Question Why does the overall gaming GPU market treat AMD like they have AIDS?

[VirtualLarry]

I guess I get the (sub-liminal) "The way it's meant to be played" ads from NVidia, along with the recurring FUD tropes about "AMD drivers", but I honestly don't get the sales disparity, especially for the price.

I've owned both NVidia-powered as well as AMD powered GPUs, and IMHO, AMD is (generally) just as good. Maybe 99% as good.

Edit: And I think that there's something to be said about the viability of AMD technologies, when they're in both major console brands.

 

[blckgrffn]

That's pretty insightful. I've seen that with "budget" gaming builds, too.

Something like a Biostar mobo, Zotac GPU, cheap no-name RAM, all stuffed inside a case with no airflow, with a PSU that came with the case.

I used to build systems like that for people on an extreme budget. Then I got some standards.

Same here. My standards have gone up a lot. Craigslist randos - you're welcome.

And yeah, weird stuff happened more often when I was using the cheapest stuff off the shelf. Surprising!

For the record, I don't think I've ever used included PSUs outside of Antec units/cases. I've always had at least that much self respect. That said, I have bought some cheap add in PSUs over the years. My wife is nails on Mail in Rebates and for years I was rolling around in $15-$25 ~430W Corsair units

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I saw this a few days ago on my google feed. The 6 worst AMD graphics cards of all time.
With that being said the RX480 was when AMD started the turn for the better. The RX580 became the value card for a couple of years.

The 6 worst AMD GPUs of all time | Digital Trends

We're looking back at some of AMD's worst GPUs, ones that really should have been better but weren't or straight up shouldn't have existed at all.

www.digitaltrends.com

- Don't really agree with a lot of that list.

Surprised that list skipped over the 2900XT & HD3870 (which was just the 2900XT with a fixed memory bus) and its sort of weird that they decided to call out the 390X, which wasn't great from a power and heat perspective against GM104 but was competitive from a performance standpoint. Lot of rebranding happening during those gens anyhow. 590 is also a bizarre choice when the 480 launched with a HW bug that was frying boards.

6500XT isn't a great card, but honestly was anyone else serving that market at the time?

 

[Leeea]

So Alex, your "This shows you have not owned a Powercolor card in ages" is just cringe, because I literally use PowerColor card now. Used it for years and as it came stock it was loud garbage with broken (it's not broken, but made poorly) fan control. I spent way too much time modifying vBIOS to hopefully fix it, but it's just unfixable issue and you can't make this card work with LUT fan control, flashing it to work as their older RX 480 with same cooler only reduces performance, changing max TDP doesn't do much, extreme underclocking (to 700 MHz) does work, but makes it really slow, meanwhile at 1GHz it still ramps up fan to the moon, regardless of temperature. AMD's own software somehow has fan control overridden past 85C, meanwhile undervolting is limited and for some reason unstable. I now use MSI Afterburner and I can now undervolt card much further and override fan control in software mode, but flaw is that Afterburner has to start with Windows, which is a bit annoying. So I spent a lot of time investigating this card and I know what it is. I have read about it online and many other people comment about how loud it is, so it's not just my particular card that is borked. And yep it's probably the worst model of RX 580 that you can buy, even MSI Armor model doesn't ramp up fan to 3500 rpm, "only" to 2900 rpm. Armor model is known to be a meme and is definitely one of the bottom tier models as it is. It's spectacular that PowerColor managed to make something even worse than that.

First off, respect++ for the lengths you have gone to try and make that budget model rx580 work the way you want it to.

On the subject of AMD allowing its AIBs to make substandard cards, your right. Even now:

Spoiler: The Biostar rx6500xt

So, I know your thinking Nvidia does not allow this sort of crap. Well, :

Spoiler: you know what is coming

The Biostar rtx3080! - https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/vga/introduction.php?S_ID=304
I love the warning at the bottom of Biostars page, "Caution!! The specification and pictures are subject to change without notice!"

If you think that is bad, going hunting through nvidia's oem models. There are some horrible ones out there that make Biostar look good.

And yep it's probably the worst model of RX 580 that you can buy,

The powercolor dragon was not the worst model rx580, or even particularly bad.

