Exciting Times Ahead For AMD fans
Of course most have been fawning over the new Nvidia GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, me however, have been waiting for news of Polaris, AMD’s new graphics architecture and that news had recently dropped with the announcement of the RX 480 with 4/8GB of GDDR5 at an astonishing price and power requirement.
I am very much an unashamed fan of AMD; my first ever build was a AMD XP2000+ based system; although it did have the rather lackluster Geforce 4 MX440 GPU; and every one of my builds have been AMD based since. So I am very excited about the future of AMD with crossfired RX 480’s costing $400 in total if you choose the 4GB version, or $460 if you opt for the 8GB version, which according to AMD has better performance than the GTX 1080; of course you have to take that claim with a pinch of salt.
I fall into the category of being a performance per dollar buyer, I’m not interested in having the latest, fastest, most expensive technology; I want value for money, not bragging rights and AMD has always provided that for me. My current system consists of a FX-8350 CPU and R9-270X GPU and in general, it meets my needs, all the games I play run at 50+ FPS on high settings running on a 1080p 60hz panel.
My current machine is now close to four years old, although the R9-270X replaced a HD 6770 in 2014. I am now looking for an upgrade path and want to stick with AMD, so with Zen and Polaris on the horizon, it’s perfect timing for me as March 2017 is when I was thinking of making the upgrade happen.
By that time, there might be a RX 490 available for $300 as the AMD teaser event suggested the RX series would run between $199 and $299. This information is based upon the very knowledgeable AdoredTV on YouTube, have a watch of some of his videos; I find him to be very unbiased and he gives you an in-depth run down of the current state of play (some of which is speculation) in the PC technology arena.
Given a choice of paying $600 for the non-founders edition of the GTX 1080, $700 for the founders edition or $460 for dual 8GB RX 480s, I will take the latter. I’m looking forward the release of the RX 480 to see how it truly stacks up against the GTX 1070/80, we know manufacturers exaggerate performance.