Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we're getting super serious with another top five best video yeah as always these are just a bit of fun and this one is actually a follow-up to last month's top 5 worst GPUs I asked viewers what their top 5 best GPU list looks like and only looking at GPUs though that have been released in the last 5 years or so many of you came back with very similar-looking listen many of them were choices that I also nominated myself so I've taken what I think are the best 5 from the list suggested added a little few of my own in and this should make for a nice stroll down a GPU memory lane it was a hot summer's day here in Victoria Australia when the Radeon HD 7950 was released on the 24th of February 2012 temperatures soared to 37 degrees and I remember it like it was yesterday actually that's a lie I just looked up the weather history graph but I'm sure it was a nice day nonetheless anyway we're not here to recall the weather but rather pay tribute to AMD's second-in-command of the illustrious Tahiti series the Radeon HD 7950 played second fiddle only to the 7970 and with a release date MSRP of just 330 dollars u.s. it was considered a real bargain at the time price to be 40% more affordable than the 7970 and it packed just five and a half percent fewer cause because that it could be overclocked to actually match and even beat the stock 7970 it also brushed off in videos then current flagship the GTX 580 which cost five hundred dollars and it was also 30% faster than Amy's previous generation flagship part the Radeon HD 6970 somebody even say it aged like a bottle of fine wine almost six years later it's still able to provide very playable performance at 1080p and modern titles and it certainly fared much better than nvidias GTX 750 over the years that particular model was released two months prior for 350 dollars no I'm not trolling you guys but I bet a few of you wish I was when I put together my top 5 worst GPU list many of you voiced concern about a lack of a GTX 970 even today with very little evidence to support the argument some claim that the GTX 970 is a broken GPU that's suffering from its borked rear buffer the GTX 970 was a highly controversial GPU released by Nvidia and yet despite that one of their most successful ever out of the gate the GTX 970 was met with rave reviews for its unbeatable value shortly after the glowing reviews though it was discovered roughly 13% of the full gigabyte video and buffer was partitioned off limiting it to a much narrower memory bus so while the card did technically have 4 gigabytes of memory on board it wasn't actually capable of the performance claimed rather the GPU was limited to a memory throughput of 196 gigabytes per second when working from the primary partition in just 28 gigabytes for the smaller half gigabyte partition this however didn't change the fact that at the time the glowing performance seen in reviews was the exact same performance gamers were receiving the worry though was that as gaming titles inevitably came more bandwidth hungry the GTX 970 would fall into a complete heap this is a legitimate concern at least to a certain extent despite the controversy though and the negative backlash this GPU really helps to strengthen invidious position and it became one of their best-selling GPUs of all time today the GTX 970 is still going strong according to my own findings and at recently impressed us in destiny - even at 1440p AMD's r9 290 went on sale in November of 2013 an MSRP of just $400 US making it 27% more affordable than the 290x that was a fantastic value when you can sit at the other interneuron he should never be more than say 9% slower than the r9 290x and in fact on average it was just five percent slower according to my tests so in a sense the Unown 290 made the r9 290x redundant much like the gtx 780 did to the gtx titan as good as the 290 was though it wasn't without a few shortcomings a m-- d-zone 290 series cards ran very hot that's the reference cool I'm talking about and they did hit temperatures as high as 95 degrees in a matter of minutes when gaming this issue though was later sold by board partners as models from the likes of gigabyte MSI honest Zeus I featured much bigger coolers with triple fan designs the key thing to note here though is that back in 2013 the antonioni really put the heat on the GTX 780 nits was so good that AMD decided to rebrand it as the r9 390 for 330 dollars where it would do battle with the more modern gtx 970 a battle that it ultimately lost if you look at the sales figures but today the r9 290 and r9 390 are still going very strong and they certainly are still taking it to the gtx 970 and even more modern GPUs in fact in a good number of games the r9 290 still hangs in there very respectably with the mid-range offerings such as the GTX 10 16 R X 480 anyway all the worries remember the r9 290 as an awesome value high end GPU from 2013 and even now in 2017 it still packs quite the punch and it will no doubt continue to serve gamers well for years to come nvidia really impressed us with the efficiency and performance of the maxwell based geforce gtx 980 back in 2015 then nine months later sox were blown completely off and barefoot gamers everywhere was shocked by how mighty the gtx 980ti was back in 2015 with almost 40 percent more cuda cores than the GTX 980 the new Ti model was a complete and utter beast later that month AMD tried to spoil the party with their Radeon r9 fury X and AMD fans boasted about 10 percent performance bumps over the gtx 980ti but just turned out to be wishful thinking and was quickly drowned out by the sound of whining pumps anyway the gtx 980ti did remain the performance champ and even to this day it's still a good bit faster a major advantage the 980ti had over the fury acts was its insane overclocking Headroom it was very easy to extract around 20% more performance from the GeForce graphics card and if comparing overclocking results well that was just a complete death blow to the fury X today heavily overclocked gtx 980 eyes can match overclocked gtx 1070 Safi paid $650 almost two and a half years ago you've got a pretty good deal as it is making $400 GPU performance today with the exception of the gtx 1080i the 980ti is probably the most impressive flagship GPU we've seen in many years now give it everything I just said about the Radeon r9 fury acts it seems a bit strange to be ending this round up on the Radeon r9 fury the the baby fury which is actually physically the largest of them all but anyway after releasing the compact liquid-cooled fury X AMD went on to release a much larger 9 X version which was just simply called the fury I had 13 percent fuel caused but for the most part it wasn't really that much slower and at $550 it was quite a bit cheaper this price stood alongside the GTX 980 and even today the two do still trade blows the r9 fury though it really suffered due to a lack of supply and shockingly just two of AMD partners were able to supply Fury graphics card and that was a soos and Sapphire earlier this year though was possible to purchase either the isuzu or sapphire models for under 250 dollars u.s. and at that price they were insane bargains of course cryptocurrency mining has spoiled that as it has for all GPU sales and now they're pretty much impossible to buy anyway still the Radeon r9 Fury has continued to age well so those are snapped one up chief will be grinning from ear to ear and hopefully in the not-too-distant future you'll once again be able to find one online for an irresistible price but even if they never present themselves as a good value option again they did provide bargain hunters with some excitement in early 2017 well there you have it announced time to let me have it in the comments below if you happen to agree with me though my picks then that probably places you in the minority so rather than miss out on all the action let me know if you've come across any truly horrible power supplies from well-known brands but a few of my own to share in a future video I'd love to hear if you guys have any of your own stories to share actually I'll quickly tell you just one of mine I once had a 1200 watt power supply from a well known brand catch on fire and a LAN party and burned through the ventilation in the bottom of the case and scorch the surface that the PC was sitting on the most shocking part was while flames and smoke were billowing from the PC it just kept on gaming it wasn't until I grabbed the power cord and pulled it the wall the system shut down and then we just had a horrible smell and a better table to deal with anyway as always I'm keen to read all your comments and maybe even leave a cheeky reply or two I'm your host Steve see you again soon guys