Be Excellent To Each Other

I'll just sit on my current PC for as long as it takes for all this to settle down and the facts of the case become clear.

I'm not even sure why I'm keen to spend £1500+ on a new PC when all my current one really does is Hearthstone, fruit machine emulators, MAME and Pinball Arcade.

Still, new shiny thing, innit.

http://videocardz.com/60631/asus-rog-st ... erclocking

Oh dear oh dear.

So the small Polaris has now surfaced. Stock performance is on par with the 970 and 390 however apparently it overclocks to about the speed of an overclocked 980. For $199 !

The price combined with the performance and power consumption could be a winner for AMD. Hurrah ! And with Vega due October/next year depending on who you believe they could well be firing up the big engines too.







Oh yeah,overclocked 1070 vs overclocked 980ti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMr7grvBljk

7% slower than the 980ti when overclocked. That makes sense, because from the limited testing I have done the 1070 was 10% slower than an overclocked Titan X when overclocked. Which is about spot on. Titan X is 3% faster than the 980ti at the same clocks, 980ti clocks slightly higher (usually toward the 1500mhz mark rather than 1400mhz of the Titan X) so can make up the difference.

I expected this. Even overclocked the 1070 only closes the gap to 11% with the 1080 at stock. Overclocked the 1080 jumps back into the lead by 21%. I heard that Nvidia did not want the same scenario with the 670 and 970 where both could be overclocked to perform around the same as their stock larger siblings. It makes sense too, because the 980 was too expensive and pretty much every one bought the 970 and overclocked it.

Blogs praise nVidia, challenge everything:
...followed by thousands of words of attempting to challenge the benchmarks by cherry picking data.

Blogs praise AMD, take it at face value:

Yeah that was before I edited my post to show that actually what I have been saying is absolutely spot on. If you overclock a 980ti the 1070 can not touch it, even when overclocked. So it's actually not just me saying that. Remember all of those millions of videos on Youtube? I've been watching them for weeks.

But hey, if you feel that the prices of the 1080 and 1070 are good (especially when AMD just launched a card that can perform like the Fury for $199) then hey, knock yourself out.

As for praising AMD? why wouldn't I? they have just released a VR card for the masses that costs £150. And it's Finfet and it's a completely new core technology.

Well Nvidia seem to be doing pretty well out of the 1080 gouge-fest so far.

All the (cough) 'cheap' ones (i.e. less than £550) are sold out and on pre-order only, but help yourself to a reference card (sorry FOUNDER'S EDITION) for £635.....

In many cases it looks like it's 2-3 weeks before any stock is expected back in.

I'm definitely sitting this one out for a reasonable period of time, the desire not to get royally ripped off far exceeds my desire to get a new PC.

Anyway I was playing GTAV with the chaps earlier in the week and my current PC can still push that around pretty much maxed out at 1440p, albeit with a few nips and tucks in the settings and framerates that drop down into the 40s sometimes (but are usually 50-60, with v-sync engaged). Yes it'd be nice to put everything to maximum and keep a bulletproof 60FPS - but not £2000 worth of nice....

I really do hope AMD have a nasty surprise for Nvidia in the works, they need taking down a peg or two IMO.

What they've done just stinks tbh.

People pre ordered and paid for aftermarket cards on OCUK and the dates continue to slip. This means that people have grown impatient and changed their orders to FE cards. I know there's little you can do about people like that but it's cuntish because Nvidia have basically fucked over their own AIB (add in board) partners and they (Nvidia) are the only ones making sales ATM.

This is already having a knock on effect as for example EVGA (who can't even talk about actual specs for their custom cards) are not allowing EK to make water blocks for their cards as they're making their own.

It kinda feels like Nvidia are basically fucking over the very people who have made them what they are today.

Apparently it's also impossible right now to unlock the voltage either and Nvidia are on the warpath trying to stop it.

Madness. I can see why Intel told them to fuck off now. Apparently they're a real arse hole of a company to work with.

Looks like it has plenty of bang for-your-buck, it'll be interesting to see how the launch goes.