Check out:

Spoiler: you can guess what I linked to

The Biostar rx580 - https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/vga/introduction.php?S_ID=237

While the Biostar was worst then the power color, it is not the bottom. I was not able to find the link to it, but I think there was a Dell Alienware model floating around . . .

Yes, the powercolor dragon was a budget model, with a budget cooling solution, budget VRMs, and budget everything. I get your unhappy with that, but you bought the budget model.

even MSI Armor model doesn't ramp up fan to 3500 rpm, "only" to 2900 rpm. Armor model is known to be a meme and is definitely one of the bottom tier models as it is.

Hey! I take offense to that.

Remember the two MSI rx580's I mentioned? Yea, they were both Armor models. I used the 4gb model for years, and the 8gb went into my partners computer. The 4gb is still working to this day, in my grandkids computer who is delighted to have it. Apparently it is great for Overwatch @ 1080p.

You can call them a meme, but I found them to be good cards that gave years of happy experiences.

 

[The red spirit]

First off, respect++ for the lengths you have gone to try and make that budget model rx580 work the way you want it to.

On the subject of AMD allowing its AIBs to make substandard cards, your right. Even now:


So, I know your thinking Nvidia does not allow this sort of crap. Well, :

The Biostar rtx3080! - https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/vga/introduction.php?S_ID=304
I love the warning at the bottom of Biostars page, "Caution!! The specification and pictures are subject to change without notice!"
You can call them a meme, but I found them to be good cards that gave years of happy experiences.

lmao I had this idea that nVidia ensures quality better as they had some historical brand kick outs like XFX, BFG, eVGA. Meanwhile, I can't recall ATi or AMD doing the same ever, most of their poor OEMs eventually just failed over time or went bankrupt or became sort of nonexistant. Probably the msot bizarre nV vendor that seemingly still exists (or exist until very recently) is Elsa, they only make reference cards or simple coolers, but they are extremely rare. I remember seeing GTX 1060 and GTX 760 from them.

The powercolor dragon was not the worst model rx580, or even particularly bad.

Check out:

Spoiler: you can guess what I linked to

The Biostar rx580 - https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/vga/introduction.php?S_ID=237

While the Biostar was worst then the power color, it is not the bottom. I was not able to find the link to it, but I think there was a Dell Alienware model floating around . . .

The second I saw all solid block aluminum cooler I expect 100C in games. It has one heatpipe, but that's still very alarming cooling for RX 580. I can't expect it to not throttle in games or be down clocked permanently.

Yes, it was the budget model, with a budget cooling solution and budget VRMs and budget everything. I get your unhappy with that, but you bought the budget model.

I wasn't really expecting too much from it, but I looked at heatsink online and it looked roughly the same and around same size as other models, but it was way cheaper than other models. I also thought that PowerColor is okay brand, because their X800 XT PEs were okayish and brand that sucks can't survive for long. Perhaps that's true, but what I got is a lemon. I expected no more than 2500 rpms in gaming, but not fans ramping up to 100 while ignoring temperature of GPU.

Hey! I take offense to that.

Remember the two MSI rx580's I mentioned? Yea, they were both Armor models. I used the 4gb model for years, and the 8gb went into my partners computer. The 4gb is still working to this day, in my grandkids computer who is delighted to have it. Apparently is is great for Overwatch @ 1080p.

You can call them a meme, but I found them to be good cards that gave years of happy experiences.

Okay, they are just notorious for high temperatures and lots of noise. They otherwise work okay, but that noise. Dawid made a video about it:

2900 rpm in Furmark and severe downclocking (not thermal throttling, just TDP limit), definitely not great, but it's actually better than PowerColor Red Dragon V2 card that I have. But still, that's nowhere good imo. That case isn't great at cooling, but isn't awful either. I'm actually surprised that his "mods" improved thermals and noise as much as it did. As far as OEM coolers go, MSI really skimped on Armor models. And I really hate when techfluencers say that cheapest cards are perfectly okay or fine or that it's worth saving money on. That's an awful advice and you will end up with some card that barely has any heatsink left and lots of fan noise. Probably the most pathetic cooler I have ever seen was this Asus card:

