Andrew's Blog-a-Blag

So I’m heading to Toronto tomorrow. I get it - Taylor still picks mostly from Tumblr, so you know what, here’s my obligatory post :p

But I’m realistic to know that odds are really stacked against my demographic. I don’t have Hollywood looks or a massive social media following. But you know what - I’m still a long-time fan and have met an insane amount of people in this fandom.

Shout out to Amazingly Talented - the OG forums, under TaySwiftDotCom for jump-starting this. Also shout out to the /r/TaylorSwift Discord - and without which this Toronto trip likely doesn’t happen.

nVidia has had such an insane bull-run in the past 2.5 years, but then you see stories like this. True, Tesla is in a unique situation where they can attract and/or acquire talent to produce hardware in-house. Google has already been building their own hardware (Tensor Processing Unit) for over 3 years, so it could also signal a willingness by other companies to do the same. 

Of the four Reputation tracks we’ve heard now, I like this one the most.

AMD repeats their bait-and-switch pricing campaign, just as they did in 2016 with Polaris.

If you don’t recall, the Polaris presentation at Computex 2016 emphasized the $199 price point. This was highly misleading. The availability of RX480 4GB ($199) was extremely limited, leaving most users having to spent $239/$249 for the 8GB reference card instead. That’s a 25% markup on that $199 talking point.

Flash forward to today, and once again, AMD says one thing while doing another. Much was made about the amazing $499 price point for Vega64. However, this price was a farce, as without the $100 rebate, the true price returned to $599. This is a 20% markup.

I have seen used 1080Ti FE cards selling for $599, and AIB 1080Ti cards are going for $650 new.

Detailed informative vid on (finally) AMD’s re-entry into the high-end GPU sector. Once we saw the prices come out ($399 for Vega56), I knew this would be the only option. But as always you have the extremely bad air-cooled SKU at launch, no word on the capability to BIOS flash (I’m leaning no), and the high probability of much lower HBM voltage makes this a no-go until at least the non-reference cards are available.

Like the 290/290X, Fury/FuryX, the Vega56 is the most cost-effective option, but if you can’t scale the HBM to match Vega64 - what’s the point? Buildzoid even states how important HBM memory speed was in the performance gap between 470/480, so I don’t see that changing now with Vega.

Now, AMD hasn’t been nearly as restrictive on voltages compared to nVidia (see the evolution from Kepler, Maxwell, and Pascal, on locking down voltages)...so there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

But yet again, AMD is arriving 15 months after Pascal launch, and 5 months after the 1080Ti. nVidia had enough time to sell their cards for full price ($449/$599 and then still introduce a price cut, $349/$499) and then continue selling. I don’t know what it’ll take for RTG to catch-up, but sooner or later, they need to releasing their cards in a more timely fashion.

I think Skylake X (s2066) reintroducing IVR, after its removal on the Skylake S (s1151) is almost metaphorical in how rushed, inconsistent, and unvetted this platform launch has been.

I know people have beat up on THG in the past, but they were one of the first to talk of the FuryX throttling and now they are substantiating derbaurer’s x299 video observations as well. You have to give credit where its due.

Motherboard manufacturers could have and should have known that Intel's Skylake-X CPUs would consume power indiscriminately, in spite of the company's laughably low TDP specifications. Everyone has access to Intel's datasheets, not just us. 

Consider also the difficultly of identifying what is causing throttling - BIOS settings, thermal limitations (CPU, VRM, or a combination of both), or even AVX-512 oddities and THG’s finding echoing what der8auer already spoke of last week. It actually does make slightly more bearish now on CoffeeLake, if THG reviewer Igor is correct on Core truly being tapped out.

Two weeks ago, Edgar Wright presented the first 5 minutes of Baby Driver at AwesomeCon 2017 - seem my IG post above. The audience was instructed not to record/take photos, so that TriStars Pictures (under Sony), would have no hesitation bringing future content to AwesomeCon. This is why I didn’t post any follow-up photos :p

So what’s my overall impression? Hmm, good but not great. Yes, I know the RT score is off the charts, but sadly that is no guarantee for an actual good film. In essence, Baby Driver may be titled about its headlining character, Baby (Ansel Elgort), but I’d argue the real star are the heist scenes and the soundtrack. Lily James, Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Hamm - all great supporting cast members...but there just wasn’t enough time to flesh out each of their story lines.

This takes me back to my first point - Baby Driver is ultimately a heist film. As good as the scenes between the heists/car chases ares, I don’t feel they were written with the same care or energy as the action sequences themselves. And now that I’ve slept on it, I think that’s why I was not satisfied by the 3rd act in particular. 

There is wit, humor, and heart-pounding action from the opening right until a certain pivotal scene. After that, there are some significant writing and character inconsistencies, which throw so much away from developments in the previous acts, and IMO signals real issues with the writing.

From Edgar Wright’s AwesomeCon panel, he indicated fully that his commercial success is what allowed him to take creative liberties on his projects now and is why Baby Driver finally came out decades after its initial inception. Now I’m wondering if the age of that inception has anything to do with how the 3rd act was written.

