GTX 970, so I guess the efficiency shouldn't be far off either.

This information is based off Notebookcheck's German section. This I translated off from there. 

#Update 05-October: It seems that MSI has dropped a leak in here!

For all I know, this could very well be the GTX 980M, As the 8192 Megs of GDDR5 RAM gave it away. Nobody can confirm this, but I'm sure this could be the GTX 980M. The scores are pretty good. I scored a 13200 on my GTX 780, which is heavily overclocked. The boost clock tops up to a max of exactly 1.2 GHz.

I also checked the typical median for a GTX 780 and it averages to a P-Score of around 12500. I said that the GTX 980M is close to the GK110 GTX 780, but I didn't expect it to be this close.

NVidia GM204 Maxwell GTX 980 and GTX 970 Launches! First Thoughts!

OKAY! Let's do a little follow up discussion with the Desktop GTX 980 and GTX 970 released yesterday.

Now I digress on some of the specs that I originally post the last time. So let's go through these quick.

-------------------------------------------------------
GTX 980
Core Config: 2048:128:64
Core Clock: 1126, 1216 Boost
Mem Clock: 7000 MHz
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Bus Width: 256
TDP: 165

Launch Price: 549 USD

------------------------------------------------------

GTX 970
Core Config: 1664: 104: 64
Core Clock: 1050, 1178 Boost
Mem Clock: 7000 MHz
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Bus Width: 256
TDP 145

Launch Price: 329 USD

------------------------------------------------------

QUICK SUMMARY

We know that these cards perform really good, and overclock really good, power consumes really good, overall excellent cards from both board partners and even just the reference card.

I'm not gonna post any benchmarks because you can just find a whole chunk at Guru3D and Tom's Hardware. Those are where I source my info everytime new tech launches out. Moreover I don't have the cards and neither do I have the money till at least someone can sponsor me a build! But definitely I can say are the following:

- Power Consumption totally blows the competition. Even SLI Configs of Both GTX 970 and 980s (which I'll quickly touch later) does match or trade blows with a single R9 290X which is pretty sad for AMD. Yup, that's right, I checked. This can save potentially a lot of money off the power bill if you leave your rigs on 24/7 compared to any of the flagship cards before it.

- Impressive enough is the performance at 4K  despite running at a narrower 256 Bit Bus-width. The larger Maxwell L2 Cache and the additional 1GB GDDR5 Memory over the GK110 does well to compensate it.

- Direct X 12 Ready, that much is certain. As to how Direct X 12 works yet remains to be seen.

BUYERS GUIDE!

Why GTX 980? As I found after various reviews, a single GTX 980 is more than good enough for 1080p, 1440p and decent 4K gaming. Though it is cheaper than the 780 Ti at Launch and still currently cheaper now, it's still slightly high a bit. The efficiency however more than makes up for it especially in the long run over the Kepler Based 600 and 700 Series. You pay a slight premium now but you pay less on power later. Even if you overclock which the card can take happily and gain some pretty nice gains, that shouldn't be any problem. Speaking of overclocks, Maxwell happily takes it no issues, with many board partner GTX 980s coming impressively close to the Titan Z. Should you want something a little cheaper, there are also alternatives.

Why GTX 970?
The GTX 970 is also a good card, and a very palatable and very nice price tag to boot at 329 USD which is currently cheaper than the R9 290X by a considerable amount while trading blows and beating R9 290X in terms of performance. Whack a hefty overclock in, and the GTX 970 comes surprisingly on par with the more expensive GTX 980. Cooling from just the reference cooler still can handle this though IMHO requires abit of bling update. :)

All around, still beats the R9 290X while being cheaper and factor in power savings.

But then comes SLI which IMO brings the GTX 970, (in all honesty, Not the GTX 980 but still makes an admirable combination) into its own. With a total price tag of 660 USD (only 110 more than a standard 980), it blows the R9 290s / 290Xs in Crossfire, R9 295X2, Titan Blacks in SLI, and the Titan Z. All these competing cards (except the 290 but bearing in mind power, cooling and noise) all cost a lot more. Some of the highest end 780 Tis and the R9 290Xs still cost the same as 2 GTX 970s. Factor that and it's probably no brainer there.

BOTTOMLINE! 