ASUS TUF GTX 1660 GAMING OC Specs

NVIDIA TU116, 1815 MHz, 1408 Cores, 88 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 6144 MB GDDR5, 2001 MHz, 192 bit

www.techpowerup.com

If you are wondering, yep it's Intel stock heatsink with copper slug and two 80 mm fans. They are terribly insufficient, not to mention that VRM and vRAM cooling doesn't exist at all. That was truly the worst Asus TUF card probably ever and that's mid tier card, there are Phoenix and Dual models bellow it. I'm wondering if there will ever be a TUF model without heatsink part at all XD[/SPOILER]

 

[Leeea]

lmao I had this idea that nVidia ensures quality better as they had some historical brand kick outs like XFX, BFG, eVGA. Meanwhile, I can't recall ATi or AMD doing the same ever, most of their poor OEMs eventually just failed over time or went bankrupt or became sort of nonexistant. Probably the msot bizarre nV vendor that seemingly still exists (or exist until very recently) is Elsa, they only make reference cards or simple coolers, but they are extremely rare. I remember seeing GTX 1060 and GTX 760 from them.


The second I saw all solid block aluminum cooler I expect 100C in games. It has one heatpipe, but that's still very alarming cooling for RX 580. I can't expect it to not throttle in games or be down clocked permanently.


I wasn't really expecting too much from it, but I looked at heatsink online and it looked roughly the same and around same size as other models, but it was way cheaper than other models. I also thought that PowerColor is okay brand, because their X800 XT PEs were okayish and brand that sucks can't survive for long. Perhaps that's true, but what I got is a lemon. I expected no more than 2500 rpms in gaming, but not fans ramping up to 100 while ignoring temperature of GPU.


Okay, they are just notorious for high temperatures and lots of noise. They otherwise work okay, but that noise. Dawid made a video about it:

2900 rpm in Furmark and severe downclocking (not thermal throttling, just TDP limit), definitely not great, but it's actually better than PowerColor Red Dragon V2 card that I have. But still, that's nowhere good imo. That case isn't great at cooling, but isn't awful either. I'm actually surprised that his "mods" improved thermals and noise as much as it did. As far as OEM coolers go, MSI really skimped on Armor models. And I really hate when techfluencers say that cheapest cards are perfectly okay or fine or that it's worth saving money on. That's an awful advice and you will end up with some card that barely has any heatsink left and lots of fan noise. Probably the most pathetic cooler I have ever seen was this Asus card:

ASUS TUF GTX 1660 GAMING OC Specs

NVIDIA TU116, 1815 MHz, 1408 Cores, 88 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 6144 MB GDDR5, 2001 MHz, 192 bit

www.techpowerup.com

If you are wondering, yep it's Intel stock heatsink with copper slug and two 80 mm fans. They are terribly insufficient, not to mention that VRM and vRAM cooling doesn't exist at all. That was truly the worst Asus TUF card probably ever and that's mid tier card, there are Phoenix and Dual models bellow it. I'm wondering if there will ever be a TUF model without heatsink part at all XD[/SPOILER]

Great post!


on the subject of high temperatures, on a personal level I just do not care. Maybe I just have low standards.


In the AMD driver it lets me set the max fan speed of the card. With my Sapphire Vega 56 I just set that to the noise level I wanted, and let the card max out its heat and thermal throttle. It was fine. Sent it into the mines after that, and it was fine. After Eth mining collapsed, gave it to a close friend of mine, and it is still running good.


With my rx580 4g, on that card I always wanted more performance and ran the card hot, gpu power maxed at 150%, and the fans noisy. I guess I just put up with it. I used to wear headphones back then, so I guess I did not hear the noise. Now that I think about it, my grand kid who uses that card now also uses headphones . . .

 

[The red spirit]

on the subject of high temperatures, on a personal level I just do not care. Maybe I just have low standards.

