Brian

Fingers crossed...

1 minute ago, drunkenninaj said:

Been registered here a while it seems but never had the chance to check the place out fully until today...

 

This place is pretty cool, I was deep into the Reflow and Reball scene of all BGA chips until around 6 months ago when I got bored of it, I know quite a bit o the subject and have helped may people start-up and repair boards over the years on other forums.

 

The software side has always intrigued me as a failed student of programming, if you guys have any questions about reballs or reflows hit me up.

Hey @drunkenninajwelcome to the community and I think @Khenglish @Mr. Fox and @johnksss would definitely be happy to have another hardware enthusiast on board that can help w/projects they come up with. Khenglish as you noticed is embarking on core swaps so if you have any tips that could assist him, definitely get in touch here on the forums. 

Damn @Khenglish that's really impressive, good job! Going to promote this to a front page post. I'll update the front page post with your results once you have them but looking good so far. 

On 7/8/2016 at 5:08 AM, Mr. Fox said:

I haven't seen a compelling reason to purchase anything from AMD yet, and considering their track record I would want to see more that theoretical marketing hype and specs. I'd need to see a mountain of evidence produced by overclocking enthusiast end-users that I know are reliable before I would spend any money on an AMD product.

 

But, 1060 would not be an option either. I've never cared too much about cost to performance ratio, just want the best and baddest even if the ratio is poor. I generally stick with the 'go big or go home' and 'all or nothing' approach. I've never been interested in owning a second fiddle budget gamer GPU, but that's just my personal preference.

The 1060 will be one of those GPUs featured in BGA notebooks that some may find compelling because they are thin and light. Probably good for college students and business people on the move but not really built for hardcore enthusiasts.

3 hours ago, TBoneSan said:

 

Brian do you know if that's meant to be the flagship for desktop mobile?

I don't think the 1060 is the flagship model. Pretty sure they will still have 1080.

For those of you wondering whether the 1060 will come to the notebook, the word is it will and it will be unchanged from the desktop version. The clocks may be somewhat lower but the ROPs, CUDA cores etc should be unchanged. 

@Vitaliy Jungle welcome to Tech|Inferno!

And some leaked FireStrike numbers for the 1060 vs 480:

NVIDIA 1060:

Sapphire RX 480 Stock:

RX 480 undervolted to 1.1v with 1300 MHz core and 2200 MHz memory:

AIB 1060 cards:

NVIDIA announced it's newest Pascal based GTX 1060 today that is expected to go on sale July 19th for $250 and $300 for the Founder's Edition. The GTX 1060 will feature 1280 CUDA cores, 6 GB DDR5 memory with a boost clock of 1.7 GHz which NVIDIA claims can easily overclock to 2 GHz. In addition, NVIDIA claims the 1060 is on average 15% faster and over 75% more power efficient than the closest competitive product at stock speeds which would be the AMD RX 480. 

The following is their PR release: 

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NVIDIA today added the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060 to its Pascal™ family of gaming GPUs, complementing the GTX 1080 and 1070, which have set records for speed and power efficiency following their launch two months ago.

 

Like the entire Pascal architecture GPU lineup, and with a starting price of only $249, the GTX 1060 has been crafted for speed and optimized for performance per watt. Manufactured on the leading-edge FinFET 16nm process, the GTX 1060 delivers GTX 980-level performance and twice the energy efficiency in VR. It consumes only 120 watts of power while driving the latest VR and DirectX 11/12 PC games at blistering speeds.

 

The GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be easily overclocked to 2GHz for further performance. Across the top gaming titles, GTX 1060 is on average 15 percent faster and over 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitive product at stock speeds.(1)

 

GTX 1060 for Every Gamer, Everywhere -- Starting at $249

GTX 1060 custom boards will be available starting July 19 from NVIDIA GeForce Partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac. The NVIDIA GeForce Partners represent a global network that will deliver GTX 1060 to gamers in 238 countries and territories. The MSRP will start at $249.

 

SMP Technology Integrated into Top Game Engines; More Than 30 Titles in Development

The GTX 1060 supports NVIDIA VRWorks™, a software developer kit that allows developers to intertwine what users see, hear and touch with the physical behavior of the environment -- convincing them that their virtual experience is real.