As of now, it's more of the GTX 970 than the 980 that will spell nightmares and headaches for AMD because it is the perfect counter for the R9 290 And the 290X in almost every possible aspect; performance, power efficiency, heat and acoustics, all for 329 USD. The GTX 980 isn't bad too, don't get me wrong, it's a great card indeed too! But it's more the GTX 970 shining for its sweet spot value for money. And I quote Darryl, a friend who owns a R9 290X I made in my Top 5 GPUs:

970 hits the sweet spot at 329usd...thats how much my 290X is worth now *cries*

Yup, AMD, you guys just got your ass kicked. However personally, it's no fault of AMD because nVidia did play their cards well. AMD had their dominance for a while for performance per dollar value. Also the Bitcoin and litcoin Mining craze are still the main reasons why AMD GPUs are still good for what they are. I loved the R9 290Xs for its initial value-for-money option till this came by!

Generally again guys, you don't need the cards from board partners to do the graphics work for you. Well to each his own, you can use those dual fan/tri-fan cooling cards if you want. Even so the base Reference GTX 980 and 970s are still good in their own right if you want to cut down cost a tiny bit more for these cards really overclock well, well over 1.4 GHz and some tip beyond 1.5 Ghz on Core and 8GHz on Memory which is really nice. So give these cards a shot. But my full recommendation for value is the GTX 970 in Single or SLI configurations.

Maswell GM204 in Full Force: GTX 980, GTX 970 and the GTX 980M Unconfirmed Benchmarks pop up

Now nVidia shockingly decided to skip the GTX 800 line of GPUs and went a generation further to the GeForce 900 Series, I understand that is probably to make it more inline with the newest Architecture that primarily takes the form of the Maxwell Core that we've first seen in the GTX 750 Ti, GTX 750, the GTX 860M, GTX 850M and the GeForce 840M. The next couple of months we will see the full force of the GeForce 980 and the 970 and the 980M and the 970M.

In the meantime, leaked benchmarks have surfaced: And here they are. We'll go through the GPUs in detail.

GTX 980 and GTX 970

Now after looking at the benchmarks, now say if you're using a GTX 780 or a GTX 780 Ti, I would recommend you stick to what you're using because the upgrades don't produce a big FPS change. Overclocking your current cards which should be highly doable, would still net most of these scores that you can see across the board. Moreover, if memory serves, the GTX 980 operates on a weaker bus-width at 256-bit. However, it's interesting to note the Maxwell's massive upgraded 2MB Cache that we've seen in the 750 Ti and the GTX 860M means Memory speeds won't take that large of a hit. So it'll be intriguing to find how it runs in high-resolution displays like 4K 3840 x 2160 or Surround.

But summarily, the GTX 980 would be the card to replace the 780 Ti, and the GTX 970 for the GTX 780.

Quick Specs of Each Card:

GTX 980

Arrangement Core: 2560:160:64 (Rumors CUDA Count is 1920)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/s

GTX 970
Arrangement Core: 2304:128:64 (Rumors that CUDA Core is 1664)

Core Clock: 1050 MHz Boost

Memory Clock: 7.01 GHz

Memory: 4GB GDDR5

Bus Width: 256

Memory Bandwidth: 224 GB/S

MOBILE GTX 980M AND GTX 970M

Now these two GPUs are IMHO my stars in this one as you can tell by the benchmarks, The GTX 980M at stock performs just a thousand points under the GK-110 Core Based GTX 780 that I have. Now that's actually a crazily impressive score because it's quite close to the more power hungry DESKTOP card. It's leaps and bounds beyond the GTX 880M, even the GTX 970M still surpasses the 880M by a respectable margin. It's already impressive that a single GTX 980M is just a small fraction away from the Dual GTX 780Ms and will probably beat the 870Ms in SLI. And the SLI Config whoops SLI-ed GTX 770's butt big time, and is placed not far behind to the R9 295X2.

Now we've already known Maxwell to be already much more power efficient than the Kepler which was the designed to power optimize the Fermi Generation.

Specs are hard to come by at this point but we'll see as time goes on.

BOTTOM LINE

With that hype coming in, I hope the true benchmarks would be about within 10% of the scores when the actual stuff comes out. We'll know as soon as the GTX 980 (M) and GTX 970 (M) launches,

Bedside Endeavor: Pentium-K 20th Anniversary Edition G3258 Unboxing~!

I did talked a tiny bit about the Pentium K and I just received mine in the mail today, 1 week ahead of schedule. And this will kick start the Bedside PC Endeavor. It'll have to drag for sometime because I still don't have any parts to go with.

So it came in the usual small brown box from Amazon with the packing bubble bags cushioning the package. It arrived safely so here it is.