That seems a normal business model. A Compnay designs and sells a product. They want to sell it before it is farmed out to other manufactures.

No but you see all the other graphics cards in the world don't work any more so people have no choice but to buy. It's very sad

Except, no.

The way Nvidia are playing the launch of the Pascal cards is unusual in two main ways.

1) They've rebranded 'reference cards' as 'Founder's Edition cards' and are charging something in the order of an extra £100 for them. Ordinarily there'd be sufficient stock of both reference cards and the more interesting partner cards, whereby the partners put their own coolers on, power circuitry, overclocks and all that stuff. As it stands at the moment, all you can get are the ridiculously expensive Founder's Edition cards - what partner cards there were all sold out quickly and are now on 2-3 week lead times.

2) The second-tier card, the 1070, is nowhere to be seen, and it looks like Nvidia are in no hurry to get it out of the door either - so are truly gouging for the 1080 (and the 'Founder's Edition at that), in the meantime.

Not withstanding Doc's snarky comment, of course no one has to dance to Nvidia's tune, and no one's existing graphics card stops working overnight - but as the SOLD OUTS everywhere demonstrate pretty clearly, enough people have bought into the Pascal hype and the somewhat predatory stock control policy, to have made it very much worth Nvidia's while to act like twats.

Who knows, maybe it'll backfire, folks like me for example who were holding off on getting a new PC until the 1080/1070 launched, are now waiting longer until the prices and stock levels achieve some resemblance of sanity - in which time AMD's higher-end Polaris offerings might end up being a better proposition....

Clearly, they said "You know that new product that we're seeing high demand of that returns a decent margin? Let's only fill half of it and then watch the money roll in as we're in a fast moving techno industry with small windows to make a buck and the customers will hang about to buy an outdated thing a few months from now. The board will totally buy this strategy".

Exactly how many people in the world are willing or able to spend SIX HUNDRED POUNDS on a graphics card anyway? We're talking about a niche market here, aren't we? Units in the thousands, not millions.

I remember when Nvidia discontinued the 200 series completely, months before Fermi's launch. This left Nvidia only partners for dead, and a couple of companies (BFG included) went bankrupt. They had nothing to sell for about five months. XFX on the other hand told Nvidia to screw and now only work with AMD.

As I said, their business practices over the years have not been very nice. As Kov said that is the nature of business, but they managed to piss off Intel so badly that Intel refused to license them any more sockets. So Nvidia's motherboards and chipsets came to an end.

I'm very keen now to see how AMD handle the launch of Polaris, because they are appealing to an enormous audience so I pray they don't screw it up. IMO Pascal wasn't entirely ready but Nvidia are just doing the hare again (from the hare and the tortoise).

Hopefully the 490 (because come on, who makes an entire chip technology from scratch just to release one mid range card?) will be good at a really good price AMD did say "The $100-$300 range" and as yet have only released a $200 part (well, and a $239 8gb 480).



How many people bought the 64gb iPhone 6? you'd be surprised Dave. Nvidia are the Apple of the GPU world, and there is obviously an enormous audience or they wouldn't keep cranking their prices like they are.

But this is the rub for me. It's the most transparently obvious gouging imaginable, and only the biggest fools can possibly be falling for this, and I simply cannot muster any sympathy for those people.

"Predatory pricing" is selling bottled water for £10 in a drought, or getting newborn babies addicted to free formula milk then charging over the odds for it. It's not charging £2000 for go-faster stripes on a Lamborghini. nVidia is just monetising the impatience of a group of consumers with far more money than sense. It's not very pretty, for sure.

Nor is there any deception here on nVidia's part. It's not a con job. Everyone knows that the stock 1080s will be out in a matter of weeks or months and the 1070s won't be far behind and these cards will be the same or better as the reference designs.

Surprise me.

I agree with you. People don't have to buy them and they're piss weak to be doing so. It isn't that that has pissed me off, these people deserve what they get (fan revving, unstable cards etc). I very rarely buy anything at launch for the issues you get more than anything else but usually like to stay a generation (or card) behind.

