Guess what, chip shortage is over! Well... maybe not... but at least my chip shortage is over.
I've been using several cards, different brands, either be S3, Matrox, Cirrus Logic, Nvidia and ATi now AMD.
The card that said to me the most was probably Matrox or the AMD RX480, I don't really have a pick but lest talk about the Polaris.
I started using ASUS again and thought that after a bumpy ride on the PowerColor I wanted a real gamers card, left the "normal" ASUS brand to get a RoG Strix RX480. I can't remember quite well, it was either 260 or 360€, not expensive at all and it was a promo sale going on with a bundled game. Doom 2016.
The year was early 2017, I really go to check the receipt for that date or I'm just getting old.
5 Years of Service later still served me quite well and we saw it spike on the used market for like 400/500€ when mining was peaking. It was sure profit if sold but then graphics card market was a mess, nothing available at the stores.
I wanted from the start a RX6800, this one seemed reasonable, not the highest but a near Top performer.
Again, RoG was the choice, for some reason temperatures on Strix cards were very manageable, sub 65ºC even when OC'ed at insane levels. But Strix models were always priced to the roof.
Now with the next line of graphics almost here and a stabilizing market, not there yet but...
I got a promo (there's always a promo) on Amazon for an Item with damaged box, took a risk and spent nearly half of what it costs in Portugal. You can't get a Strix 3070 here for what I've paid, it was 73€ more than a Strix 3060ti.
Now wish me luck.
Because this Beast has to top the Old Beast.
But it sure started really well. 4K is really playable with this card!! 😁
Lets see the editing, I got to update drivers and DaVinci resolve to version 18 to take full advantage.
Go Go Go Go
After some more testing...
Davinci really scared me, the latest drivers kept crashing the rendering but that's a known issue, so rolled back to the WHQL ones. Davinci for some reason does prefer WHQL drivers.
The timeline editing was really choppy at first, I dropped something on my pants after seeing the games flying and editing being slower than the RX480.
Did a rendering to see how much it would take and... ok, its way faster but the timeline is sooooooo chopppy... 😞
Started reading, updating, rolling back, updating again. Tweaking. All for nothing, version 16 seems the best for now till the version 18 matures.
The timeline in Davinci is now back to "almost normal". Could be some render cache issues.. but I don't know. Most of the people at BlackMagic foruns says: Stay away from AMD.
But the RX480 was actually very smooth, so this must be just software issues.
The temperatures!
WOW! Just WOW! Zero dB and under 40ºC all the time. Just WOW!
I like the AUTO undervolt, till I learn more about the GPU limits, the feature is actually good at it.
Don't have SAM enable, but that's because to forcibly enable it I need to update my BIOS, and that gives me stresses with DOCP profiles. Ill do that update when I move on to a more recent CPU.
The RoG part
The Addressable RGB strip is really cool and the card sure is a thicccc boy. 3 slot!
The length is actually the same as RX480. So it fits nicely in my case.
Gaming part
I installed a demo in steam that keeps evolving, hey its free. From RoG of course.
Its basically a showcase game with the background story and some nice little shooting games. At the start the graphics ran really great on RX480, but now some years after, they don't. Not even at low settings, too much eye candy to showcase the latest GPUs. With the RX6800, oh yeah! Back to ultra settings and well over 140fps.
I need more games 😄
More news soon.
