Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

HW News: AMD Pricing 'Scandal,' HBM Height, GDDR Price Hike

2017-08-17
welcome to another episode of hardware news we're going over the last week of news in the industry there's a lot of stuff about Vega but some Intel rumors and sort of confirmed announcements at this point discussion on NAND pricing and now GD are practicing as well so GD d our memory looks like it's about to face the same fate as NAND for SSDs and DRAM at this point so that'll be interesting to see going forward before getting to that we partnered with LastPass for this video the password of management solution that makes it easy to randomly generate a new password for each website and account without needing to memorize them all this strengthens account security so that you're no longer using the same password for multiple sites and makes it easier to manage when one gets leaked learn more at the link in the description below let's start off with the Andy Vegas stuff so this week we on our stream got a whole lot of questions about what are your thoughts on the Andy vega pricing and for those who aren't aware basically the rumor was from a get at overclockers UK that basically the initial MSRP for vega products 54 and 56 was only going to last for about a day before that price increase and there wasn't any independent confirmation on that from Andy we've asked other folks have asked I'm not aware of any official statements from the company so that makes it kind of difficult to really figure out what they're doing with regard to give us posts from the overclockers co dot UK which claims that AMD had provided rebates to retailers ie MDF we've learned from two different board partners in the industry who contacted us that this appears to be correct we're told the gibble is right about the prices and rebates on the Vegas 64 cards and that it looks like the lower price of $500 was only going to exist for initial launch when those rebates were available and now that they're not it appears that pricing will increase based on what our sources were saying we're still waiting on comments from AMD we reached out on the 15th and haven't yet received response but for pricing specifically I think what we're looking at is a scenario where retailers and board partners are going to benefit a whole lot more then Andy on Vega and that's because ultimately a and B if they're not going to see a penny of the money if retailers decide to overcharge on cards by 150 bucks or 200 bucks Andy doesn't see that money the retailer's do and the same is true for board partners who increase their price because they need to make money and via Vega a 56 and 64 it turns out how really expensive to make to the point where 56 kind of skeptical on if and he's actually profiting on that card without the help of their packs their bundle packs HBM is very expensive we have some numbers that I'm trying to confirm independently but have an idea of what it costs have an idea of what the vrm cause something I deal with the cooler costs I don't know I don't know if they're making money on 56 not stand alone and if they are it's very little like an insignificant amount but it seems like it's probably negative 64 is more it's closer to breakeven or profit but the bundles are where the money is and so we were talking with some third parties some companies and the initial quantity of Vega cards was kind on the low side the quantity allocated the packs was pretty high so we didn't know this about the packs when they were first announced which was new I ended up listing them as independent product SKUs where you buy the card the monitor the motherboard the CPU all together end of story you don't even get to pick which component is mixed and matched it's just either it exists in ASCII or doesn't the way we thought it would work is that you would buy a Vega card that would cost $100 more and then it would apply coupons to your card and then you go and pick the things you want that were supported by the pack not how it turned out to work so either way it looks like a high allocation went to the packs and I mean that's pretty obvious because the individual cards basically sold out immediately whatever there was there wasn't much of it and the packs persisted hurt at least an entire day if they're not still there at the time this video goes up so I interesting scenario looks like Andy's trying to make some money back but either way we're not sure on the pricing concerns we're not sure if it's going to go up and stay there or not and we've tried to confirm it but we haven't gotten response yet so it can't really go too far with that story right now as far as the different heights on GPU and HP m so we talked to just one AIB partner right now I haven't spoken to enough to really make a firm statement on this but the concern was basically that GPU height and HBM height are different on Vega and so you might have concerns with applying an aftermarket looking cooler and it sounds like the difference that exists is less about height and more about the adhesive used I guess it's a silicone versus something else I don't have the full details but it sounds like that's more of the difference in height that said we bought some stuff that will help us check the height on at least our our unit and hopefully other reviewers who have Vega or other users who have Vega can follow our steps and check the height of the HBM the GPU on your unit then we can all compare data and we'll be doing that separately probably just a small article so that's the initial step we have some other interesting news on our overclocking efforts with Vega 56 we'll be talking out in our hybrid mod which we're filming shortly and we'll be up probably the day after this goes up and while we're on the topic of prices and video cards some more unfavorable news