I personally don't care about GPU temperatures itself, unless they are too high, but I definitely worry about VRM and vRAM temperatures. vRAM, because my specific model doesn't even monitor memory temperature and doesn't have any direct contact with heatsink, only already hot air from heatsink. VRMs, because high temperatures very directly harm their lifespan (each degree of heat has squared effect on lifespan) and on lower end designs they are already usually quite weak to begin with. So it's better to not torture them too badly. Right now I run my RX 580 at 1310 MHz and -191 mV, which is 959 mV, temperature of GPU in Superposition 4k bench is 74-75C at 2000 rpm, while sucking up to 117 watts (stock config lead to TDP throttling, actually less performance, wattage at 150 watts tops and temperatures in high 80s at 2k rpm). It's even cooler and more economical in Cyberpunk, Furmark, Unigine Valley and Unigine Tropics. It's now pretty good and minus minor performance loss it should be on par with other RX 580s acoustically. But this is basically maximum undervolt for this card, even -6 mV bellow this leads to crashes and lock ups. I might add 20 mV later, but so far it seems to be perfectly stable (at least as much as AMD drivers are stable, which for some reason make screen go blank during boot up and few seconds after boot up even at stock clock speed and voltage, it's definitely a bug).

In the AMD driver it lets me set the max fan speed of the card. With my Sapphire Vega 56 I just set that to the noise level I wanted, and let the card max out its heat and thermal throttle. It was fine. Sent it into the mines after that, and it was fine. After Eth mining collapsed, gave it to a close friend of mine, and it is still running good.

I gotta say that I find Vegas intriguing, Furys too. They have great reputation for undervolting and it can help you reduce heat and save as much as 100 watts. Even if you set TDP to RX 580 level, which would be more or less -30%, it will suck roughly the same amount of power, while being a lot faster than RX 580. If you want to go really low, you can set it to -50% and with some undervolting it should still be significantly faster than stock RX 580. Vega 64 and 56 were one of the last cards, which had non encrypted vBIOSes, so it was possible to tweak them there too. Radeon VII was probably the last one.

With my rx580 4g, on that card I always wanted more performance and ran the card hot, gpu power maxed at 150%, and the fans noisy. I guess I just put up with it. I used to wear headphones back then, so I guess I did not hear the noise. Now that I think about it, my grand kid who uses that card now also uses headphones . . .

And I use speakers, so I hear noise well and practically anything above 2000 rpm become tolerable at best.

 

[Leeea]

at least as much as AMD drivers are stable, which for some reason make screen go blank during boot up and few seconds after boot up even at stock clock speed and voltage, it's definitely a bug

I am going to push back on that.

AMD drivers do nothing until after windows starts. So before you see the windows logo, that is not AMD drivers but rather the firmware on your particular mainboard.


Not sure what mainboard your using, but sometimes if you update the BIOS that issue goes away. Not your GPU BIOS, but your mainboard BIOS.


That behavior is not unheard of, some rtx4090s are doing the same and worse.

 

[Stuka87]

- Don't really agree with a lot of that list.

Surprised that list skipped over the 2900XT & HD3870 (which was just the 2900XT with a fixed memory bus) and its sort of weird that they decided to call out the 390X, which wasn't great from a power and heat perspective against GM104 but was competitive from a performance standpoint. Lot of rebranding happening during those gens anyhow. 590 is also a bizarre choice when the 480 launched with a HW bug that was frying boards.

6500XT isn't a great card, but honestly was anyone else serving that market at the time?

The 480 issues was a firmware bug, not a hardware bug. The firmware was incorrectly drawing more than 75W from the PCIe port. That was fixed pretty quickly (I think it was like a week?), and it only impacted the launch day blower cards.

But I agree one some of their odd choices. The 390/390X were both good cards. Yes, they used more power. But nVidia today uses WAY more power, and I don't see them complaining about that or calling the 3090 the worst card ever.

We can even go back to like the Rage Fury MAXX (Dual Rage 128) which has a dual GPU card that almost never worked correctly. It didn't use crossfire, but instead used AFR which while had very smooth video, induced several frames of latency in everything. Or we could even talk about other dual GPU cards like the 7990, which like the nVidia 690, was never a good card.

But, seems like this site doesn't have experience with anything that was pre-GCN.

 

[The red spirit]

I am going to push back on that.

AMD drivers do nothing until after windows starts. So before you see the windows logo, that is not AMD drivers but rather the firmware on your particular mainboard.


