How does a freelance writer keep up with everything happening in the industry when he has a full time job, a family, reviews to keep up with and a puppy in training? It’s worth pointing out that a lot has happened in the month of September this year. AMD has been making announcements about Zen, INTEL has had some details about Kaby Lake and NVIDIA is talking about the GTX 1050. Rather than try to keep up with every piece of news as it releases, we’re going to try something new by having a once a month update to catch you up on the things that are happening in the industry. Welcome to the PureOC Monthly News! On the last Friday of each month, we’ll pull together all the news that feels relevant and give a one stop location to get your info from. So without further ado, let’s get into what’s happened this month. CPUs, Motherboards and Chipsets  AMD Zen, Grey Hawk, X370 Chipset and A12-9800 We’ll start with AMD this time around since much of the anticipation of what will happen in the CPU sector relies on them. We got some more detailed shots of the new Zen chip and the 1331 pin design is confirmed. As far as new info is concerned though, we didn’t get much this month for that. The A12-9800 on the other hand had some very interesting leaks. Some performance scores showed up and even though the new AM4 chip is still using Steamroller cores, it has some reasonable improvements. What was really interesting was an overclocking result. So...

Introduction Wait! Where’s the Zen chips already? Just keep being patient a little longer because the new architecture is coming soon enough. On top of that, Zen isn’t going to replace every budget range when it first releases. Unless AMD has a surprise up their sleeves, we can only expect Zen to target the high-end at first. In the mean time, Piledriver chips will still be filling the other budget slots until the rest of Zen arrives. Today, we’re going to take a look at the FX-6350 and see how it does. Some of you may be thinking that the 6350 has been beaten to death in reviews and that would be pretty close to accurate. However, we do have the new Wraith Cooler bundled with this chip so that will give us a little bit of a new angle to look at. The other thing we want to do differently is abandon the stock clocks. This is Pure Overclock! Who needs stock clocks anymore? Seriously though, the FX-6350 has been around long enough that we have a great idea of how it performs, even overclocked. This will be more of a review in seeing how well the Wraith Cooler does in comparison to some other slightly heftier coolers. We’ll get into those details in a bit so sit back and enjoy a quick word about the philosophy driving AMD. At AMD, we live our core values through our actions. This helps drive our business. Being a socially and environmentally responsible business is an important part of AMD’s culture – The AMD Way. We believe that our employees are m...

Alright! Go ahead and grab a tiny pinch of salt just in case, but something VERY exciting has surfaced and it’s about as legit as we can get until Zen’s actual release arrives. We’ve heard AMD talk about the 40% IPC gain for some time, but that doesn’t translate into a real world performance scenario. However, WCCFtech just picked up a benchmark that finally gives us a lot of hope for the CPU market next year. Apparently an Ashes of the Singularity Benchmark leaked that had the new Zen chip as the processor. The chip was an engineering sample so it was only running a 2.8 GHz base and 3.2 GHz boost clock. While the benchmark results were standalone, WCCFtech took the opportunity to bench other processors using a similar setup (The RX 480 being the other key piece). While this won’t be as accurate as a full review, the new Zen chip easily performed above an i5-4670K while still falling behind the i7-4790. Here’s the big deal though. Against the previous FX-8350, the Zen chip has almost a 40% performance increase in this benchmark! Granted, this is early and across two different systems, but this is a good sign that Zen is going to reach expectations. Another thing that makes this a pretty big deal is the fact that the clocks seem really low for the average CPU nowadays. It’s very likely that these clocks are going to be higher once the chip actually hits the market. Even a 20% boost on the current clocks will likely push the chip ahe...

Let me start by saying that I cover A LOT of AMD news. This is mostly because when I built my latest system in 2012, I ended up with the 8350 CPU due to the purpose and budget I had at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to get my hands on Skylake, but we all have to live with what have at the time. As it is, I’ve become very familiar with the 990FX chipset and the various motherboards. At this point, if you told me there would be ANOTHER 990FX motherboard, I would have told you I also have some ocean front property in north western Colorado for sale at an excellent price! However, ASUS is certainly releasing a new motherboard, it supports 220W CPUs, and at this point, one has to wonder why they would be releasing a board like this with Zen just around the corner. The Sabertooth R3.0 doesn’t just support 220W CPUs. It’s packed to the brim with awesome features that I can personally say I’ve never seen to this degree. ASUS has maintained the reputation of being the top overclocking board for FX chips since the Crosshair V Formula-Z and nobody has quite been able to take their crown. With this new board, we have the same power capability, but looks to be updated with not only better MOSFETs and chokes, but the option to install a 40mm fan blowing right on the VRM heatsink. Anybody who’s played with AMD knows how useful that is. The Sabertooth also doesn’t sacrifice expand-ability with added features. We still have a good ra...

