Thanks for the explanation. Will come in real handy when I attempt WC.

Wow so now a used 970 is selling for the same price as a new 970 pre gst/ringgit drop?

basically from what I noticed, yes

brand new reference model gtx970 in H1 2015 is priced somewhere in the RM1.1k range, now the cheapest is about RM1.3k

and that's the one with reference cooler, not those fancy big fans with heat pipes revisions

who know why my ram usable in nvidia geforce experience but in my computer detect normally,none usable

I see a lot ppl selling their 970, why a?

Jump red camp?

Pascal in April.

what's the coolest 980ti (and quiet too) on the market now? no water cooling please.

https://www.techpowerup.com/mobile/220372/n...6-computex.html

June, not April.

Phew looks like more time to think since it's early June now..

Hello guys, I'm currently using R9 380x looking for an upgrade with 3k budget.. any recommendation?

You might want to add a little bit more and then get the cheapest "non-reference" 980ti. Else you can try your luck with a 2nd hand 980ti. Some are selling around 2.8k+-. Personally, if possible, I will wait a little (you know, with AMD and Nvidia pushing new cards soon).

Mine very quite

I think mainly is upgrading. Going 980ti or something similar in the red camp.

I bought a new 980ti for RM2.7k (Gainward GS) - http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7338/gain...view/index.html

I feel it's not worth it to spend extra 500-600 for a well known brand like Asus. I'm gonna sell it anyway when Pascal arrives

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/EVGA/GT...SC_Plus/34.html
Same cooler, i guess.
MSI Lightning seems to be the coolest

Is Lightning LE available locally?

This post has been edited by Skylinestar: Feb 29 2016, 07:31 PM

From Guru3D for those who can't wait / playing the waiting game for Pascal.......


It's been topic for discussion for a while now. Personally I think we'll see some soft of announcement in April during the GTC, and later on a broad announcement in the Computex timeframe. Likely, and here's why the post starts with 'rumor' only the mobile parts will be announced and launched first, and not the desktop graphics card parts.

According to sources in the industry the mobile replacements for GM204 and GM206 are planned to be released first. Pascal is Nvidia's new GPU architecture, fabbed at 16nm. Everybody is waiting on big Pascal with its 17 billion transistors. As stated we expect Nvidia to share more details on the GPU Technology Conference as the CEO of Nvidia is holding a keynote speech.

Initially everybody expected an April/May release for desktop GPUs based on pascal.

The 'Big pascal' that the PC gaming community is waiting on is called GP100 GPU based on a TSMC 16nm process fab. We'll call that GPU Big Pascal with billions of transistors (16 to 17 billion rumored). Two things can happen here, it will have HBM2 which is complicated, or the cards will use GDDR5X.

In a latest timeframe prognosis Nvidia are rumored to launch the first high-end GP104 GPUs with models GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 (should Nvidia use their old naming scheme). These chips would come in a 37.5×37.5mm BGA package, and has 2152 pins. Pascal GPUs are fabbed in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) (recently hit by an earthquake) based on the new 16nm FinFET process, a process that uses the popular stacking method that NAND these days uses as well. It should result in significant power savings.

Anyway, so be it, mobile parts will likely be released first.

Things that are surely to be certain are:

-Product cycles are getting longer these days, hence you can expect new launches between 2 generation levels Longer timeframe.
-Technology companies are not stupid. they will milk out (max) cash flow out of each generational products before launching a new one. Like this Mr Huang of NVidia. (he got the business brain in him)

new driver 362.00 out already anyone tested yet

Can't wait to try out these new drivers with my yet-to-be-delivered 'Far Cry Primal'

On the technical side,
1) Chip design nowadays are getting more and more complicated (billions transistor count) and there are limitations in fabrication process and also heat issue.
2) Debugging these chips will take longer time. If they fast track it and release a buggy chip, they stand to lose more from RMA and bad rep.
3) It is right to salvage chip defect and reuse as lower end parts. Less wastage, recover R&D cost and fabrication cost.
4) Architecture performance improvement and/or power saving is normally achieved by fine tuning the architecture, better power gating or new ways to perform the task. Over the years, technology company already fine tuned a lot of aspect in their architecture, leaving less and less things to fine tune. Intel's CPU core improvement is generally only ~10% from architecture to architecture (instead of having more cores, it's really hard to increase performance for each core given the same thermal envelope).

From the above points, you can see design process is getting longer and longer, this also translate to R&D cost getting higher and higher. This is why some company choose to rebrand their products. IMO, Nvidia is already doing a lot of enhancement on both hardware architecture designs and software side (CUDA/Gameworks) in order to optimize the performance possible. (Anyone may argue open source is better, but let's face it, almost no investor and hardware vendor will be willing to invest too much time/effort on open source things. Open source = broad compatibility = hard & longer to optimize.)

TLDR, long product cycle for GPU is good since this forces the developer to use smarter technique and optimize to achieve better results instead of just brute-forcing it. This is why console graphics are generally on par/or better with PC graphics, even at a (much) lower performance capability.