I guess digit time has it reported that GDD our prices or specifically video card memory prices not sure if HDMI included in that but potentially those prices apparently have gone up by about thirty point eight percent for orders placed in August so that's the cost to the manufacturer by the supplier when I'm from 650 per order - 850 per order per unit I believe it's a single module that they're talking up to that price and HBM TDD are 5 + 5 X those are basically the second most expensive components on a video card after the GPU proper and then you have things like the cooler sort of down towards the end vrm around where the cooler is but prices on those looks like they're going up 31% for these suppliers that may affect consumer prices as well if it does we won't see the impact of those prices for probably another couple months but it'll be hard to discern the difference from that versus the difference from mining still keep an eye out to see if there's another price surge in Intel news that their eighth generation coffee Lake CPUs are to be announced on August 21st officially and that's for mostly purported quad core i3 parts though there will be others as well discuss Intel will unveil the 8th gen core processors on 8:21 via Facebook live and that's going to be for the new generation that follows along after skylake and kb lake and we fabricated on their 14 nanometer process once again this coincides with Intel's processor architecture optimization cadence as they ditched the tick-tock cycle many years ago you know it was only discussed recently and all still transitioning to 10 nanometers that'll be cannon Lake and coffee Lake is the filler along with sky like X as we wait for 10 nanometers and here's something that this was probably discussed a week or two ago now but it's worth mentioning the current well hour for sure understanding at this point is that coffee Lake will not use the 200 series boards for Intel so you're gonna have to buy a new new motherboard which is sort of what Intel generally does so new motherboards will be required most likely and then there are rumors that the i3 S will be quad cores I think that's more or less confirmed at this point with discussion about six cores also on the table and tech report has an article about the i3 8300 and I 382 50k alleged CPUs that are coming out the coffee like family so you can check that out for more information an X 399 motherboard news the tr4 platform has seen growth over the last couple weeks with the following vendors announcing new boards MSI has the X 399 gaming Pro carbon asrock has the fatality X 399 professional gaming board and the X 299 Taichi asus has the rog zenith extreme which is what we tested on the ROG Strix X 399 II gaming the ACS prime X 399 a and then there are a couple of other boards in the works from other vendors as well ek water blocks has been in our news segments a lot lately they're pushing a lot of products these days and our newest one is water blocks for arcs Vega those will come in either vera electrolytic copper base or nickel-plated base for the cold plates and they're full coverage blocks they can be paired with a clear top or a black top if you prefer orders I think are live and they should be shipping either soon or along with rx Vegas launched note that Vega 56 isn't available to the public yet though also in cooling enter max has the lick tech TR for a IO LCS closed-loop liquid coolers it doesn't need that many of words in the name get it it's a CLC it's an enter max CLC it's called lick tech they like using that naming along with wick max perhaps consider a different name but they are announcing these for 100% IHF coverage on thread Ripper along with the Noctua air coolers that also have 107 IHS coverage we have one of these coming in so we'll be testing it whenever it gets here and hopefully be able to see how much of an impact that has versus the previous version where was it's a circular cold plate for these smaller chips and other than that 3000 rpm pumps they will be 240 or three sixty millimeter radiators they have an advertised TDP of five hundred watts potential for cooling and priced at one hundred thirty one hundred sixty dollars slated for late August the pump supplier by the way for anyone interested the enter max and left eye products for C LCS are made by a pol tech they make couple other products in the industry as well including former silverstone liquid coolers and they're one of the smaller competitors to the likes of ASA tech and kulit or Kuwaiti finally they're still an ongoing NAND shortage expected until mid 2018 there's new information on insight over at Tom's Hardware that details how the nan shortage very well may live into next year which means that consumer pricing and availability will likely not see any respite on probably aggressive growth and multiple market segments like data center laptops mobile Internet of Things devices all that stuff Sampson and Apple both have flagship devices launching very shortly and both demand huge provisions of manned and this is compounded with the move to 64 layer 3d man that we've been seein SSDs lately as well so as Tom's Hardware notes business pcs are expected to exceed a 50 percent SSD attach rate now it's gone up quite a bit over the last few years it's not just enthusiasts anymore NAND technology products are shipping the big data everywhere and technologies and all the phones it's it's all over the place and supplies not great right now so looks like it won't be any better until next year sorry for the bad news on man prices and gdg higher prices but that's the industry we're in today so as always you can help us out directly with patreon support at patreon.com slash gamers Nexus you can go to gamers X at squarespace.com to pick up a shirt like this one subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.