Not sure what mainboard your using, but sometimes if you update the BIOS that issue goes away. Not your GPU BIOS, but your mainboard BIOS.


That behavior is not unheard of, some rtx4090s are doing the same and worse.

I use Gigabyte B460M Aorus Pro with F6 BIOS, probably doesn't say much anyway as it wasn't a popular board at the time.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

The 480 issues was a firmware bug, not a hardware bug. The firmware was incorrectly drawing more than 75W from the PCIe port. That was fixed pretty quickly (I think it was like a week?), and it only impacted the launch day blower cards.

But I agree one some of their odd choices. The 390/390X were both good cards. Yes, they used more power. But nVidia today uses WAY more power, and I don't see them complaining about that or calling the 3090 the worst card ever.

We can even go back to like the Rage Fury MAXX (Dual Rage 128) which has a dual GPU card that almost never worked correctly. It didn't use crossfire, but instead used AFR which while had very smooth video, induced several frames of latency in everything. Or we could even talk about other dual GPU cards like the 7990, which like the nVidia 690, was never a good card.

But, seems like this site doesn't have experience with anything that was pre-GCN.

- Those early cards were kinda gnarly all around. The industry was growing so fast year over year that stuff really was almost obsolete as soon as you bought it. The software all around was kinda funky too, between drivers/OS/Games/APIs... you'd get new standards by the year, it was all over the place. It really was the wild west.

On the NV side, I admittedly cannot provide some sort of comprehensive list, but My top contenders would be:

- 5800Ultra: Just an absolute turd of a card, completely and utterly trounced by the ATi 9800 in every conceivable way.

- GTX 480: Hot, Loud, power hungry. Almost feels like a rhyme of what is happening again this gen: AMD comes up a bit short on raw performance but wins on the heat and power metrics, NV goes balls out for the top tier of performance at all costs.

-GTX 780: The Kepler arch as a whole, but I really felt bad for anyone that went with the plain jane 780 which ran headlong into one of AMD's best chip designs. While AMD was able to repurpose Hawaii into the Grenada chip and remain competitive in performance with Maxwell and the 980, the 780 chips quickly faded into irrelevance fast.

-RTX 2080Ti: One of the weakest gen on gen performance improvements in NV's history, one of the smallest uplifts from the next chip down (2080s was just 15-20% shy of the Ti), huge $1200 street price was one of the biggest real world price increases we've ever seen, early cards suffered from the space invaders issue (I'm noticing a trend with NV's halo launch cards...).

Tougher with NV because no matter what issues they have around their cards... they are virtually always the FASTEST option, which makes it hard to say any given card was actually BAD per se (with the exception of the 5800Ultra, and maybe the 7950GTX whatever).

Sort of feeds back in with the theme of the thread: AMD doesn't fight for that top spot, and it certainly loses far more than it wins when it looks like it might fight for it.

 

[CP5670]

The most solid cards back then were the 3dfx ones. Everything just worked, including SLI, and many games were designed around Glide. Both Nvidia and ATI had quite a few driver issues in contrast.

 

[alexruiz]

So Alex, your "This shows you have not owned a Powercolor card in ages" is just cringe, because I literally use PowerColor card now. Used it for years and as it came stock it was loud garbage with broken (it's not broken, but made poorly) fan control. I spent way too much time modifying vBIOS to hopefully fix it, but it's just unfixable issue and you can't make this card work with LUT fan control, flashing it to work as their older RX 480 with same cooler only reduces performance, changing max TDP doesn't do much, extreme underclocking (to 700 MHz) does work, but makes it really slow, meanwhile at 1GHz it still ramps up fan to the moon, regardless of temperature. AMD's own software somehow has fan control overridden past 85C, meanwhile undervolting is limited and for some reason unstable. I now use MSI Afterburner and I can now undervolt card much further and override fan control in software mode, but flaw is that Afterburner has to start with Windows, which is a bit annoying. So I spent a lot of time investigating this card and I know what it is. I have read about it online and many other people comment about how loud it is, so it's not just my particular card that is borked. And yep it's probably the worst model of RX 580 that you can buy, even MSI Armor model doesn't ramp up fan to 3500 rpm, "only" to 2900 rpm. Armor model is known to be a meme and is definitely one of the bottom tier models as it is. It's spectacular that PowerColor managed to make something even worse than that.

