Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed now last week we talked about a number of issues we felt Intel customers would like to see them address and in the face of growing competition from AMD they should certainly consider a few of them issues such as platform compatibility the underwhelming Box cooler and then the massive separation between the base and boost clocks which sees the TDP rating now abused and of course there were many more at the end of that video I noted that we would be targeting AMD next and talked about areas where the red team can do better and well this is that video as the current underdog AMD has more reason to play nice they've been forced into doing many of the things that we've been asking Intel to do simply because of their much smaller market share so as I said in the Intel version of this video we don't believe a laser st. not by any stretch of the imagination it's still a big company trying to achieve all the things that big companies set out to achieve basically make as much money as possible if you do miss part one which focused on Intel I recommend you go and watch that video first I'll provide a link in the video description or as a pinned comment but to quickly summarize the series a few weeks ago tell myself we're over in Taiwan attending the Computex trade show and we found ourselves discussing quite a few areas where Intel AMD and NVIDIA need to improve to become more consumer friendly and at the end of that discussion we thought would actually make for a pretty good video series since we've already tackled the big one Intel it's time to talk about AMD and while there really isn't that much to discuss on the CPU front we also have a few GPU related things that we can talk about I'll talk about each point that was raised and please note that none of this is in any particular order some things will be more important than others again we're just looking at this from the perspective of a consumer so let's get into it in our what intel needs to fix video we mentioned that intel uses a pretty useless TDP metric that people often confuse for power consumption the TDP rating only refers to the heat dissipation required to run the CPU at its base clocks which makes a little sense in the world where CPUs frequently run it well above the base clock for maximum performance well ambi are gonna be left with hook either their TDP trading also makes a little sense and only serves to confuse buyers and enthusiasts at least in our opinion how AMD calculates the TDP is different Intel but like with Intel's TDP it only vaguely relates to power consumption and isn't really a good reflection of how much power a modern processor uses during actual operation and because it isn't a good reflection of power consumption it's really not a good metric for deciding how be for your cooler needs to be AMD's exact definition of the TDP is the maximum power a processor can draw for a thermally significant period while running commercially useful software that's just a meaningless statement that allows AMD to effectively choose whatever TDP they like the end result is a risin 7 2700 and risin 3 1300 X that have the same TDP even though one is an 8 core CPU clocked up to 4 point 1 gigahertz and the other is a quad core clocked of 3.7 gigahertz it doesn't make any logical sense that both CPUs would have the exact same TDP and looking at the actual power consumption figures for each processor it's quite clear that 2700 does consume a lot more power it's true that AMD's TDP does seem to fall closer to a real-world power consumption but it's still such a useless metric for everyday PC builders aimed you should provide an actual power consumption metric that allows everyone at easily compare processors particularly for higher-end CPUs that make it so much easier to know how much power is dissipated when running the CPUs highest possible performance level so that way you can go and buy a cooler that meets the spec okay so this one was a bit cheeky funny at first but now it's just becoming a bit childish confusing I suppose even frustrating for potential buyers again AMD are the underdogs they were coming into this fight an extreme disadvantage with horizon so we can kind of understand why they decided to copy Intel's naming schemes personally I would have preferred aimed E to be smart about the naming and call the quad-core rise in parts rise and fall for example and then the eight core parts Verizon eight then give the SMT enabled models the X suffix for example instead though they copied the core i3 i5 and i7 doming with the rise in three five and seven but we don't really have too much of an issue with that the big problem has been the chipset naming the X 370 and X 417 chipsets are ok they're different enough from Intel Zed series such as the Zed 370 for example I'm still a little confusing but it's not too bad the be 350 in our be 450 chipset names are you know they're quite unfortunate the B series from Intel was meant to be their business range though it's now somehow just become a gaming thing and with the 100 and 200 series we just have the B 150 and be 250 chipsets AMD beat Intel to the punch with B 350 so in total decided to one-up them and release a B 360 chipset so now we have B 150 250 and 360 from Intel with B 350 from AMD there was a strong rumour that AMD would be releasing AZ 490 chipset around the same time intelligent expected to release the Zed 390 chipset but thankfully it seems those plans have been canceled still the popular B series is extremely confusing especially for those that don't live and breathe PC tech I have heard from a few people who build a new PC every two to three years that have purchased a B 360 board thinking that it will work with their rise in CPU or vice versa bought a be 350 board thinking it would work with a coffee like CPU some of you might say well that's a stupid mistake to make but again if you're only building a PC every few years and you hear that a B 350 board is the best value for your eyes and CPU it's conceivable that you might accidentally order a b3 61 anyway trolling Intel was a bit of fun quite amusing but I think it's time to get serious now so as you consume up we want chipset names to be a lot less confusing maybe aim dica ghosts with something like our 450 and our 470 as an example that that would be much clearer okay Sophia missed it but given the views you probably didn't her back in early May I created a video titled why AMD superior compatibility could end and it's all your fault basically I talked about how AMD was copying a lot of flak from inexperienced system builders who ran into troubles with outdated be 350 or X 370 boards and by outdated I mean they were using an older bias that didn't support the new second generation CPUs in summary I concluded by saying that this wasn't AMD's fault those complaining simply need to accept the fact that they were taking on the role as the PC technician it was really up to them to make sure that the motherboard have the appropriate BIOS however I did state that one or AMD's fault after all they did ensure continued compatibility while Intel continues to accident or a year or two it the most there are things AMD could do to help things more practical and financially viable than their boot kit band-aid what we as consumers would like to see is aimed at working with their board partners so you know MSI asrock gigabyte and a sous for example and work with those guys to implement a Rison BIOS flashback feature a feature that would allow motherboards bars to be updated without needing the correct CPU to boot