What is pissing me off is how they are playing the "every man for himself !" card, screwing over loyal AIBs. They did this inititally with the GTX 460 too, though I will admit they had a lot more to lose then (I think the 460 brought them back from the brink tbh, ATI had been making DX11 hay for months and the 480 and 470 were pretty much failures). But after Maxwell their only excuse is pure greed.



I was speaking hypothetically. As in "£600 phone sells out in seconds". Not exact figures.

This isn't even remotely the same thing and this comparison is hopelessly bogus.

For most people, a smartphone is no longer a discretionary purchase. For most people, the 1080 doesn't exist. They have no idea what it is or why they'd want it. So the value deviced from £600 of phone is completely different from the value of a £600 graphics card.

Most people don't pay £600 for a phone, they get it "free" or for a few quid from a carrier.

Steam has about 125m active users. 5% of them have a 970. That's six million or so cards and I'm pretty comfortable that there are basically zero 970s that aren't connected to Steam. Apple sells more iPhones than that in the opening weekend. Apple quite possibly sells more phones in a year than nVidia has sold GPUs in the last decade. These businesses are not comparable.

No one gets it free. The package you opt for will have the price of the phone in it. So for example phones like the iPhone 6 come on plans costing £50 a month.

I would hazard a guess and say you don't spend your entire day reading enthusiast forums. I said Nvidia are the Apple of the GPU world and they are. They have a following just like Apple does and their products sell out at launch just like Apple does and so on. They also have cut throat marketing strategies and so on so there are plenty of similarities between the two. They also can't put a foot wrong right now it seems and everything they do changes into gold. At one point at the end of last year they had pretty much 80% of the GPU market. That's dropped again now and AMD have about 30% but yeah, it was worrying for a while there.

I did not say they were the 100% absolutely everything spot on Apple of the GPU world. They act the same and trust me, they have the same loyal following. And that's why they can bring out a card with a 10% performance increase (vs overclocked Titan X or 980ti) and not only up the price by £150 or so over the previous gen but also screw over all of their AIBs at the same time *and* still sell out on day one.

Do you seriously, actually, really think I don't know this?

John,

I think you are missing the point. no one needs to upgrade their phone or the graphics cards every few months.

You are complaining about Nvidia's business model. As far as I can see the older card still allows every one to play games but the new card allows a bit more shiney. Is it £600 worth of new shiney, i doubt it, as in 6 months there will be new shiney again, I would have a guess a the 1100 or something similar.

A better analogy would be buying a new car at registration day, or buying it slightly later pre registred and all the loss has been taken of it.

I'm not missing the point. You're correct, no one needs to upgrade or jump on the latest shiny. Sadly due to the nature of the human race they do though. And they're being exploited. Do I care? no, not really, but that does not excuse the way Nvidia have handled this release. I think you are missing the point on that. Am I personally bothered? no of course not. I bought a Titan X before launch as I knew what was coming. Does it bother me people are getting screwed over? of course it doesn't.

Do I like watching it though? no, not really. Even though I don't understand these people that need the latest shiny and think they're daft that doesn't mean I like to watch weak people being exploited.

How are they getting screwed over, it is their choice completely. Their life if no worse by waiting or not having the card.

As the Doc said, expolited is charging £10 for water at a drout.

As I already explained I really couldn't give a toss what people buy or don't buy. However, the way Nvidia are handling this release will have a negative impact on PC gaming as a whole as well as other things.

Well, unless AMD actually deliver what they have promised (but given their history of promising and failing I'm not holding my breath and wait to be surprised, I have no expectations of Polaris at all for example)

PC gaming is better when PC gaming is cheap. The more people who can access it means the more devs want to release games for it that actually work and so on. The bigger the audience the more money there is to be made therefore more PC games.

Ok, i am curious, how will limiting selling a new shiny card have a negative effect on gaming?

No cards in folks PCs have stopped working (although i need to get a new one to support windows 10), so all games will work as they did..

Or am I missing something?

