Gadgetory

what's going on YouTube Jay's $0.02 here and as a reviewer I've got the responsibility of making sure that I get it right there's a lot of people looking at this channel and watching these videos for opinions to help make proper decisions when it comes to spending their money on various PC components and hardware now a couple weeks ago I did a video on the Sapphire 290x try x8 gigabyte AMD graphics card and a lot of you felt that I did a very terrible job at giving that card a thorough review and you know what the more I thought about it the more I thought you guys were right which is why we're gonna do the responsible thing and go back and do a take two of the Sapphire try x8 gigabyte 290x I mean after all this card really does deserve it the fractal design r5 is so amazing it fits all kinds of cool hardware in there water cooling air cooling and on top of that it's silent it's awesome like explosion early now cards like this kind of make it a little bit difficult on the consumer to try and figure out whether or not they need a card with eight gigabytes and that really is the star of today's show now I do want to apologize for getting the previous video a bit rushed and a bit just lackluster because I think I was a bit excited and pressed for time to get skunkworks completed as well as the parvum build which you guys have recently seen go up so now we are circling back and giving this card the thorough investigation that it really deserves now sapphire is one of two brands that actually offer an 8 gigabyte variant of the 290 and 290 X now you might be asking yourself why does the 8 gigabytes exist now I've already kind of said it the 8 gigabytes really is the star of the show when it comes to this graphics card I mean the hawaii-based GPU is nothing new it's actually been out since October of 2013 and it's really starting to become dated when it comes to refresh cycles of GPUs we all know the 300 series is literally right around the corner and that tends to be the time when prices are constantly fluctuating and dropping even this card right here is continuing to drop in price over time and when the new cards drop people are gonna find themselves wondering well do I need a 300 series card or can I get away with going something like the 290 X or 298 gigabyte versions we won't spend a lot of time going over the specs considering not nothing has really changed especially since two weeks ago and certainly nothing's changed on this card because I've had it the entire time it is based on the Hawaii GPU does have a turbo clock of 1020 megahertz I was able to overclock it to eleven hundred and twenty five higher than any other 290 or to 90 X so far that I've taken a look at on this channel I was able to overclock the RAM to fourteen hundred and twenty five megahertz remember that number is times four when it comes to AMD GPUs and it does have eight gigabytes of gddr5 running a 512 bit memory bus so the specs on this thing are really impressive but how does it perform when it comes to games well gaming is not the entire story when it comes to this card in fact I'm kind of glad I got a chance to really take a look at this card again and look at it from a different perspective if you guys remember a couple of weeks ago I talked about leap Computing's cloud base gaming and how there's two options at launch it you can go with one is a Titan X and the other is a 298 gigabyte now when you talk about a client base system that's sitting right here in front of you you would think okay well Titan X is probably going to be the fastest GPU so why wouldn't you want it and I kind of said that same thing to leap I said why would anyone go with older architecture rather than cutting edge when the price is the same and we basically said well the reality and the fact remains that AMD's computational power on the GPU is far superior to invidious and I kind of thought you know I think that might be true considering the fire pros have always been so powerful and definitely for productive needs very cost to performance ratio and they said that if you are doing a lot of rendering or lots of GPU based computational workflows then you're definitely going to want to go with AMD where it's going to give you better stream quality so that got me thinking lots of GPU vram lots of people aspiring to either be famous youtubers or famous twitch streamers which means rendering videos or alive rendering gameplay up to a server and streaming it you're gonna be offloading a lot of GPU power a lot of computational power onto the GPU so the eight gigabyte buffer really does come in handy it's not just about high resolutions but it's also about high performance for the GPU when tasks are offloaded onto the GPU and with modern api's like mantle and DX 12 coming in the future this is a bit of future proofing yeah I know you guys know I don't like the word future proofing but there is a bit of future proofing involved with higher frame buffers when it comes to GPUs so let's go ahead and take a look at some of the benchmark numbers here I did a couple of games we did some Far Cry 4 GTA 5 battlefield 4 not hardline I'm gonna have hardline installed on the test bench yet and then some Metro last light so let's go ahead look at those benchmarks and then we're gonna do a live demo actually of premiere with one of my workflows we're gonna show you where this card really shines I'm not using a capture card on this because the screen tears really bad when he's a capture card so you're just gonna have to deal with it but you can see right here this section that's going up and down is the core clock and this section up here on the very top is the GPU usage so as I scrub you can see the GPU starts to immediately do something now the other thing I want to point out here is that there is absolutely no lag in the scrubbing or the playback and