The GPU Sell-off: A Cautionary Tale of Market Saturation and Future Performance
As we eagerly await the arrival of new graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia and AMD, a peculiar phenomenon has emerged. The market is flooding with last-generation GPUs at discounted prices, making it challenging for future models to prove their worth. eBay listings have revealed a plethora of sold RTX 3080s, with some fetching prices as low as $500 or less. While this may seem like a blessing in disguise for consumers, it's essential to consider the potential implications on the market and the future of GPU performance.
The Radeon RX 7000 series is still on the horizon, but AMD has been tight-lipped about its details. However, Igor of Igor's Lab has provided an exclusive look at the upcoming Radeon RX 7900 XT, courtesy of a hand-drawn board layout. The seven-chiplet-based GPU at the center boasts a Graphics Compute Die (GCD) and six Multi-Cash Dies (CCDs). The memory layout supports up to 24 gigabytes of GDDR6 configuration, and three eight-pin PCI Express power connectors provide juice for up to 450 watts. While Igor estimates actual thermal design powers (TBP) will be far below this figure, some speculate that final designs may employ the 12Vh power connector, akin to those used in RTX 4090s.
The Future of Intel Discrete Graphics
Intel's Arc discrete graphics team seems to be alive and well, despite rumors of its demise. The company has announced plans to discontinue Pentium and Celeron sub-brands, which previously represented the pinnacle of CPU performance or the ideal balance between power efficiency and processing prowess. These deprecated sub-brands will be replaced by a new brand name, likely used in the mobile space and for lower-power CPUs. While it's unclear what the new brand name will be, Intel has invested significant resources into rebranding efforts.
The Rise of Voice Assistants: A New Era of Advertising
Amazon's Alexa personal assistant service is set to undergo a significant transformation. In an effort to create a lucrative ecosystem, Amazon aims to infuse ads and other annoyances into Alexa's responses. This development may raise eyebrows among users, who have grown accustomed to the convenience and value provided by voice recognition. While some may welcome this change, others may find it intrusive or annoying. As with any new feature, time will tell how users react to this shift.
The Am5 Launch: A Price-Competitive Breakthrough?
AMD's upcoming Am5 launch has garnered significant attention, particularly regarding prices. The x670 motherboard lineup was previously steeply priced, but the advent of DDR5 has led to a decrease in cost. B650 and b650e chipsets, part of the lesser Am5 family, may offer a more affordable solution for enthusiasts seeking fun features like overclocking and PCIe Gen 5 support. A planned launch date for these lesser chipsets is set for October 4th, during an AMD live stream showcase.
The possibility of sweet-spot b650 boards providing users with all they need at a price below $200 may make the Am5 launch more appealing to those on a budget. However, this remains speculation, and only time will reveal if these expectations are met. As we await further details about the b650 lineup, one thing is clear: AMD's efforts to provide value and affordability will be closely watched by enthusiasts and consumers alike.
Tech News Roundup
As we conclude our look at the latest tech news, it's essential to acknowledge the various articles mentioned in this article are linked in the description for those interested. My store at paulshardware.net also offers high-quality merchandise, including t-shirts, hoodies, beer sets, and more. Subscribing to my channel is always a good call, as new content and updates will be shared regularly.
And so, we bid farewell to this week's tech news, leaving you with the anticipation of what's to come in the world of GPUs, processors, and voice assistants. Stay tuned for further developments and stay informed about the latest technological advancements.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to Paul's Tech news another week has passed and the tech world has only used that time to gain momentum as we've hurtled towards Q4 and launch apocalypse 2022 the launching a veritable PC Hardware superstorm that has been Gathering when the new CPUs and gpus will rain down upon us like a glorious golden shower allowing for a few fleeting moments of Happiness before we spot the attached price tags and then Retreat back into our depression caves but before you allow the winter malaise to wash over you completely which would be weird since technically fall hasn't even started yet take heed that this week's news is not just another reminder that big launches are coming but are still weeks or months away there was perhaps even bigger news as the ethereum merge actually happened kneecapping GPU mining profitability on a global scale and then on Friday the bombshell dropped that on the cusp of a new generation of GeForce graphics cards launching nvidia's biggest add-in board partner EVGA is exiting the GPU market and will no longer be doing business with Jensen and company that one I didn't see coming when it rains Tech news it pours though hope you brought your umbrella excellent today's video is brought to you by the new height Eclipse hg10 wireless gaming headset combining a clean matte lunar gray color scheme with competition grade functionality including 2.4 gigahertz wireless connectivity with 30 hour estimated battery life High Fidelity 40 millimeter neodymium drivers a detachable unidirectional mic USB type-c connectivity with an included 1.8 meter cable to play and charge at the same time and conveniently accessible controls for power volume and mute for more on the height Eclipse hg10 headset click the sponsor Link in the video description let's start with a quick look at the big board we only have a small update this week I added the likely announcement date for Intel's 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs which will probably take place on September 27th during their Innovation events Arc A500 and A700 gpus could get a launch date that day too