New GPUs for the Holidays, Insight into next year's PC Hardware

Sorry I missed last week, had too much going on to write an article. Hope you guys understand.

It's been a pretty good week for PC Hardware, as a new card was just released by AMD in time for the holidays and some insight into what Nvidia's been working on with HBM 2.0 to release next year. It's been a good ride this week, so without further ado let's get into some of this.

AMD just released a 'new' card into their r9 300 series family, the r9 380x. As you would expect from the name, it's a little better than the r9 380, and not as good as the r9 390. That's to be expected with the starting price of the card at $230. Very solid pricing, as every one of these 380x cards comes with a 4gb GDDR5 memory standard, whereas with the previous r9 380s and GTX 960s we saw a lot of 2gb variants floating around.

Checking out this graph (thank you Anandtech), we can see that the new r9 380x is definitely a refresh of the r9 280x, with the 380x boasting the same amount of texture units as the 280x. However, it features an extra gig of GDDR5 memory standard over the 280x and a much smaller power draw over the 280x.

If you're interested in purchasing the r9 380x, perhaps for the holidays or that you need a mid-range upgrade, at the moment there are a couple different options. You got two XFX versions of the card to choose from, the standard Double-Dissipation edition for $230 and a Black Edition factory overclocked (40mhz higher than stock XFX card) version for $250. You have a Gigabyte Windforce version at the standard $230, a Sapphire Nitro Dual X version for $230, a Powercolor version for $230, and two ASUS Strix versions priced at $240 and $260 (no MSI Twin Frozr?). Definitely not a bad selection.

In Team Green news, Nvidia unveiled plans for their next generation of cards. Their Pascal series, set to succeed their Maxwell power-saving series (the 900 cards) is featuring HBM 2.0. HBM stands for High-Bandwidth Memory and is a faster, lightweight, and much more efficient memory solution than the standard GDDR5 memory we've been using for a while now in most GPUs. HBM is not only faster, but it's able to support a higher bandwidth than GDDR5 and takes up much less space on the PCB board, allowing for smaller versions of cards to card out. You can definitely see the advantage of taking up smaller space when you look at AMD's HBM 1.0 r9 Fury Nano, which is only 6" long and can fit in smaller form factor cases.

Bunch of information I'm too lazy to look up the definitions of

HBM 2.0 overcomes the 4gb memory limitation of HBM 1.0, and Nvidia plans to take full advantage of this because they unveiled plans for 16gb of HBM targetting 1 tb/s bandwidth. Now, I'm pretty certain that we'll never fully utilize THAT much VRAM for gaming, and it's a pretty good possibility that that kind of high-end card might not even be available at launch with the other mid-range series cards, but as an enthusiast card and a card for 3d rendering and modelling, it's pretty dank.

Even though there's only really been two things going on in PC Hardware this week, that's still pretty good considering we sometimes go weeks and weeks without official information regarding PC Hardware/Software. With Thanksgiving coming up (or should I say Black Friday/Cyber Monday), the holidays are fast approaching. Getting something for yourself? Buying some hardware for someone you know? Leave a comment or tweet at me, I'd love to know. Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone.