Jjay wrote:Was chatting to a friend who i didn't know knew much about building pc's, He told me to take your advice about the q270 but maybe wait for the AMD 8000 series which is just around the corner, maybe January or even December since they are rumored to have quite a big performance increase. I didn't realize they were so soon i thought it was mid 2013 for the 8000/700 release so maybe i will wait a few months and just live on my 6850.
Heh, there's always something better around the corner. Buying a shiny new PC with brand-new, cutting edge hardware seems a bit silly if you're going to bog it down with a 6850. One thing for sure is that the 6850 generally struggles with 2560x1440. In the UK at least, the 7950 really is bargain of moment. It's a good 50 cheaper than a GTX670 and it's barely distinguishable from it in terms of performance.
Rumours about the 8000-series being much better are
just plain wrong though. The 8000 series were taped out months ago and everything apart from clockspeeds has been finalised. At the top end, The 7970 is a 2048-shader chip and the 8970 is a 2560-shader chip. The process is the same 28nm and the architecture is the same GCN, so AMD are going to have to put a lot of work in just to
match the clockspeeds of the 7000-series, let alone raise them above 1GHz.
Even if the new cards come out on time, they won't replace existing cards at the same price point;
More performance = higher price, because AMD are
absolutely desperate for money until they somehow settle their $600m overdraft!
It'd be nice if they did better than my predictions, but I suspect that
- the 8870 2GB will be about the same price/performance as the 7950 3GB.
- the 8950 will replace the factory overclocked (1100MHz) 7970's at around the same price/performance.
- the 8970 will suffer from availability issues and high prices as a result of the very large die.
At 5.1B transistors (20% more than Tahiti) it's going to require more die area, which exponentially increases the cost of manufacturing a defect-free, leak-free, low-voltage product capable of hitting 'flagship' clockspeeds.