although Arc launch dates are notoriously difficult to pin down with Nvidia set to host to their GeForce Beyond event at GTC on Tuesday September 20th though where we will almost certainly be seeing the reveal of the RTX 40 series of gpus a fine selection of RTX 4090 leaks have surfaced this week it began on Monday when a since deleted post on the Chinese Baidu forums showed off what appears to be the retail box and an assembly line of RTX 4090 gpus from Zotac with a redesigned three fan cooler that looks quite large likely taking up three if not four slots it's hard to say for sure but there seems to be room for one or possibly two 16-pin pcie Gen 5 12 VH power connectors for power delivery which would allow the card to pull over 600 watts from a compatible power supply then on Tuesday a gigabyte retail box for their RTX 4090 gaming OC was posted by Twitter user w n Zod while the card itself wasn't shown retail box images appeared to show a similar design to gigabytes RTX 3090 TI gaming OC which would mean a big fat four slot cooler to contrast the slimmed down font they're using for 4090. this would appear to also confirm the gpu's memory configuration 24 gigabytes of gddr6x Twitter user wnzod also showed a picture of a Lenovo Legion system with a partially masked model number that is probably an RTX 4090 and Then followed up with some images of the cooler assembly lots of fins in that stack there I must say and uh wow that's that's a lot of heat pipes too and then there was this card from Galax that videocards.com posted renders of on Friday a GPU that's apparently from their SG or Sirius gaming lineup so no jokes or or any silliness please will leave the implied Ridiculousness to the protrusive fourth fan on this card which stands out conspicuously from the back plate as if to say SLI is dead which reminds me I don't think that I see any NV link SLI fingers on any of these leaked RTX 4090s so perhaps we should also say rip to the rip GN rip J series if even a simple two-way setup isn't a thing anymore or maybe they figured out how to do SLI via the pcie Gen 5 bus who knows anyway apart from the four fan setup this card has a single 12 VH power connector no model name as of yet and a box with a rough approximation of what a PC Gamer looks like according to Galax what would be weird is if I showed any leaked images of an EVGA RTX 4090 GPU because those will not be coming to market the news broke Friday with videos by Gamers Nexus and Jay's two sense that EVGA one of nvidia's biggest add-in board Partners will be terminating its relationship with Nvidia and will not be selling any RTX 40 series gpus this came as a shock to many who have seen EVGA as a staple provider of Nvidia cards for well over a decade the company was founded in April 1999 in fact about about 80 percent of their business by volume in recent years has been Nvidia graphics cards and this isn't some rumor either Steve and Jay both sat down with EVGA CEO Andrew Hahn in recent weeks and he made it clear that they are completely stopping the production of nvidia-based graphics cards and they do not intend to restart in another generation or two down the line either EVGA will remain in business as they do sell other products like power supplies and motherboards and they plan to continue to support customer warranties for existing gpus which they've set aside inventory for their supply of new 30 series gpus will likely run out before the end of the year and apart from layoffs in Taiwan that have already happened they do not plan to fire anyone staff might be reassigned and some might just continue to get paid for the foreseeable future when which was a nice decision for CEO Andrew to make there are no immediate plans to sell the company they're not expanding to new product categories and at least for now they're not partnering up with amd's Radeon team or Intel's Arc Squad but that hasn't been completely ruled out either and if you do spot an EVGA 40 series GPU image or leak online that's because they did get as far as creating some engineering samples before development for this generation was halted nvidia's top executive staff was notified of this move all the way back in April and the key reason was that Nvidia was just a pain in the ass to work with according to EVGA I'm paraphrasing there and also CEO Andrew wanted to spend more time with his family rather than dealing with all the behind the scenes drama in the GPU industry it's a messy breakup to be sure but as for me I'm hoping EVGA will move Beyond G-Force quickly and hook up with team red or team blue on the rebound those 40 series gpus though the ones that EVGA won't be selling are looking almost dangerously performance heavy though with additional leaks from Twitter leaker copite7 Kimi claiming that the full-size Lovelace chip could have more than 75 billion transistors a big step up from the 3092 TI which had a paltry 28.3 billion or the piddly little Navi 21 chip on the Radeon RX 6950xt which has 26.8 billion rumored 3dmark time spy extreme results indicate about double the performance from the 49d versus the 3090 so that's impressive although there's already cynical expectations that Nvidia will be pretending that we're still in the height of the GPU shortage era by attaching a two thousand dollar plus MSRP so it is perhaps good news that we could see lesser cards launched this year too again if rumors are to be believed with two variants of the RTX 4080 on tap one with 16 gigabytes of gddr6x vram and one with 12 gigabytes the 12 gig version was maybe going to be a 4070 TI before but calling it a 4080 will probably allow them to sell it for more money even though it has a narrower memory bus more than 20 percent fewer Cuda cores and a board power of only 285 Watts let's switch to some good news though GPU mining is dead or so it would seem effectively for now thanks to the ethereum merge that actually finally happened early in the morning on September 15th which could reduce Global power usage by as much as 0.2 percent According to some estimates which is nothing to sneeze at less power used a new day for PC Gamers who don't have to compete with prices completed by crypto speculation and ethereum is still