Gadgetory

hey everyone this is steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we are back for an episode of tech raid where i will recap all the major gaming hardware news that's come out in the last month or so and this week alone actually has been a pretty big deal we had photos of nvidia's gtx 770 week AMD confirmed a roadmap to their next iteration of GPUs as well of course is rapidly approaching and on the motherboard front gigabyte has a pretty cool new high res customizable UEFI BIOS for their impending Haswell boards so all that in mind let's start with the graphics news in recent leaks to chip hell photos of Nvidia's reference GTX 770 have surfaced along with speculation of course on prices and some specification information fed Zilla has also cited sources on card specs but has some conflicting information with chip health so I'll just lay it out straight for you since there's really no way to know who is more accurate between the two weeks and two sources first of all both sites and both sources confirm that the 700 series of geforce GPUs will effectively be rebranded 600 series chips just stepped up by a tier so the gtx 770 will more or less represent a gtx 680 of the previous line of of kepler which the 700 series also runs on the gtx 760 ti will effectively be a gtx 670 and so on we'll see the same gk104 GPUs on the 770 and 760 TI as we saw on the respective predecessors though the gtx 780 is significantly more interesting the 780 looks like a it looks more like what we'd call a Titan light card so of course everyone knows the GTX Titan by now and from what chip held sources have stated it looks like the gtx 780 will utilize the same gk110 or at least a slightly stripped-down version of the gk110 GPU that's found in the titan it'll have 24 96 cuda cores to Titans 2688 so in terms of raw compute power they're really not all that far apart at least for our game and enthusiasts purposes it's almost definitely less optimized for professional applications of course but that's just how optimization works it will still be targeted toward gaming for the 780 the 780 will ship in both 3 gigabyte and 5 gigabytes Q's gddr5 from what we've heard and according again to chip hell both 3 gigabyte and 5 gigabytes Q's will have 320 bit and 384-bit memory interfaces respectively fazila on the other hand says the 780 will be on a 256-bit memory interface based on the titan le gk110 chip really that's a pretty massive difference for the memory interface between the two reports and it is a very significant impact for gaming purposes actually any purposes because you need enough bandwidth which is partially calculated by the interface with so you can actually push the data to all of that ram as for what i can tell you well this isn't a new generation of g-force chips it's not the max well jan we've been waiting for and it's effectively a rebrand and slight upgrade of the existing options i don't want to make it sound bad because it's not they will probably perform pretty well but it's not Maxwell just FYI the new units will have revised heatsinks that are similar to the titan cooler so that's certainly reason to be excited and i'd imagine we might have better overclocking potential with the shift of boost to point out down from titan to the consumer class 700 series if nothing else boost to point 0 will be a big boon to the adoption of whatever cards end up carrying them by enthusiasts overclockers when we attended PAX East our Nvidia sources somewhat ambiguously noted that boost to point out would be shifting down the chain to new chips as for whether new chips are clarified as the 700 drop or Maxwell I'm not certain that information may be out there so certainly do comment below if you find it generally another upgrade that happens with these quote-unquote rebrands as I've been calling it is a drop in TDP and heat overall so that's another thing to definitely look out for and it's not as big a deal as with the Fermi series but certainly always a good thing to drop heat will still be running on Kepler architecture and while I'm certain that the gtx gains over the GTX honored equivalently branded cards anyone who's already on Kepler or Fermi may want to wait it out another generation or at least wait for some of the more in-depth benchmarks to emerge the ship dates on the 700 series have been listed as May twenty-third for the 780 with a potential May sixteenth drop May thirtieth for the 770 and quote-unquote summer for the 760 Ti so moving on to amd's GPU updates we get a somewhat less exciting but equally noteworthy roadmap and AMD's sea islands GPS were originally due out in quarter to this year for those who remember but due to a series of delays and technological hurdles we may not see them until quarter 3 or quarter for if at all there's technically already been an 8000 series drop in the form of OEM chips for laptops and other devices but no official 8000 series sea islands cards have yet been put out the new richland apu which is due fairly soon and will champion trinity will technically be running 8000 series branded you know an internal apu the GPU component of that but they're mostly just rehashes of the 6000 series found in trinity as the base so in short there's been no major news on the 8000 front and due to delays and branding and marketing reasons I almost wonder if we'll even ever see one though if we do see an 8000 drop in consumer GPUs it won't be until much later this year what we do know however is that AMD has now confirmed some of the specs of