We normally don’t get too excited about external drives, but this one is pretty good:
So is that its marketing hype, that you can run over it with a car? It isn’t cheap but it is an interesting product.
AMD announced the Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 video cards featuring their new RDNA 4 architecture. These cards are aimed at the market of the 4070 Ti Super and the 4070 Ti/4070. These could be the best value gaming cards depending on how AMD prices them. Anything that puts price pressure on Nvidia’s cards is a good thing so we’re hoping that AMD does the right thing here.
But even if AMD doesn’t offer a very competitive price, early indications suggests that their 9070 XT beats NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 SUPER In TimeSpy Extreme. That is impressive if true.
We all knew these models were coming so it’s nice to have them finally announced:
| Model | Cores/Threads | Max boost | TDP | L3 Cache |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 9 9950X3D | 16/32 | 5.7GHz | 170W | 144MB |
| Ryzen 9 9900X3D | 12/24 | 5.5GHz | 120W | 140MB |
Price has not yet been announced but they won’t be cheap. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core AM5 Processor is presently listed at $700 at B&H Photo. Unfortunately, we’re not expecting these to be that much faster than the 7000 series equivalents. Perhaps 10% at best. But we would be happy to be wrong on this front.
The Nvidia RTX 5000 series has been announced. We are disappointed by the lack of VRAM upgrades in several of the models. However, we are not surprised as Nvidia has a good hold on the market and can get away with a lot. We really want to see some more affordable models with 24gb of RAM. Instead, we get only 16gb of RAM unless you go up to the $1,999 32GB of RAM flagship RTX 5090 video card.
The following table summarizes our current knowledge:
| Model | Cuda | Ram | Memory Speed | Bus | Power |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 5090 | 21,760 | 32GB | 28Gbps | 512-bit | 600W |
| RTX 5070 Ti | 8,960 | 16GB | 28Gbps | 256-bit | 285W |
| RTX 5070 | 6,400 | 12GB | 28Gbps | 192-bit | 250W |
| RTX 5060 Ti | TBC | 16GB | 28Gbps | ? | 200W |
| RTX 5060 | TBC | 8GB | 28Gbps | ? | ? |
| RTX 5080 | 10,752 | 16GB | 30Gbps | 256-bit | 400W |
We are sad to hear that AMD is delaying the launch of its 9000 series processors due to quality expectation issues. Maybe they’re paranoid after the defect recently found in Intel processors? Either way, not the news we were hoping for. It’s not clear how much of a delay this will bring.
Rumors seem to be indicating that we might see the Nvidia RTX 5000 Blackwell cards in 2024. We certainly hope this is true. Not much is known about these cards yet although we are seeing several sources say there could be a 40% generational improvement which would be quite significant.
It looks like we’re finally going to see a significant architecture change (new 2.5D interconnect tech) with AMD’s Zen 6 generation that will lead to better bandwidth, latency, better scaling, and power efficiency. This will increase cost, however. AMD is on a roll and have been able to consistently produce meaningful generation over generation performance increases. Zen 5 itself is already claimed to have a nice performance increase. We’re still waiting for more leaks and benchmarks for Zen 5 which should be coming out any day now.
Finally some reliable information has come out about AMD’s next generation of video cards.
What we’ve learned:
We’re always happy to see anyone compete against NVIDIA as they’re the kind of company that needs competition to keep them from bad behavior.
The ROG Strix XG259QNS was announced on February 5, 2024 by ASUS. This 24.5″ 1080P IPS panel monitor is clearly target at gamers with its refresh rate of 380Hz and a response time of up to 0.3ms. The brightness is adequate but not amazing at 400cd/m². We wish it had HDMI 2.1 instead of 2.0.
The price is not known yet but the current XG259QN monitor with very similar specifications sells for $450 presently. We also don’t know the release date but we expect it soon.
See ASUS’s specification page about this monitor for more information.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a video card from Nvidia for lower than $200. But this is not an exciting card considering its specifications:
However, it’s good to have options at this market segment. This is probably okay as a budget 1080p card that will let you play games at medium settings. It will definitely be an improvement over any integrated graphics. But would would recommend you save up a bit more and get something that will last you for a longer period of time. This is, after all, based on 3.5 year old architecture.
One interesting situation to consider is, do you buy a Ryzen 8700G or a cheap processor and a new Nvidia RTX 3050? Trick question. Wait for the 8700G to drop in price.