Ok, you got me, I phrased it wrong.
I should not have written "you have not owned..." because you own that card now, even if it launched 6 years ago.
What I should have written was "you have not acquired another Powercolor card in years"

That RX 580 that you own, was indeed, a mediocre design.
However, the point that several of us are trying to make about Powercolor being one of the top AMD AIBs is noticeable on their Navi designs and forward.

 

[The red spirit]

Ok, you got me, I phrased it wrong.
I should not have written "you have not owned..." because you own that card now, even if it launched 6 years ago.
What I should have written was "you have not acquired another Powercolor card in years"

That RX 580 that you own, was indeed, a mediocre design.
However, the point that several of us are trying to make about Powercolor being one of the top AMD AIBs is noticeable on their Navi designs and forward.

Meh. They are still nowhere near Sapphire, an actual top tier brand. PowerColor is a bit bellow XFX, but above Afox. I haven't seen anything particularly great about them. Their Fighter series are okay, meanwhile their top tier Hellhounds are decent, but not leaders. PowerColor cards usually don't have much going on for them aesthetically, neither they are particularly impressive for overclockers. Red devils are pretty decent, but again nothing too special either. Not to mention that PowerColor has very weak support/warranty anywhere outside of US. XFX IMO is better as their aesthetics are great. yes they had a lot of blunders, but they haven't given up, improved their designs and almost always had a product left that could duke it out with Asus, Sapphire and MSI as equals. XFX also seems to be doing some pretty good PR, one of the best out of all AMD vendors. The best analogy for PowerColor would be a Gigabyte, but with even lower budget. The thing with PowerColor isn't that their products suck (for the most part they don't), but is the fact that it's definitely a cheaper vendor and you see consequences of that. Their products for the most part are probably okay, but don't seem to have what it takes to really compete with other vendors, except for their price.

 

[Stuka87]

Meh. They are still nowhere near Sapphire, an actual top tier brand. PowerColor is a bit bellow XFX, but above Afox. I haven't seen anything particularly great about them. Their Fighter series are okay, meanwhile their top tier Hellhounds are decent, but not leaders. PowerColor cards usually don't have much going on for them aesthetically, neither they are particularly impressive for overclockers. Red devils are pretty decent, but again nothing too special either. Not to mention that PowerColor has very weak support/warranty anywhere outside of US. XFX IMO is better as their aesthetics are great. yes they had a lot of blunders, but they haven't given up, improved their designs and almost always had a product left that could duke it out with Asus, Sapphire and MSI as equals. XFX also seems to be doing some pretty good PR, one of the best out of all AMD vendors. The best analogy for PowerColor would be a Gigabyte, but with even lower budget. The thing with PowerColor isn't that their products suck (for the most part they don't), but is the fact that it's definitely a cheaper vendor and you see consequences of that. Their products for the most part are probably okay, but don't seem to have what it takes to really compete with other vendors, except for their price.

NOBODY should be buying anything from XFX with their shady business practices. I am amazed they are even in business after China nailed them to the wall.

I have owned several PowerColor cards going all the way back to the ATI 5000 series. Never had a single issue with any of them. Their Navi based cards are great. Their Red Dragon cards reviewed extremely well. The 5700 XT Red Dragon was considered to be the best 5700 XT made. Even ahead of Sapphires Nitro+.

 

[The red spirit]

NOBODY should be buying anything from XFX with their shady business practices. I am amazed they are even in business after China nailed them to the wall.

I have owned several PowerColor cards going all the way back to the ATI 5000 series. Never had a single issue with any of them. Their Navi based cards are great. Their Red Dragon cards reviewed extremely well. The 5700 XT Red Dragon was considered to be the best 5700 XT made. Even ahead of Sapphires Nitro+.

I just watched what happened, because I wasn't aware of anything like that. Yep not great. Kinda impressive how AMD seemingly did nothing about that.

 

[Stuka87]

I just watched what happened, because I wasn't aware of anything like that. Yep not great. Kinda impressive how AMD seemingly did nothing about that.