their HD 9970 chip in the volcanic island series of GPUs volcanic islands originally due out after sea islands and the 9970 has been stated to operate on 20 nanometer gate last manufacturing process which is actually ahead of schedule so that should probably happen and it aims to take place of Tahiti the 9970 boasts 4096 stream processors 256 TM use 64 ROPS and a massive 512 bit memory interface according to our sources with that large of an interface I wouldn't be surprised to see an unprecedented memory capacity to take advantage of the increased memory bandwidth and bus and given AMD's 8 gigabyte unified memory presence on the ps4 I don't think it's too ridiculous to suspect that they may take a similarly high-capacity approach to discrete GPUs in the desktop market transitioning from GPUs and two CPUs feels a lot more natural in the modern era of I GPS and AP US then really it ever has before and Intel's Haswell chips have had a series of final confirmations lately including ship dates specs pricing and igp info it's too complex to delve into great depth here but we can definitely go over some of the basics and need to know info as for the graphics component which intel pushes really heavily lately Intel's released internal benchmarks so these haven't been checked by third parties might do of benchmarks of haswell's iris integrated graphics the results were compiled only with Intel's 3rd gen Ivy Bridge HD 4000 igp on the desktop side versus its 4th gen iris IGP on 3dmark11 but they're still pretty promising from the charts we've seen it looks like Intel's desktop class I 7 4770k outperforms the current gen i7 3770k strictly in graphics output by nearly three hundred percent so three times faster however they define faster I think it's actually defined by the score granted by 3dmark11 and they they normalize that score to just an easy 3x despite the TDP increase 284 wats in the 4770k from I think was 77 wats previously that's a pretty insane amount of graphics power to pack into a socketed CPU which traditionally has only been the CPU up until the last couple years here is it something that I want to game on not really if I'm honest most enthusiast gamers will still want a discrete card and Intel knows that they're not trying to compete with you know high-end Nvidia chips or AMD cards that stated it would be closed-minded to scoff at the incredible developments made by really AMD intel nvidia everyone in recent years to bring low TDP high performance graphics to traditional cpus that's it's pretty impressive really when you look at the history of these cpus and looking at mobile it's which is where integrated graphics make a whole lot more sense it actually looks like Intel's i7 46-50 you CPU outperforms the previous 3687 you by approximately 1.5 times the previous metrics the i7 4558 you is a full two and a quarter times the score of the third generation 3687 you so the mid-range 4650 you has well chip uses only 1.5 or sorry it uses only 15 watts 1.5 would be pretty outrageous it uses 15 watts so to produce effectively the same performance as a GT 620m at which consumes around 35 watts that's that's pretty impressive I'm I'm excited about the future of where this is going keeping thermals and power consumption down in in the laptop means more efficient cooling design longer battery life really just more consolidated in terms of the actual laptop size and it yields the same or better performance than the previous generations so definitely good news there for laptops if you are using intel in them as for when it's coming out we know has wells targeted release date is june third witch is dead center of computex i think we're right before it and this was confirmed directly by Intel's Twitter feed which stated the 4th gen release day 10 nanoseconds from the tweet pricing will be pretty similar to what we saw at the launch of the third generation of CPUs don't expect prices to fluctuate very much in the Ivy Bridge market Intel's processors really always stay around the same price point for their entire shelf life aside from occasional fire sales from retailers transitioning over to motherboards for the last part of our news for the month we see gigabyte really getting behind UEFI BIOS customization and I actually I recently wrote a roundup article on the major z87 boards coming out for haswell but at the time we hadn't yet heard anything about bio specifically gigabyte has streamlined their new bios a bit by stripping out some of the tediously low-down status menus so they have instead repositioned them to be more consistently locate on the sides and top and bottom of the screen which allows the user to monitor CPU memory and system information constantly without the need to dive through multiple sub menus and a screenshot released by gigabyte we also see what looks to be a user customizable tab configurator from the image users will be able to create their own tab named it assign a location in the menu hierarchy and then assign items that will be displayed on that tab probably most noteworthy however is the fact that it's a high-res interface likely 1080p or thereabouts-- and the resolution is configurable from within BIOS it also appears that a voltage regulation clock speeds stuff like that can be manipulated with slider options which is kind of neat if a bit unnecessary and that's all for this month's hardware roundup if you spotted any important news that I've left out of here please post it in a comment below let everyone know and I will see you all next time peace