JC's argument would hold water if games developers were exclusively targeting only the most capable cards, but that's not the case (except in some rare instances I would imagine)

Any game released recently (except Arkham Knight, trololol) will scale down nicely on older cards - sure, you might not get 90fps or whatever, but it will still be playable on (sometimes much) older hardware.

Only that's exactly what they do these days. Build workstations with the very latest cards in, ditch the older ones and make it so that new games run the best on the most current hardware.

Fallout 4 as an example. Looks pretty bad, runs like crap even on a Titan X if you set everything to ultra. And that's not even a good looking game, and I get 39 FPS mins with an overclocked Titan X !

Plus there's history. GTAIV launched and was so hard to run that they had to disable things in the menu and announced that "Higher settings are for future hardware".

Devs are lazy and will do as little as they need to with PC games. That's why SLi and Crossfire are pretty much doomed now*.

*OK basically back in the days of the 360 and PS3 devs had to code for specific platforms. IE - they first had to code a game for the 360 and to do that they needed to optimise for the hardware. They got really good at this, because it was set hardware. However, moving that code onto a PC meant that they had to rewrite large portions of the code in order to get it running on a PC, so whilst they were at it they would code in AFR support for games so that Crossfire and SLi worked (Alternate Frame Rendering).

However, then two new consoles come along that pretty much run on PC hardware and now the work needed to get a PS4 game (for example) running on a PC is far less. And because it's far less that means they don't need to bother rewriting the graphics code for example, so pretty much every release for over 8 months has not worked with either SLi or Crossfire and has not even been AFR friendly and thus, Crossfire and SLi have stopped working almost completely (Fury X Crossfire was the worst experience ever, it simply never worked).

And that means that Nvidia and AMD have to go to these lazy companies and ask them specifically to rewrite portions of code to make the games work and they just haven't been.

As of a few days ago Nvidia officially announced to Ryan Shrout (PCper, the guy that exposed Crossfire runt/dropped frames) that they were no longer supporting 3/4 way SLi. However, they did say that they would continue to support SLi with two cards. In other words, they won't support it as there is nothing they can do, but maybe if DX12 multi adapter actually becomes a thing two cards may actually do slightly more than one.

And this is all down to devs wanting the cheapest, easiest, most money making life possible.

So yeah, PC game devs have got form.

Windows 8.1 still works, but if i want Windows 10 i need to upgrade.. yes I see the irony

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-gefo ... 2a-ms.html

Wow.....

$375 eh Nvidia?

Edit. Before they pull that page like all of the others. Cheapest pauper edition with lousy cooler is £390. Most expensive so far has been a Galax, at £455.

Word of the day is "Suggested" taken from MSRP. Nvidia suggested it would be $375 for a non FE, they start at £390.

Cheapest 1070 I can see on pre-order at Overclockers is £365, with a proper minging cooler on it, which if my 970 is anything to go by, will spin far too slowly to keep temperatures in check, and therefore throttle like fuck to keep the GPU from roasting itself, or require a manual fan profile in MSI Afterburner to make MUCH NOISE but at least allow the card to boost freely.

There's a big open goal for AMD here, but have they got anything to kick at it?

Well of course they're going to run the best on the most current hardware, that's progress.

My point is that the vast majority of people (i.e. not the target audience for the high-end cards) are more than happy to play their PC games at "Medium" or "High" rather than "Ultra", and don't really care if they get under 60fps provided it's still playable.


Those bastards!

Eurogamer review of the 1070 is now up - http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... 070-review

They're saying 'a bit faster than a 980Ti/Titan X but for less cash', albeit they're quoting lower 1070 prices than the card is actually selling for.

OCUK have the 1070 Founder's Edition in stock for £400, the 'cheaper' ones are all on pre-order only. (And even then they cost more than Eurogamer are quoting.)

The 980Ti still makes no sense though, they start at £500 and suck 100W more power to do the same job, so even at £400 you'd be better off with a new 1070FE for £400.

On balance I think the 1070 might be the card for me, it seems to be turning in around 80% of the performance of the 1080, and it slightly outclasses a 980Ti. What I'm after is a 'max everything out at 60FPS/1440p card', the 970 doesn't manage it, the 1070 should.

