somebodyspecial
Honorable
DrKlahn :
cats_Paw :
So... Spmpled GPU is better than the retail. Means what? that the sampled had better cooling or that AMD is tweaking their GPUs again to fool customers?
The Tom's article doesn't have enough information to really to say what is happening. What we can gather from the limited information is that it is going over 40% fan speed and staying at its lowest clock. It may be that the heatsink thermal grease is not properly applied (it does happen). It may be that there is an actual defect in the silicon. It may be a software bug.
If you have been following the launch on the various forums, by and large people are seeing the same performance on retail cards the reviewers have been. So in my opinion this should have been researched more thoroughly before just throwing out numbers in the graphs and hinting this is typical. I doesn't take much of an investigation on enthusiast forums to see the results the majority of people are encountering. The responsible thing to have done would have been to made this into it's own article detailing the behavior, fan setting experimentation and possibly a teardown to see if there was any negligence in construction.
But since AMD admitted they have "variance" problems and are working on a fix, Toms is basically vindicated right? They may not have had time to do anything more (they may not even own the retails themselves). I posted a link to TR forums showing another guy having this issue, and he replaced the grease, ran with the side off etc. Nothing changed until setting the fan at 50%.
I see nothing wrong with reporting what they found. It's just the data they got while testing. How do we know an article isn't coming already? Techreport is planning on testing retails for issues (due to the toms article) so look for that soon if you don't get it here. Though again, AMD has admitted to a problem, so there isn't a question about that now. It's a KNOWN fact.