 

Included with VRWorks is NVIDIA Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology, which allows the GTX 1060 to seamlessly project a single image simultaneously to both eyes, yielding a 3x VR graphics performance improvement over previous generation GPUs. This allows GTX 1060 users to play VR games with higher levels of detail, without sacrificing performance or quality, for a more realistic, immersive experience.

 

Simultaneous Multi-Projection is being integrated into the world's biggest game engines, Unreal Engine and Unity. More than 30 games are already in development, including Unreal Tournament, Poolnation VR, Everest VR, Obduction, Adr1ft and Raw Data.

 

NVIDIA Ansel Integrated into 'Mirror's Edge: Catalyst' and 'Witcher 3'; Available this Month

The GTX 1060 also supports NVIDIA Ansel™ technology, a powerful game-capture tool that allows gamers to explore, capture and share the artistry of gaming in ways never before possible. With Ansel, users can compose the gameplay shots they want, pointing the camera in any direction, from any vantage point within a gaming world, and then capture 360-degree stereo photospheres for viewing with a VR headset or Google Cardboard.

 

Gamers will be able to experience Ansel for themselves with Mirror's Edge: Catalyst next week, and Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, later this month. Many more Ansel-enabled games are in development, including Epic Games' Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament; Cyan Worlds' Obduction; Thekla's The Witness; Boss Key Productions' Lawbreakers; Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division; and the highly anticipated No Man's Sky from Hello Games.

 

VR Funhouse Available This Month on Steam, Adds GTX 1060 Support

NVIDIA VR Funhouse -- the company's VR carnival game -- will be available for free later this month from Valve's Steam digital distribution service. Developed on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, VR Funhouse will work on GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs and HTC Vive VR headsets. It will also be open sourced to developers and artists so they can create their own VR Funhouse attractions.

 

Special Limited Founder's Edition, Direct from NVIDIA

The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition board -- designed and built by NVIDIA -- will be available starting July 19 for $299 at www.nvidia.com only. The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition is crafted with premium materials and components, including a faceted die-cast aluminum body machine finished for strength and rigidity and a thermal solution designed to run cool and quiet.

 

Like the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Edition boards, a dual-FETs power supply is used to improve power efficiency, along with a low impedance power delivery network and custom voltage regulators.

 

The NVIDIA Flickr page hosts the entire lineup of GeForce product photos. - See more at: http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-quantum-leap-for-every-gamer:-nvidia-unveils-the-geforce-gtx-1060#sthash.30QRCTvF.dpuf

 

(1) Game list includes BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Star Wars Battlefront, Witcher 3, Ashes of the Singularity, The Division, and more. All games tested at 1080p resolution. GTX 1060 was tested with driver version 368.64 with a TGP measured at 120 watts. As of July 5, 2016, AMD RX480 competitive product was tested with driver version 16.6.2 across the same games and resolution with a measured TGP of 185 watts. - See more at: http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-quantum-leap-for-every-gamer:-nvidia-unveils-the-geforce-gtx-1060#sthash.30QRCTvF.dpuf

 

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So the RX 480 has issues with PCI-E power draw and AMD is supposed to release a driver level fix any day now that remedies that problem albeit at a slight performance cost. By default, this fix will be off and users can toggle it using a "compatibility" button in the UI. AMD claims they will make up for that slight performance loss with driver optimizations for games. The reference cards also tend to run on the hotter side and have nearly no overclocking headroom (5-6% max). 

With that in mind, will you still consider getting one for your PC or are you waiting on NVIDIA to drop the GTX 1060? 

12 hours ago, Khenglish said:

All I can see them doing is dropping the power limit.

On July 5th they will supposedly issue a driver level fix. Anyhow, with some sleuthing I found a rogue AMD engineer discussing Polaris, enjoy:

7 hours ago, Khenglish said:

The poster who lost a PCI-E slot is correct in that its very strange that the 2nd slot still works (PCI_E for x16 is on CPU, not southbridge though). You would expect that if one slot died that all would be dead. They both share the same power circuitry.

Indeed but AMD has pretty much acknowledged the issue and said they'll address it in a driver update. I'm not quite sure what they will do via drivers to accomplish this and whether it will affect performance in anyway. 

AMD's new RX 480 $200 graphics card is out and delivers GTX 970/R390 performance as promised. However, there are some conflicting reports of the new Polaris GPU drawing more power from the PCI-e slot than it is rated. According to Tom's Hardware, the RX 480 draws 86 watts peak from the motherboard's PCI-e slot although the official ceiling is 75 watts.