it up in fact you wouldn't need a CPU at all although this one is more on the board partners aim B could certainly get involved to make sure this is a feature that's implemented on all a m4 and tr4 motherboards the good news is it seems that board makers are starting a wise up for example we saw at Computex that all future MSI AMD boards will support a bias flashback feature even at the very cheapest boards hopefully AMD will nudge all their board partners into making this a standard rise and feature something AMD needs to improve rather than fix is the integrated memory controller or IMC for short some decent steps were made with second gen Rison but there's still a bit of work to be done and we're sure AMD is well aware of that memory frequency is still quite limited and we've also found that you still do require a good ship to hit 3400 and beyond things do get even worse if you plan to fully populate your motherboards DIMM slots for memory modules will likely force you down to a lower speed than that of two modules memory compatibility is still somewhat limited as well though we realize that the rise in processors have only been on the market for about a year and a half now and support for the platform is improving all the time still we would like to see Andy continue improve ddr4 memory compatibility in the short term long term they will transition a DDR 5 and then we'll start this all over again there AMD will be starting from a much better position like the IMC of the rise and cps that we just spoke of I was sure ahem DS working hard to improve the competitiveness of the radeon gpus that being the case we won't banging on about this one too much it's my opinion the current Radeon architecture in this case the graphics core next or GC and 5th generation architecture needs to be better optimized right now in order to deliver equivalent performance at the high end AMD's GPUs are over 50% larger when compared to in videos pascal architecture i arrive to that figure when comparing vega 64 to the gtx 1080 for example this not only makes AMD's vega GPUs much more costly to produce but they also require much more power to operate it seems that AMD's allocated a huge amount of resources an effort to try and fix their scheduling issues issues that see so many of the cores on parts like Vega 64 underutilized or not utilized at all during heavy gaming workloads another issue that's led to Vega is underwhelming gaming experience and this is probably the main issue is the fact that AMD produce one mammoth GPU to do it all whereas the competition has two separate product lines one focus solely on gaming with a more expensive professional line designed for compute work they probably need to work towards a design that can be easily implemented to suit either market I much like what they've done with Xen with the rise and an epic CPUs for example we were hoping that na'vi would be the first step towards that but it's sounding like and we might have to wait another generation yet at the end of the day as consumers we just want to have more than one option and while picking between say the Radeon rx 580 and geforce gtx 1060 can be a challenge as we saw in a recent comparison it's less of a challenge at the high end and anyone's spending i know 500 dollars or more at a graphics card i should probably go with the green team now this one isn't something that's going to go away anytime soon despite the fact that we would all very much like it to a rather than refresh RIBA Randall rehash whatever you want to call it just don't do that do nothing wait to actually have something new of course it's not just AMD that's guilty of doing this in video loves to rebrand or whatever you want to call it products as well that has to be said recently AMD has been the biggest offender Nvidia did release the GeForce 10 series in mid 2016 and then a few months later we got the underwhelming Radeon RX 400 series the flagship part was the rx 480 and it did struggle to compete with the gtx 1060 at the time anyway just eight months later an effort to spice up the Radeon series and make them seem new and exciting again AMD rebranded the rx 400-series as the RX 500 series I only truly new bit of silicon we got was that pathetic little rx 550 while the rx 560 was fully unlocked with 1024 cause though aimed he did manage to that one up creating the 14 CU and 16 CMS anyway the refresh was designed to set the stage for the Vegas series which arrived four months later so while Vega 56 and 64 were new paths the RX 5 a TRX 570 well those were just blatant rebadge --is the RX 560 was a refresh that kind of went wrong in the end and the rx 550 was the only truly new GPU below the Vega models to my opinion that ideally AMD should have just added the Vega 56 and 64 GPUs alongside the RX 400-series and that would have been a lot less confusing and led to far fewer and disappointing reviews of rebranded products as I said Nvidia is every bit as guilty when it comes to rebranding or refreshing GPUs so it's a practice that we would like to see both companies just completely forget about okay so let's talk a little bit about freesync before wrapping all of this up in general freesync is a great initiative and it brings adaptive syncs support to a wide range of monitors at an affordable price point it's certainly nice to see free sync monitors available at much lower prices than equivalent g-sync monitors but there are a few issues with the free sync monitor ecosystem and it would be nice to see AMD tidy it up for starters free sync badges are a bit of a mess you can find really good free SiC monitors on the market and you can find really bad free SiC monitors having the free sync badge says nothing about the quality of the display just that it supports the VESA adaptive sync standard crucially it doesn't tell you how well a monitor supports adaptive sync there are many free sync certified monitors with a very small refresh rate window so small they don't actually enhance the gaming experience at all while technically these sorts of monitors are free sync compliant they may as well not have free sync at all what we think AMD really needs is something like a free sync gold badge maybe or something along those lines anyway that lets gamers distinguish between basic free sync implementations and free SiC monitors with good quality panels and low framerate compensation that delivers a good gaming experience AMD did try this with free sync too but that's more designed for top-end HDR displays a free sync gold badge would be perfect for regular displays that deliver great experiences from basic to a DP 144 Hertz models right up to top-end ultra Wired's one of the good things about Nvidia g-sync validation is that insures you get a good gaming monitor when you see the g-sync badge if I only been something similar it would not only strengthen the free sync ecosystem but it would make it easier to pick out a good gaming monitor so there's about half a dozen things we as consumers feel AMD needs to address admittedly many of these things aim there's no doubt already working on but things like the meaningless TDP rating probably won't get addressed unfortunately anyway I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did hang tight because next week we will tackle what NVIDIA needs to fix and that could be a much longer list so let us know in the comment section down below if there's anything you think we missed for this video and if you have any suggestions for the upcoming in video version as always thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I will see you again next time