there and functional for people who want to buy and sell it so who is sneezing I guess well that would be crypto miners who are invested in GPU mining Farms who apparently just really don't want to sell off their gpus look they say we're still consuming tons of power we just moved our Terra hashes over to other coins like eth classic haha gotcha PC Gamers and people who don't want ridiculous amounts of electricity wasted but even crypto enthusiasts who aren't complete morons know that it's not just about hash rates it's about adjusted difficulty rates and ultimately profitability so here is what happened to the hash rate on eth Classic this week and guess what here's what happened to the profitability and why is that well it's because any legitimate cryptocurrency will increase in difficulty when there's an influx of mining power even cryptos that are supposed to be the saviors of GPU mining such as ravencoin have seen a similar dip in profitability see all these negatives over here in the profit column that's that's not a good thing if you're a GPU Miner as pointed out by Ben Gagnon CMO at bit Farms it took less than 24 hours post merge for profitability to turn negative on the remaining well-known GPU minable coins or maybe you know just not worth it unless two cents a day for your Raven coin mining sounds appealing to you you can pretty much see the peak Point here on Thursday or Friday after so many miners switched to eth Classic when they realized it wasn't worth the effort and then started to shut those mining rigs back down and so as pointed out by the glorious PC Master Racers on Reddit it begins the GPU sell-off or so we hope to flood the market with Bargains and make it really hard for the new generation of gpus to prove their worth whatever Nvidia and AMD want to charge for them a quick glance at sold auctions on eBay and I'm cautiously optimistic these are just sold RTX 3080s and while some are still stupidly priced I am seeing quite a few sell for around 500 bucks or less and that's not a bad start and now we move on to Tech briefs purely out of necessity today as I am quite literally running out of time to get this video made the Radeon rx7000 series of gpus is still on the calendar for this year but apart from a very brief tease during their event at the beginning of this month AMD hasn't revealed much but Igor of Igor's lab came through with an info drop on Thursday using another of his hand-drawn board layouts in an attempt to share some info that he's privy to about the card without fueling the sensationalist leakers out there who feed on leaks and rumors for their own nefarious clickbait videos than them all to hell so here we have a close to reference board design for the new Radeon RX 7900 XT showing the seven chiplet-based GPU at the center with one Graphics compute die or gcd and six multi-cash dies or ccds a memory layout that could support up to a 24 gigabyte gddr6 configuration and three eight pin PCI Express Graphics power connectors for up to 450 watts of juice available although Igor says actual tbp should be far below that it's possible final designs could use the 12vh power connector as many of the RTX 4090s appear to be going with but hopefully we'll find out more directly from AMD soon Intel doesn't appear to be killing off their Arc discrete graphics team anytime soon but they are killing off some old friends you might remember pentian and Celeron Intel sub brands that use to represent the height of CPU prowess or the ideal mix of performance and efficiency depending on whether or not you write copy for Intel's marketing team deprecated and reassigned over the years particularly after the Core Series of CPUs debuted pentiums and celerons still held a place on the Intel lineup in the mobile space and for lower power CPUs but now they'll be replaced by a more up-to-date brand name that they probably spent a bunch of time and money Focus grouping and mulling over with outside Consultants the new Intel processors will be called Intel processors I can't believe Intel pays people to make decisions like this speaking of things I can't believe Amazon's Alexa personal assistant service will soon be replying to questions that you ask it with ads I'm kidding I totally believe this and in fact I expected it it's an old Ploy offer people something free or free-ish but helpful build an ecosystem around it so they rely on it on a daily basis and then start to infuse ads and other annoyances so you can profit while your customers debate how long they'll put up with that BS in exchange for the convenience of voice recognized commands my guess would be not long but I never signed up for Alexa in the first place hey Google tell Alexa to eat a barrel of dicks speaking of that I guess I was wondering what you all thought about the upcoming am5 launch when it comes to prices I mentioned some steep x670 motherboard prices last week and while ddr5 has come down in price it's still pretty expensive versus ddr4 perhaps the answer will be b650 and b650e the Lesser am5 chipsets that should still allow for fun stuff like overclocking and some pcie Gen 5 support depending on the model of motherboard and we now have a date for b652 or most likely an announcement date for a follow-up launch and that announcement will be October 4th when AMD has a live stream showcase planned to further elucidate us on the details of b650 and b650e so if you'd rather not drop 400 bucks plus on the motherboard for your 300 ryzen 7600x maybe there will be some sweet spot b650 boards that provide you with all you need for well below two hundred dollars we can hope and I can hope that you enjoyed today's video so there you have it guys Tech news for the week and if you liked it click that like button or leave me a comment down below while you're down there all the articles I talked about today are linked in the description if you're interested and you can check out my store at paulshardware.net for high quality merchandise t-shirts hoodies beer sets and more including my new 8-bit designs like this one they're so pretty so shiny subscribing to my channel is always a good call too thanks again everyone for watching and we'll see you next week\n"