The package in the box, the usual blue color that is associated
with Intel's Boxed products

Intel Pentium Dual Core G3258 Inside

You'll get the following contents:

- The Pentium G3258 Chip

- 82mm Delta-Manufactured Fan

- Installation Manual with the Pentium Case Badge at the back page

- A McAfee AntiVirus Offer Brochure bundled

The Instruction Manual, G3258 Chip, Delta 82mm fan, McAfee Brochure

The cooler is a bit different compared to the one I had with my Core i7 2600K, but the design of the fin array is the same as my Core i5 2500K, only with the fan blades updated. It should prove sufficient to get some overclock out of this but as I said earlier in a previous post to try get an aftermarket cooling solution instead. Slick from LinusTechTips has advised though not to spend more than your processor for a Cooler.

The 82mm Delta Fan that came with the G3258 (Left)
and the Foxconn (right) fan from my Core i7 2600K

So Just a refresher for the G3258:
- Clock Speed: 3.2 GHz, Dual Core
- 3MB Cache
- 1333MHz Memory
- LGA 1150
- Intel HD Graphics
- Haswell Architecture

This arrival has kick started the project but the build will be shown later.

Apple's Move to Cheapen Products? Not Good Enough.

Well, this morning I received my documents from LaSalle College of the Arts that concerned my Orientation Programme and administrative matters. Also came with it is the Order Forms of all the MacBooks offered by LaSalle.

OK, let's stop there. Now I was instantly baffled by the pricing of the Apple Products. This comes after a recent move by Apple to crank out cheaper products which I still think it's nonsensical regardless.

Now here's an example:

You could say that the pricing seemed a bit reasonable but here's a thing. If I compare the Base vs my Desktop, that's the amount of money I spent to build my Gaming Rig with a Single 21.5 1080p Screen, complete with the thickest 120mm Corsair AIO Liquid Cooling that I can shove in there, SSD and 3TBs of Space, a GTX 780 which was the bulk of the cost, OC Core i7 2600K.... actually slightly less than that!

On the Laptop side:

LaSalle's Order Forms, but the MacBooks are still costly and don't have that price to performance ratio all other laptops except Razer has.

Although this has discounts across the board, it's still a freaking hefty price to pay. For example the Base MacBook Pro 13 Inch which cost 1588, I could buy Laptops much more powerful than that which cost that much. E.g. Aftershock XG13 costs the same but with a Gaming Grade GTX 860M which is tonnes better than the most powerful GPU powering the MacBook 15 Inch at a wimpy GT 750M which cost 3588 before discounts. And even a more far cry than the Base MacBook Pro's HD4000 by a whopping 84%.

Although Apple Products are very good and all, they should at the very least offer a wider customization scope and redesign their internals, at least starting with the storage. Because, who will in the right mind pay so much for 512GB PCI-E storage for their laptops! It's insane!

If you want to see the full magnitude here, if Apple can redesign the Bays to accommodate a more traditional 2.5" bays, it's easier to do a closer apples to apples comparison. Let the Aftershock X15S-V2 be the more competitive comparison, the Recommended Config is 600 bucks less. And it offers a Core i7, 8GB of RAM with the option to double that, an optical bay, a traditional sweet spot storage of SSD and HDD molded together, and the flagship GTX 880M GPU. Now look at this! You're paying less for a top end 15-Inch, more customization for storage. More ridiculous is the base config for the Aftershock Titan. Though it only has a Mechanical HDD as storage, you can always swap it out. And for the price of the MacBook Pro 15-Inch with a GT 750M GPU, you get SLI Flagship GPUs! Big difference there, Big difference.

To be reasonable, the 15 Inch MBPr should have a bare minimum of a GTX 850M with GDDR5 RAM for the price you pay for.

Apple, seriously, after looking at the order form this morning, please for the love of God, make your products cheaper and increase customization options, PLEASE! I don't want to spend a bomb right away at this point.

Haswell Unlocked Pentium Dual Core G3258 / Pentium-K: A Budget Gamer's Dream?

Well, some of you may be aware of the Devil's Canyon based Haswells that hit the market. But Intel also came with what could be a CPU aimed at Budget gamers.

The new Pentium Dual Core G3258
But you can call it a Pentium K

It was initially dubbed as the Pentium Anniversary Edition but the SKU has been given a designation as the G3258. Now basically, the G3258 is a G3240 and the 3420, same specs being a 3.2GHz Dual-Core CPU, having 3 Megs of Cache, and a HD Graphics running on a 350MHz - 1150MHz. But here is where things get a little different.