Maybe they did, just not publically. But as far as I know, XFX is still listed as a board partner.

 

[A///]

because xfx used to be an nvidia partner and then they fell out with them and went to amd or nvidia told them to **** off when they began making amd cards too. if amd follow the same route what's xfx gonna do? make cards for intel?

 

[Stuka87]

because xfx used to be an nvidia partner and then they fell out with them and went to amd or nvidia told them to **** off when they began making amd cards too. if amd follow the same route what's xfx gonna do? make cards for intel?

I don't think that is something AMD needs to care about. The Add in Board partners represent AMD. And if one of them is being really shady and skirting the law, it should be in AMD's best interest to dump them.

 

[A///]

I don't think that is something AMD needs to care about. The Add in Board partners represent AMD. And if one of them is being really shady and skirting the law, it should be in AMD's best interest to dump them.

it goes without saying that msi needs to be dumped by both.

 

[Aapje]

I don't think that is something AMD needs to care about. The Add in Board partners represent AMD. And if one of them is being really shady and skirting the law, it should be in AMD's best interest to dump them.

It depends on whether you think that the GPU design companies should control the board partners. I would like less control, not more, so the board partners can actually differentiate themselves. Then the consumer can choose who to (not) buy from.

 

[Stuka87]

it goes without saying that msi needs to be dumped by both.

I am not sure what this is in reference to?

It depends on whether you think that the GPU design companies should control the board partners. I would like less control, not more, so the board partners can actually differentiate themselves. Then the consumer can choose who to (not) buy from.

Giving them more room to innovate on their cards, for sure. Give them more room to move. But if a company is doing the kinds of things XFX was, AMD should drop their license. nVidia and AMD, and well, now Intel, need to have some standards as to who they allow to represent them.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

What was XFX doing that's got everyone in such a tizzy? Mislabeling cards to bypass import fees in China?

Why exactly should AMD drop one of their exclusive partners for administrative shenanigans when the parts are still solid and basically no one knows about AMD... Wait I mean XFX... Wait I mean XFX's shens?

 

[maddie]

What was XFX doing that's got everyone in such a tizzy? Mislabeling cards to bypass import fees in China?

Why exactly should AMD drop one of their exclusive partners for administrative shenanigans when the parts are still solid and basically no one knows about AMD... Wait I mean XFX... Wait I mean XFX's shens?

Yeah, all have paid every cent of taxes owed their entire life.

 

[dlerious]

What was XFX doing that's got everyone in such a tizzy? Mislabeling cards to bypass import fees in China?

Why exactly should AMD drop one of their exclusive partners for administrative shenanigans when the parts are still solid and basically no one knows about AMD... Wait I mean XFX... Wait I mean XFX's shens?

Rumors were that they sold cards direct to miners, took some of the cards back and sold them as new. Third paragraph here

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-customs-seize-5840-illegally-mislabeled-xfx-gpus

I believe XFX dropped Nvidia (like EVGA), not the other way around.

 

[Stuka87]

What was XFX doing that's got everyone in such a tizzy? Mislabeling cards to bypass import fees in China?

Why exactly should AMD drop one of their exclusive partners for administrative shenanigans when the parts are still solid and basically no one knows about AMD... Wait I mean XFX... Wait I mean XFX's shens?

There is a few things they have been involved with, not a one off case. XFX public statements claim they did nothing wrong.

They were (allegedly) mislabeling GPUs to get around customs (marking them as cheaper cards than they were).
They were (allegedly) bypassing store fronts and selling directly to miners. Its the reason XFX RX 5x0 and RX 5x00 cards were almost non-existent in store fronts.
They were (allegedly) reselling cards that had been mined on, without stating that they were previously mined on. They basically repackaged them. The story here is China banned GPU mining. So all the GPUs were sent out to countries with cheap power. Once mining crashed, the cards were then repackaged and they tried to reimport them to China in order to sell them. This is when they got caught the most recent time. Its not clear if XFX owned all the cards, and were basically building cards to mine for their own profit.

Its worth noting that XFX is owned by the Pine Group. And is not a standalone company.