I'm still waiting for the cheaper (and superior) partner cards to become available though, and I'm not spending more than £350.

The prices on OCUK mysteriously dropped. This could be for several reasons. Either they were undercut by other websites so had to lower them or basically saw the reaction to those prices on their forums. It really wasn't pretty.

The 980ti prices I've quoted you are for boxed cards in warranty selling used. Useless if you only like to buy new of course

I don't think it will be long before prices drop any way, I think AMD have everything they need now for their possible pending RX 490.

Sapphire's Nitro RX 480 pictured, as well as their blower reference model. It seems AMD aren't being very precious of their stock design which is nice, because that little back plate improves the look no end IMO.

http://videocardz.com/60992/sapphire-ra ... o-pictured

Apparently reviewers have the cards in hand, so performance leaks are expected over the coming days.

https://youtu.be/nUG9jgERvEQ

This could be BS but apparently according to Chiphell that is a Radeon RX 480 running Firestrike Ultra. The guy running the card got around the NDA by ghetto cooling it with the cooler from a 290x Lightning card.

If it's real the performance is the same as the R9 Nano for £165. That's fucking mental.

If AMD do indeed have a RX 490 in the pipeline it could be within 5-10 percent within 1070 performance for $299.

AMD talked about Polaris 10 costing $100 to $300 and so far the most expensive has been the 480 with a RRP of $199.

Geforce GTX 1060 to possibly feature 6gb 192bit memory.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-nvid ... 2h-ms.html

Pretty good value

It only looks passable because the prices on the 1070 are coming in so pisstakingly high to start with, and I guess you can actually buy a 980Ti at the moment, which is more than can be said for the 1070

I notice that Overclockers have shitloads of Founder's Edition 1080s available, which suggests to me that people are waiting for the cheaper (and better!) partner cards to become available, so maybe the gougable market isn't that big after all.

I'm happy to wait a bit of time on this one, and see where the prices start to settle down to, particularly on the 1070. The 980Ti would have get really cheap (like under £300) for me to start to consider it.

The 980ti is a better faster card so long as you know how to overclock one. I posted a video a while back of a 980ti OC vs the 1070 and the 980ti was 7% faster. The Titan X is 10% faster.

The problem is (and it's skewing the results) is that the 1070 overclocks itself pretty much to the point where it will thermal throttle. And inside a case that does happen quite a lot.

A decent 1070 with a half decent cooler on it currently costs more than a top end 980ti with a larger better quality cooler on it. A cruddy 1070 will cost around £370 and will likely spend its days throttling. Not only that, but FE 1070s and the KFA2 "clown card" do not have the zero fan mode and need to run the fan all the time.

My experience with my 970, which is absolutely the shittiest, cheapest one I could buy, and has exactly the same cooler as the shit stock cooler on my 670 - is that if you set it with an aggressive (admittedly noisy) manual fan profile it will routinely boost itself to over 1200MHz and stay there all day, with no other adjustments whatsoever. (Conversely, on the default fan profile, which prefers quietness over speed, it'll throttle like fuck.)

I suspect the cheap 1070s will be the same scenario, they'll throttle like bastards on the default fan profile, but if you're prepared to tolerate some noise - they'll boost up quite happily.

Once you get up to the £400 price point, which is where the nice 980Tis are, you're also getting 1070s with great coolers on them and rated for boost clocks of 1822MHz.

I agree it's closer than it probably should be and Nvidia are taking the piss with the pricing on the 1070/1080s, however it still doesn't make sense to drop £400 on a 980Ti IMO, when by all accounts the best-performing 1070s will be coming in at that price point, and I can't see a 980Ti matching those for performance.

But yes, the very fact there's a debate about it means Nvidia are being mean on performance and greedy on price with the 1070.

From what I have seen from the 1080 I would not expect any more performance than you saw in reviews of the 1070 FE. What you can expect though is the fans to switch off until the card hits 50c and less throttling. If you want to go beyond the spec of Pascal you need to do it with water. So EVGA Hyrbrid or custom water is the only way to actually gain anything significant clock speed wise. Right now with the aftermarket 1080s you are paying for your sanity with regards to noise, but even the best of the bunch (the Asus Strix) fares no better clock speed wise than the FE.