that's because we're offloading all of the playback instead of to the CPU Ram we're offloading everything to the GPU so the GPU is taking over the workload here for the entire playback now no matter where we play it it's instant seeking I mean have you guys ever tried to do any sort of editing and the moment you start skipping around the timeline it takes a second to load or the playback here is in half resolution we're in full resolution right here so you guys can see that it just does an amazing job at keeping things very very responsive now the more layers and things that you add the more that you'll start offloading into some of that GPU Ram we're only using six hundred and thirty megabytes right now GPU but if we start let's just start adding some things to this and see what happens here so let's add whoops so let's add a YouTube logo let's add some vignette just making layers here I know it looks like crap but we're just making layers here let's add a troll face haha Twitter bird another transparent overlay let's do it that's what she said bubble jerry's bobblehead that i made him my bobblehead well that's huge oh let's see do some more transparencies mmm let's do this let's do the circuit background boy let's bring back down the opacity on that one so watch some transparency on there and let's go ahead and cut this clip like that let's add some sharpness because you know sharpening is very intensive and let's just crank the sharpness amount all the way to the top and look at you see the way it continues to scrub anyway so you can see it didn't matter it just did not care now this is all 1080p footage it would be you know if it was a 4k video workflow it would be probably more into the GPU Ram but we're just basic premiere like this you can see it's doing a fantastic job at just giving us some decent workflow but for those of you who are using things like you know 3d studio Max or After Effects or just doing any sort of high-end motion graphics then that 8 gigabyte buffer is definitely gonna be something you're interested in but I just wanted to give a quick demo here of how things look in Premiere and how playback and everything is just completely instant and let you actually see how it is LOF loading onto the GPU right here you can see the GPU usage going up and I think it goes up when we start playing all of these portions right here let's see too much all right well there you go there's that little demo now before getting out of here it's worth noting that the eight gigabyte buffer is not only beneficial to productivity workflows you guys know that there's been definitely a push towards more and more V RAM and graphics cards and being utilized by games where developers are really starting to tap into massive amounts of VRAM in terms of texture packs pc mods and things like that shadow of Mordor requires six gigabytes of vram if you're gonna be running the high resolution texture pack and we all know that I've been berated for saying that sky mod modding is only you know beneficial to a small amount of people apparently an awful lot of you do Skyrim modding which really can eat up into the vram as well and then of course minecraft even though this GPU die is nearly two years old still remains very relevant even in the 1440p resolution 4k one of these cards even with a gigabyte V RAM is or buffer is not going to be enough for 4k as you can see by the FPS on the charts but 1440p is still massively playable even at highest presets on all of these graphics settings and it's going to remain more relevant into the future as resolution gets more you know vram intensive you're gonna have a card that's gonna last a lot longer in fact for gigabyte cards are gonna start seeing their age a lot sooner than slower GPU cards with more gigabytes of vram so this is going to remain relevant well into the future here at least for the next several years so it's definitely a card worth consider picking up if you're looking at stepping up above 1080p resolutions or you just want to have a longer-lasting card even at 1080p resolutions ultra settings and getting into some PC modding or PC gaming modding and still have enough power to do workflow with a single card live-streaming editing and all of that stuff so really the card is a jack of all trades so guys there you go I wanted to circle back and take a look at this card once again this sapphire didn't ask me to do this I did this entirely on my own in fact I asked sapphire if I could borrowed the card for longer so that I could do this video I have tied up and utilized this card for well more than my than my welcome I have overstayed my welcome with this card so it's time to send it back but I at least wanted to make the previous shitty video that I did right by doing more traditional tests that it definitely deserved so if you guys were considering buying a graphics card and you weren't sure if the new 300 series was gonna make these things obsolete absolutely not they're gonna last well into the future plenty of GPU power lots of VRAM huge memory bandwidth and it's still relevant and is gonna be relevant for quite a while now of course pricing on these cards is always fluctuating so I don't really talk about pricing in the videos unless it really warrants it especially with graphics cards are always going up and down especially as new things are released so if you want to see the current pricing just look in the description to find a link down there where you can see what the current Amazon pricing is anyway as well as other links to Amazon affiliate codes if you guys want to support the channel if not go ahead and support your favorite youtuber we all are a community so we're supporting one of us or all of us is always welcomed now as always guys couldn't do this videos without you so every single time I'm always gonna say it thanks for watching you