Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

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WCCFTech has posted some interesting news/rumors that are worth posting:

 

XFX’S LATEST RADEON R9 380 CRIMSON EDITION UNLOCKS TO A FULL R9 380X “TONGA XT” WITH BIOS SWITCH

http://wccftech.com/xfx-r9-380-crimson-edition-unlock/

XFX has launched their latest Radeon R9 380 Crimson edition graphics card which is exclusively made for the Chinese market.

Almost every high-end or custom graphics card features a dual/triple BIOS design these days. Accessed by a small switch that is ideally located on the PCB, these BIOS allows users to save custom overclock profile, use factory configured settings for clock speeds / fan speeds or revert back to a stock profile if overclocking goes haywire. We have seen manufacturers store OC profiles in a second “OC BIOS” before but XFX went one step ahead and added a custom profile that let’s you unlock the card to a full R9 380X graphics card for the price of a custom Radeon R9 380 graphics board.

>>Why do these cool things launch only in China? Something like that would be great to hae here .

 

 

eBay LISTING OF 18 CORE Xeon E5-2600 V4 Broadwell-EP ES PROCESSOR SPOTTED – SELLING FOR $999 US, COMPATIBLE WITH X99 MOTHERBOARDS

http://wccftech.com/ebay-xeon-e5-2600-v4-broadwell-ep-listing/

The listing on eBay shows a 18 core chip with 36 threads since it is a hyper-threaded processor. The chip clocks in at a base clock of 2.20 GHz with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.0 GHz and 2.60 GHz across all cores. Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 V4 lineup is based on the company’s 14nm Broadwell architecture so there are some key change overs to the design which add to the efficiency of the new lineup.

The seller has clearly mentioned that the chip is an engineering sample but runs fine in all workloads. The stepping mentioned is A0 which means this chip is past the early sampling stages. The chip packs 2.5 MB L3 cache per core and has a total of 45 MB LLC in the die package and TDP of 145W.

The chipset support list includes X10DR series from Supermicro, X99/Z10PE series from ASUS and X99 motherboards from Gigabyte. A list of these is shown below as the seller has detailed:

• Supermicro: X10SR series with BIOS R 2.0, X10DR series with BIOS R 2.0
  
• Asus: X99 series with BIOS 2101, Sabertooth X99 with BIOS 2101, Z10PE series with BIOS 3101
  
• Gigabyte: GA-X99 series with BIOS F20

>>Anyone needs more cores/threads?

 

 

AMD 14nm FinFET POLARIS GPU SIZE LEAKS OUT – 232mm² LARGE DIE

http://wccftech.com/amd-polaris-gpu-die-size-232-mm-2/

Details of AMD’s upcoming 14nm GPU have finally started leaking out. Some good detective work by the user AnarchX over at Beyond3D 3DCenter forums has revealed what appears to be the LinkedIn profile of a senior engineer at AMD. Interestingly, the engineer lists multiple projects, one of which is the Polaris die. The size of the chip will be 232mm² and (assuming the information is accurate) will constitute one tier of the Polaris architecture.

 

"According to the information we have about the 14nm LPP process, and based on transistor density increase, a 232mm² GPU would be roughly equivalent to a  464mm² 28nm processor – at the same TDP levels. Since we already know that AMD is going to be focusing not just on performance but power efficiency as well – this number could be be much higher, in fact we will discuss the number AMD is using below. We can however safely say that this die is more than capable of meeting the ‘minimum VR spec that AMD promises."

 

>>As a reference, AMD's 290/390 chips are 438 mm², so if that assumption is true and we add the performance increases from the new architecture and other improvements, get we a chip that will bring a nice improvement in performance and power consumption while also leaving room for bigger chips down the road (either for the Fury brand or a 5x0 series)