-Intro

It’s funny - despite the FUD from Linus about the RAID features (RTSe), it came down to a far more fundamental element of board design - VRM cooling (or the lack thereof).

There is some irony in an Intel board being so dangerously under-engineered, in terms of surface area for VRM cooling. AMD was long ridiculed for this when it came to their boards for Bulldozer - especially when combined with less experienced users not buying a sufficiently spec-ed board for their CPU. Now in Intel’s rush to bring a 8-core offering to market, they sacrificed basic board design to do it.

-The Problem(s)

What did he see? 105C measured VRM temps from the PCB on the back, and accounting for some inaccuracies, probably closer to 120-130C. This is from a regular non-AVX P95 load and with a pedestrian overclock (4.6Ghz, 1.25v). He was using a pre-tested CPU known for hitting 5GHz, so this a confirmation of a board-limiting issue. Removing the non-effective VRM cooler and using a 120mm fan resulted in a 40C drop in temps. For someone who has been building as long as I have, I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to use active board cooling. Maybe on the Intel P35 or the nF4 platforms, to cool the Northbridge. But any properly designed VRM cooler, with actual *effective* surface area, should not require active cooling.

Secondly, in addition to the VRM issues, der8auer revealed problems with power delivery through. He tested a 10-core Skylake-X at a very mild overclock (4.5Ghz, 1.25v). Pulling something like 300W through the single 8pin connector revealed a cable temperature of 65C in an open-test bench. Yes, those are GPU load temperatures coming from a power supply cable. Now - not all boards only have a single 8-pin EPS. Some have an additional EPS or at least a 4-pin, but building these boards so close to spec, especially with 10-core loads or higher, seems pretty reckless to me. Why weren’t x299 boards built, at a minimum, with an additional 4-pin connector?

(Additional info - on that note, I started looking at x399 Threadripper board offerings, and terrifying enough, Asus even quotes themselves as using ROG design concepts from their Skylake-X boards into their Threadripper boards. I hope that isn’t true, after seeing the results of der8auer’s testing today. However when you consider that observations from Computex noted many boards carrying only a single 8-pin EPS, I have a funny feeling we could be seeing the same stories from the AMD side as well.)

-Conclusion

The hyperbole present in this sensationalist headline is a big reason I can’t take many PC sub-reddits seriously. Any experienced builder could take one look at the advertorial, just a single page, and would instantly recognize that it’s not even a real review.

Shall we look at what a real review looks? Here’s a recent one for the 1080Ti: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_1080_Ti_Amp_Extreme/

Hmm - advertorial - 1 page, or actual review, 36 pages?

The hot take by not only the submitter but the corresponding circle-jerk comments really makes me shake my head. If young builders are this gullible, it speaks to a horrendous lack of critical thinking by this new generation of PC builders. Maybe that’s why there’s so much RGB garbage invading the enthusiast space these days.

Note that other blatant AMD shills, e.g. HardwareCanucks, never get accusations of impropriety, so like everything else these days - seems different standards are applied to different people.

http://www.pcgamer.com/watch-pc-gaming-show-2017-e3-livestream/

I’ll confess, I have not gamed much as of late, apart from BoTW on the Switch. That said, I consider myself PC gamer first, then console second.

There is some irony in that the first year AMD has a competitive chip, Intel is the top billing sponsor for the event. Since this is occurring in the middle of the work day, I’ll only be able to occasionally check live-blog/twitter for updates.

Considering how much we already know, the real formality is getting the new Intel gear into more people’s hands - reviewers, and not just for random LN2 bench runs, that have no application for 24/7 use. Anyway, that’s scheduled from 9:15 AM PST, 45minutes ahead of the PC Gaming Show itself.

The video (and hilarious thumbnail) actually speak for itself, but it’s really telling when even the biggest sell-out and hardware shill is speaking out against Intel. The industry has seriously atrophied without competition - and yes, I fully blame AMD for that. Phenom 1′s atrocious launch, salvaging it with the Phenom 2, but then throwing that all away once again with Bulldozer set AMD back several years.

Ryzen - despite its competitive IPC is so clock-limited that it’s still just competing with Intel’s Sandybridge chips from 2011. After two months of AGESA updates, AMD is finally making real progress on memory compatibility, but once again reinforcing that AMD’s product launches are still rocky and rushed at best.

Opening episode of Fargo, Season 3. Incredible. Insane big screen cast, including McGregor, Winstead, and Thewlis.

Anyone not under a rock I’m sure has heard of this incredible TV series released just recently on Netflix. Apart from Dylan Minnette, I’m not sure that most of the other cast members are well known - and I’m glad for that actually, as I think that could have easily distracted from the writing. They cast a newcomer, Australian actress to Katherine Langford, to play the lead as Hannah Baker, and she absolutely excelled in that role.

There’s much to say, particularly on the social commentary, but I think I’ll let this story sink in first before I start talking about that.