I would still like to know how Nvidia managed to show their sample at the unveil hitting 2100mhz solid. So far I have only seen those sorts of clocks twice. Once was when that hairy dude from Gamersnexus bodged on the 980ti Hybrid AIO cooler and the other have been a few instances of people putting them under water. And no phases or gigantic coolers seem to make any difference to that clock speed wall, apart from water. It seems Pascal gets very hot quickly and even the top end air coolers can't get them past the 1900mhz wall without throttling.

Me personally? I would probably buy one of those clown cards making sure the PCB was the FE one then buy and fit an EVGA Hybrid cooler. They just offer so much more than air coolers (most notably high clocks, no throttles at all and one single 120mm fan spinning at the speed you decide on).

The only reason I would avoid the 980ti and not take it over the 1070 is because Nvidia have form for derping drivers. The Witcher 3 launched with the 970 and 980 and for the first three months it was absolutely awful on Kepler (IE my Titan Blacks). Some say it was deliberate (I will admit to nearly buying two 970s just to be able to play it, in the end I saw sense) some say it was a mistake but yeah, they have form.

Other than that though? the 980ti is the better card. Nvidia were hell bent this time not getting egg on their face as they have in the past (OC a 670 = 680 perf OC a 970 = 980 perf). So this time the 1070 is noticeably slower than the stock 1080 and no overclocking can make that difference up.

1070 now in stock at Overclockers, £380 gets you one with a horrible cooler that I swear is exactly the same as my old 670 and current 970, or £400 for a Founder's Edition which is probably a bit better cooler wise.

So yes it's definitely a bit nip and tuck, as £400 will get a really nice 980Ti, and then you're into the arguments over whether a reference 1070 on a shite cooler beats out a custom cooled 980Ti that you can properly crank up with an overclock.

I just choose to carry on sitting and waiting, until it all settles down a bit.

(And the new DOOM game has given me renewed faith in my PC's abilities to carry on trucking for a bit longer anyway )

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-compo ... gtx-980-ti

And they drop again. I had a 670 Jetstream, lovely card (well actually I had two, so lovely cards.)

Surprised to see the Strix so cheap though. That's one of the better cards.

Hmmm, it's still only £9 cheaper than the cheapest (admittedly not available yet) 1070 with a decent aftermarket cooler on it.

For £360 it's undoubtedly a good buy, but it's not tempting me to specify one in my new PC.

I guess Overclockers (or anywhere for that matter) aren't going to undercut the 1070 by any significant margin with end-of-line 980Tis.

The Asus Strix 980ti is £359. The Asus Strix 1070 is £469.

When you overclock a 980ti the tide changes. You go from being 5-7% slower to 7-10% faster. I have no doubts that the Strix could do 1450 easy.

OCUK will undercut any one dude. They don't care. Fact is they are probably using their severe buying powers right now to secure cheap cards to sell. The 1070 is still hen's teeth and I read that it was down to binning. Apparently Nvidia pushed Pascal so hard that they are having massive yield problems due to the enormous clocks they wanted to use on Pascal. In other words they are struggling on volume of these chips that clock so high so they are basically struggling on volume. That's why there are so few custom cards because they are prioritizing the FE cards.

But yeah, selling old gen cards that are as fast/faster doesn't bother OCUK. They had enormous stocks of the 780, 780 6gb and 780ti that they obtained from MSI and were savagely undercutting the price of the 970. A sale is a sale I guess?

I wasn't matching Strix with Strix, just looking for the cheapest 1070 with a respectably chunky aftermarket cooler on it.

Overclockers seem to have plenty of the FE 1070s in stock at the moment, with the £390 one at 5+ in stock and all the others at £400 or more, showing as 10+ in stock, so they're certainly not selling out.

A 980Ti at £299.99 would catch my eye, but when it's the same money as for a well cooled 1070 with some OC headroom in it, I'd go for the 1070.