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AMD’s Radeon RX 480 draws an average of 164W, which exceeds the company's target TDP. And it gets worse. The load distribution works out in a way that has the card draw 86W through the motherboard’s PCIe slot. Not only does this exceed the 75W ceiling we typically associate with a 16-lane slot, but that 75W limit covers several rails combined and not just this one interface.

 

 

With peaks of up to 155W, we have to be thankful they're brief, and not putting the motherboard in any immediate danger. However, the audio subsystems on cheaper platforms will have a hard time dealing with them. This means that the "you can hear what you see" effect will be in full force during load changes; activities like scrolling may very well result in audible artifacts.

 

After Tom's Hardware published their report, other websites such as PCPer followed up with their own testing and reported similar findings: 

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The results are compelling: at stock settings the RX 480 is 160+ watts on average and spikes to 170 watts several times.

 

 

Metro: Last Light (4K) power draw, RX 480, Click to Enlarge

Taking a closer look reveals that the motherboard PCI Express connection is supplying 80-84 watts of power over the +12V rail continuously, while the +3.3V rail hovers just below 5 watts. This is definitely a concern for the RX 480 design, but to what degree?

 

Additionally, there are some users that reported potential issues with their motherboards that arose after using the RX 480 in their systems:

Keep in mind both of those reports do not 100% confirm the problem is the RX 480 but given the reported issues with it's power draw and these users boards experiencing problems after installing an RX 480, there is a strong possibility that it is the cause.

There is a reddit thread in r/AMD on this topic and AMD's Robert Hallock has issued the following response:

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1) The RX 480 meets the bar for PCIe compliance testing with PCI-SIG. //edit: and interop with PCI Express. This is not just our internal testing. I think that should be made very clear. Obviously there are a few GPUs exhibiting anomalous behavior, and we've been in touch with these reviewers for a few days to better understand their test configurations to see how this could be possible.

2) Update #2 made by the OP is confused. There is a difference between ASIC power, which is what ONLY THE GPU CONSUMES (110W), and total graphics power (TGP), which is what the entire graphics card uses (150W). There has been no change in the spec, so I would ask that incorrect information stop being disseminated as "fact."

We will have more on this topic soon as we investigate, but it's worth reminding people that only a very small number of hundreds of RX 480 reviews worldwide encountered this issue. Clearly that makes it aberrant, rather than the rule, and we're working to get that number down to zero.

/edit for absolute factual clarity.

 

We're awaiting AMD's full official response which should hopefully be coming soon. 

UPDATE: TechPowerUp contacted AMD and received the following official response:

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"As you know, we continuously tune our GPUs in order to maximize their performance within their given power envelopes and the speed of the memory interface, which in this case is an unprecedented 8 Gbps for GDDR5. Recently, we identified select scenarios where the tuning of some RX 480 boards was not optimal. Fortunately, we can adjust the GPU's tuning via software in order to resolve this issue. We are already testing a driver that implements a fix, and we will provide an update to the community on our progress on Tuesday (July 5, 2016)."

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20 minutes ago, Lossy said:

let me know if you come by any solutions. I too have been trying to get my 1080 to work on OS X. Works perfectly on Windows.

Why would you even want it on OSX though? It's not like OSX is known for gaming. 

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

 

Why bother with Alienware at this point? If they cripple it like they did the last 18-incher it will be a well-built chassis that houses an abject failure in terms of performance. If they release it as a overweight BGA turdbook it will be even worse than that. Alienware has shown us their true colors since the introduction of Haswell. Judging from their past behaviors that followed release of the M18xR2 I think it is safe to say that they are no longer committed to producing high quality enthusiast products that deliver superior performance or an experience that enthusiasts can find to be gratifying. Their only commitment is to sell and maximize profits using marketing hype and anything that turns out right seems to be accidental at this point. They haven't sold anything worth buying since the M18xR, so there's really nothing for us to look forward to.

This man speaks the truth, Alienware became trash shortly after the release of Alienware 18 and I called it before it was even released and jumped ship a few years ago. They always find a way to cripple their systems, whether it's bios, hardware or a combination of both. Plus AW laptops are notoriously thick and heavy with ugly fat bezels and subpar displays, just say no. Get yourself an MSI or Clevo if you want a better performance notebook but unfortunately with the way the market is now, you can only count on Clevo if you want a socketed CPU. 

