Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today I've got a quick breaking news story that I want to cover I don't often do these on the channel but this one could be very important for viewers shopping for an affordable GPU before Christmas normally it's Intel or Nvidia making these bad anti consumer decisions but every now and then the industry underdog joins in this year's Radeon rx 500 series refresh wasn't exactly met with open arms by reviewers all consumers but at least we got slightly faster products at a slightly lower MSRP even if they were just factory overclocked to achieve those extra frames shortly after the release pricing went haywire thanks to cryptocurrency mining but you guys know all about that and that's not really AMD's fault anyway fast forward to today basically the end of 2017 and it's fair to say AMD's GPU division has had a year to forget however not wanting to end the year with Vega pricing and availability all that controversy being the caption for 2017 they've come up with something that's actually better or worse depending on how you look at it meet the brand-new Radeon rx 560 or is this or this one the original one I can't tell and that's pretty much the problem here to your average consumer there may be no real way of telling whether you're buying a new radio RX 560 or an old Radeon rx 560 that's obviously a big problem as of today there is now a second version of the Radeon rx 560 that's appeared online and it does have slightly different specifications compared to the original card the new radio rx 560 ships with 896 stream processors down from the original 1024 and this is a result of just having 14 compute units enabled whereas the original has all 16 so that makes the I suppose new Radeon rx 560 a straight rebadge of the rx 460 aimday already did this with the RX 560 d4 the Asian markets earlier in the year the RX 560 D was just a rebadged rx 460 but the D made it clear that this was in some way different to the normal rx 560 in this instance it indicated that this was a cut-down model however the new Radeon rx 560 and we'll be saying radio rx 560 allow this video with just 896 stream processors will also be known as the Radeon rx 560 why not the rx 555 for example or why not just stick with the 560 D which we were sort of already aware of and the people in the Asian market certainly were I have no idea why AMD have chosen to do this but does seem very underhanded and very sneaky sly just bad jumping over to newegg.com you can filter search results quite heavily and under the stream processors tab you can select either 896 or 1,024 stream processors selecting 896 stream processors we get a few models from assumed power color suits for example have designated their cut-down rx5 60 cards as evo models which cheer average consumer really means nothing and I suppose could be interpreted as being more special than non Evo models the cheapest of the cut-down rx 560 models cost just 125 dollars us and that's the power hello red dragon RX 560 and from a consumer standpoint I'm not sure how to work out which of the power color rx5 60s have the full 1024 SPU's and which don't they don't seem to list how many stream processors each model has on their own websites so that makes the issue all the more confusing anyway thankfully newegg.com are better at stating what's what and that's probably more to save their own bacon at 125 dollars the 896 spu power color RX 560 is fairly cheap but for as little as five dollars more you can land yourself a gigabyte RX 560 gaming OC 4g and that has all 1024 SPU's enabled making it around say 8 percent faster overall for me a $5 increase in price so it's quite shocking to me at least the AMD thought it would be okay to just change the RX 560 backs to the RX 460 spec and just brush that change under the carpet for consumers it's extremely concerning that there's really no clearly identifiable Monica to differentiate between the new and original models AMD really they seem to be relying exclusively on board partners to disclose the final specs of the aftermarket graphics cards and as we've just seen in the power color example it's not really a consumer friendly approach choosing between two gigabyte or four gigabytes of vram buffer that can already be a bit of a challenge for non enthusiasts adding additional specifications to the mix that are even as obviously disclosed as the memory buffer capacity well that just further complicates the hardware selection process it makes it very difficult for another system builders performance figures they might only vary by a few frames in most instances they will vary by more than a few frames and others but really that's hardly the point this move by AMD further validates my decision I recommended the GTX 1050 over the rx 565 months ago now the GTX 1050 can be had for as little as a hundred and twenty dollars and when compared to the rx 460 it's just outright faster of course in video are far from Saints themselves but that's not the point of this video this is really a rare and you consumer move by AMD so I think it's important we give them a hard time about it so they don't feel the need to do it again or at least feel like they could get away with it if they do get away with it this time hmm just finally I have asked AMD for an official statement and I am yet to hear from them but I did only ask them that this morning so they may be putting something together who knows there's quite a few news outlets and tech sites and whatever that are concerned about this and it's not really a rumor which is why I'm reporting on it it's not something that we have changed a spec on their website and it's a typo or something like that this is actually happening there are rx 560 graphics cards in the wild that you can purchase that look to be cheap and they may even end up being okay in terms of value adjacent to a real rx 560 but that's not the point if you don't in your leg and you think well these are five sixty that's really cheap I've just researched this card I know how performs I'm gonna buy it you're actually buying an Rx for 60 and that is the problem here anyway I'm gonna leave it at that happy house Steve I'll see ya next time you