Now although the G3258 doesn't have the K Designation on its SKU, treat it like it has one because it is fully unlocked and unleashed. Slick from LinusTechTips dubbed it the "Pentium K" which is apt due to that reason. Only thing about it that does put some users off is that it requires a Z97-based Motherboard in order to overclock it. And Z97 boards are not cheap, depending where you look and what motherboards that are offered. However, cumulatively, the price compared to the i3 4330 and a H87/97 boards will be slightly lower. And word has gotten from Board Partners that they are creating BIOS-es that allow the H87/H97 Boards to overclock it, so keep your eyes open for any updates.

It is designed to be overclockable even on a stock cooler to keep costs down even further. Now when overclocked, it can still compete with an i3 4330 in Synthetic benches. However in terms of CPU Coolers concerned, I absolutely will not, and will never endorse using the stock wimpy coolers supplied by Intel. A Bigger Down Draft firing cooler, (Not even a tower is really needed) will fit the bill just fine. Something like a MassCool 8W553B1M3 will be fine.

Gaming however, is where Pentium G3258 is practically geared towards. When heavily overclocked, though it will still generally fall behind the bigger brothers like the Core i5 4670/4690, but not too much. It'll still put up a show.

At the price of around USD 75 give or take, this will be the sweet spot and will directly compete with the AMD APU (minus the GPU) based Athlon X4 750K. Games that are also CPU bound will enjoy the performance boost as you overclock it heavily.

Some reviews have appeared with regards to the CPU. This link (Polish One that was translated to English) pits the G3258 with other CPUs that were generally affordable, including an outrageous comparison with the 8-Core AMD FX-8000 Flagship 8350. Of course in heavily threaded loads it's not gonna match up but In terms of just pure gaming alone, a baby Pentium Overclocked to 4.7GHz handily beats the 8350 in a large majority of the benchmarks thrown by the reviwers that it's not even funny.

http://pclab.pl/art57691.html

Hexus even pit it against a Core i7 4770K:
http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/70977-intel-pentium-anniversary-edition-g3258/?page=7

Of course Integrated Graphics is not gonna obviously do any good but scroll all the way to the bottom where Hexus slams a GTX 750 Ti in, there's barely any difference in FPS count in certain games between the G3258, Core i5 4690 and Core i7 4770K.

So yeah. Go figure.

BOTTOMLINE

So if you're on a budget, and you want something that can perform very well in games as CPU hooked to a dedicated GPU, this should fit most budget builds. I've actually Ditched my AMD Build for this CPU which I pre-ordered from Amazon, cause' this seems to be a fun chip to play around a bit. Although it may be 2 cores, but overclocking this thing will bring itself closer to the 4 cores in gaming. Moreover, the CPU's TDP as such will not be so high anyways compared to the AMD CPUs I'm initially planning to get. I'm just like getting a CPU, Motherboard, Storage, PSU and Case, that's it. I've already have a couple of GPUs with me, but it'll be nice if Kitguru sends me one of their 2 R9 280s. With that I can have better data whether this CPU will hold the GPU back in performance as I now have a Radeon 6850, Radeon 5850 and a GTX 780, so I need something in between the 5850 and the GTX 780.

Singapore Internet Freedom is absolutely Jack Fucking Shit.

Well, I've been increasingly EXTREMELY pissed on how restricted our internet accessibility here in Singapore. There are some websites and forums to be specific that I wished to be in a community in. But all the time I've been getting Errors from all of them:


Sorry, you don't have permission for that!


[#1001]

You are not allowed to visit this community.


Or


Your IP Address is known and blocked to be suspicious of Spammers, you are not allowed to register.


Now tell me, What the fuck is this?


Here are some forums I tried to sign up for that resulted me getting this stupid error code that is a result of some government crank down on internet accessibility from sectors like the Media Development Authority (MDA) that really cut the crap on all this.


Here are 3 of the Websites that I couldn't get in. 2 of the 3 have YouTube Channels that I absolutely tune in everytime.


Tech Of Tomorrow Official: http://techoftomorrow.invisionzone.com/

OC3D: http://forum.overclock3d.net/

Dota Cinema: http://www.dotacinema.com/news


Now I'm EXTREMELY Pissed. Our Internet Freedom is absolute JACK FUCKING SON-OF-A-BITCHING Heap of Shit that is blocked and regulated by a group of Government beasts.


Please whatever you can, Help get me out of this vicious cycle fast! It absolutely annoys me where I cannot be part of some Tech Communities in the Bigger Side of things. Singapore's Tech Community is though very active but not big.