Well the last few years AMD wasn't able to compete in performance notebooks because their stuff ran far too hot and consumed too much power. Supposedly that will change with Polaris but we'll see, I'm always skeptical of anything AMD says.

LOL @ picture.

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

 

Don't you just hate it how idiots with low standards and lack of intelligence ruin things for everyone?  

Oh yeah and unfortunately there's a LOT more of them than us. 

Well looks like BGA bullshit is beginning on the desktop now, feast your eyes on this: 

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 Colorful, the Chinese PC hardware manufacturer, integrated the required components from a GTX 1070 directly onto a motherboard's PCB. We've heard rumors that GP104would be available in mobile form-factors in a few months, so it's possible that this draws from some laptop initiatives, but it's interesting to see others consider it too. As Videocardz pointed out, this is not an ATX-standard board, so it's possible that Colorful is planning on getting into (or supporting someone getting into) small form factor desktops.

http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/Motherboard-Colorful-Includes-GTX-1070-Graphics

I would not recommend SLI for anyone considering buying a new notebook or building a desktop in the near future. Both AMD and NVIDIA are moving away from mgpu support and so are the lazy software developers who only want to create cross-platform titles and not bother with PC optimization. You get rare titles liked GTA V which make somewhat an effort to add in some extras for PC but overall it's just a straight port with a few extras like GameWorks if NVIDIA tosses them a bone. AMD doesn't have the budget to be devoting engineers to get game devs to add extras to PC games so this locks all of us into NVIDIA's GameWorks and depending on who you ask, that is either a good or bad thing. 

With consoles now moving to a more frequent upgrade cycle, I think we'll hopefully see a lot of fragmentation there and butt hurt with the guys buying the latest consoles (e.g. PS4 Neo) and not being able to get extra effects and having to deal w/the lowest common denominator. Maybe that will drive those guys to finally build a decent PC. 

4 hours ago, johnksss said:

Lets hope....If they decide to make any more sli notebooks that they do not require a code to unlock sli. Like they are doing with the desktop variant. (Using more than 2 cards(1080/1070) in sli requires a code now)

I don't think it should affect notebooks at all since they don't use more than 2 GPUs. But in general SLI is dying out and has been for sometime. If you look at some of the latest games and engines they simply do not have native SLI support and it is up to the developer to implement it (e.g. good luck unless its AAA title). It is part of the reason I'm moving on from Titan X SLI to a single card. 

37 minutes ago, Prema said:

 

The 120Hz FHD should work just fine (given the DM2 cable can fit)  in current DM models (minus g-sync)...the higher res will exceed the current DM model eDP bandwidth...  

 

 

They would like to see people Better Get Another one each year than upgrade their current model...

That doesn't make sense though because they still make money off an MXM board sale vs BGA. In fact they could probably get away with charging more for the MXM version. I suspect it might have been due to push back from companies like Dell and Asus wanting consumers to throw away their laptops and do full upgrades vs putting in an MXM GPU. So it comes back to BGA but not necessarily because NVIDIA wanted it that way. Plus as I said before, I suspect with the dwindling MXM market, NVIDIA probably wasn't making money on reference designs or were breaking even and decided not to make them. That's why they're charging their $100 tax on desktop reference cards now because they said it was costing them money in the long run to maintain the reference design. 

8 hours ago, Prema said:

The refreshes are very similar except for an additional USB 3.1 (USB 2.0 is gone), updated audio licenses (ESSTM SABRE HiFi DAC (headphone) / SOUND BLASTER® X-FI® MB5), official Kaby support etc...

Biggest change is that NVIDIA stopped giving ODMs MXM Reference designs.

The last two MXM supporter MSI and Clevo have to design/create their own solutions or join the BGA club (everyone else), which they don't do just yet...but vote with your wallets for upgrade-ability or it won't last much longer.

Has nvidia given a reason for not making mxm reference boards anymore? I'm guessing the cost vs volume wasn't worth it for them and that's why. However, I bet MSI and Clevo could threaten to go all Polaris and that would convince nvidia to make the reference board.

22 minutes ago, kickbutthero said:

Awesome Brian!!! Now where's my promotion ?? lol

Well since you inadvertently found a bug I suppose I could speed it up for you as a one time deal.

16 hours ago, j0ak0 said:

hope the new 16nm give them the ability to make it work with all the horsepower as the desktop version

It will be the full chip but with lower clocks.