The best I have seen from a 1070 FE so far has been 150mhz on the clock but the fan needing to run at 80% or more to stop it throttling.

When you push a technology as hard as Nvidia have in order to make it look better than the previous tech something has to give. As with the 1080 aftermarket cooling and or phases isn't making much difference.

Having said all of that though the AMD RX 480 doesn't seem to be any better. Apparently it's really hard to get 100mhz on the core on the stock card. Highest clock so far has been 1380mhz or so.

Whether that's down to the 6 pin connector no one knows yet. It's not heat related as the card only hits 73c or so even overclocked so it could be that it has absolutely pants phases to save AMD money. I expect the aftermarket cards to cost considerably more tbh.

Yeah, I guess that £299 for a 980ti is certainly not out of the realms of possibility. If they're not shifting then they'll need to make them shift

Audio, again.

So the first pair of cans I bought were some Grado RS2E and they weren't cheap. However, for live music and so on they are astoundingly good. I literally sometimes feel like the music is coming from all around me, down to their open design. The soundstage is amazing.



The only thing they left me wanting was more deep bass. They are a tad light, but that can be forgiven due to their immense accuracy. There are certain types of music however that do not suit the Grados at all, and I am running one of the most neutral amplifiers you can buy, a Graham Slee Novo.



I have that set up hooked up to the Soundblaster XFI Titanium HD. I use it as I said for live music etc.

Recently I was poking around on Ebay and I saw these.



I had my eye on those right from the beginning. They are apparently very good with tight punchy bass. I wasn't going to bite, then suddenly I saw them on Ebay for £139. They're genuine too, and that's about half of what they usually sell for. I have those hooked up to my Aune TK1 here.



And I use those for dance music. They are very accurate and can handle fast paced music. The thing is the one thing missing was a big fat set of cans with irresponsible bass reproduction. When I initially bought the Grados it was a tough choice between them and a few other pairs of cans. One being the B&O but the other set I considered were the Oppo Planar Magnetic. So yesterday morning I was faffing around on Amazon and I saw these.



They're Hifiman 400S. They are the cheapest set of Planar Magnetic headphones right now and they were cheap enough to make me want them. So to treat myself I went ahead and bought them and also bought another amp. This is my third now and is connected up to the Asus Xonar D2X.



And TBH they are the best pair of headphones I have used. Amazing sound and they are absolutely huge so the bass drops incredibly deep. Very good for Reggae and so on !

I also have these for my portables. They were cheap at £40 and sound very good.

News time. First of all the 1060 has been pictured in Hong Kong.

http://imgur.com/a/nRVpE

If you click the link you will also notice that AMD slipped up yesterday and accidentally listed a RX 490 in their promotion list.

RX 480 to release today. Performs around the same as a GTX 970 and doesn't overclock very well. 100mhz is about the max on the 480 sadly.

1060 to release as 3gb for $250 (3gb is pretty much useless these days) or more $ for a 6gb card. Seems they are playing the "Good cop EXPENSIVE" card. The 3gb will be stupid and the 6gb will cost a lot more.

However, I am starting to think that AMD do indeed have a 490 and will counter the 1060 with it. I saw an interview with a guy at Alienware a while back and he was talking about their Graphics Amplifier which is a box you fit a GPU into and then connect to your laptop. He said you could drop a 490 straight in. Slip up? it seems so. At first I just put it down to human error, but then when AMD had it listed on their site yesterday it's now far more than just a slip up.

They've obviously edited it and you can no longer see either the RX 480 and 490 but the cat is out of the bag it seems. This would lend credence to an interview with a lady at AMD who said they were making Polaris cards that would cost $100-$300. Every one assumed that the $300 card would just be a custom 8gb 480. The thing is the 8gb 480 is expected to drop for around £220. If that's the case then it would be the first time that I had ever seen an aftermarket card with a price hike of £80 (or $80) just for a custom cooler and some extra VRMs. I think it's far more likely that the 490 will sit somewhere between the 480 and 1070 and cost $299 or £299 there abouts. Maybe £280.

RX 480 goes live at around 2pm today.