Wow! The RX 480 release has been wrapped up in more drama than a few seasons of Jersey Shore!!! Sure, that statement could be an over exaggeration considering I’ve never seen Jersey Shore, but the drama is real enough, that’s for sure. To be clear, my complaint is not directed at writers on other sites. I know of a slight disagreement between PCPer and Tom’s Hardware, but the issue was resolved almost immediately and professionally. With the power issue being fixed today, I want to discuss the good, the not so bad, and the downright ugly angles behind the RX 480 release. I’m still incredibly excited about how good the new releases are for graphics cards this year. In the case of AMD’s RX 480, I feel like AMD is doing a great job of meeting the appropriate expectations. When Maxwell hit the scene, the R9 300 series was almost laughable in comparison. To the series benefit, it was in a great price-to-performance bracket, but the bars set in overclocking and power efficiency were way above what was being hit by the more budget friendly option. Now, we have a card that is much, much closer to those standards with the RX 480. The reference design isn’t as strong in overclocking, but the AIB partners are sure to fix that in the coming weeks. While this can make the choice a bit harder between Red and Green, I don’t feel like builders will actually feel like they had to compromise in any area if they choose AMD, which is great! Now, it&...

Introduction Everyone may be waiting for Zen, but that doesn’t mean AMD doesn’t have a few more releases up their sleeves before the end of the year. The Athlon X4 845 is the latest budget minded chip to help pass the time until their new architecture arrives. What’s nice about the 845 is the fact that it uses the latest Excavator cores instead of the Steamroller ones. AMD designed the Carrizo architecture to put an emphasis on power efficiency, but ever since the backlash from Zambezi, single-thread performance is one of the first things people look for with new releases. We’ll certainly check that out but there’s something else that really needs to be pointed out in AMD’s new design choices. The stock cooler is the bane of CPU existence. They’re SOOO bad! With all that noise, inefficient cooling, as well as cheap designs, many feel like their hard earned dollars are slightly wasted with such skimpy designs. AMD is trying to change that by redesigning all of their stock coolers. Pure Overclock already got to check out the Wraith cooler and it was a hit. Now, we’ll get to also see how AMD’s lowest budget cooler performs as well. If Zen manages to complete the direction AMD is on, there is no doubt they will start changing the market in good ways. We’ll see how the Athlon X4 845 measures up, but before we do that, let’s take a quick word from team Red themselves. At AMD, we live our core values through our ac...

There’s been so little time and so much going on that’s it’s killing me to not cover all the great things happening in the GPU market lately. The GTX 1080 easily conquered the most powerful graphics card spot, the GTX 1070 fits perfectly into the affordable high performance spot, and now the Rx 480 is a great mid-range main stream card. I want to focus on what NVIDIA and AMD has done for the market, but I also want to bring up how the fan boy wars seem to be destroying the PC building communities as we know them. The GTX 1070 is easily the unsung hero of 2016 release segment so far. While it’s ideally propositioned as a 1440p card, 4k isn’t a stretch with some settings tweaks. The Pascal architecture not only destroys DirectX 11 titles with ease, but much like Maxwell, it overclocks extremely well. The close release after the 1080 overshadowed the card, although it will likely be more popular than the 1080 in the long run. The only serious drawback is that because supply isn’t as high for the time being, retailers are selling the cards at a pretty high price over suggested retail values. Asynchronous support has come up a few times, but Async isn’t widely enough used to be an issue for the time being. My hope is that if Async becomes a boon for game development, that NVIDIA doesn’t keep muddying the waters with their “support.” Of course, this week was the big week for the RX 480 release. I think many of us in th...

Introduction Back in 2013, AMD released a chip that had many scratching their heads. Between the abnormally high TDP and ridiculous price tag, everyone thought the company had lost their minds. In hind sight, it’s easy to see that AMD hadn’t found their new direction yet, and they were ensuring that a chip of this magnitude could be successfully handled in a consumer market. The good news about the 9590 is, in spite of being considered a failed launch, it still worked out to be a decent chip and it certainly opened the door for future releases with high TDPs. Energy efficiency kind of gets thrown out the window with overclocking, and an ultra-enthusiast version of Zen is something I would certainly look forward to today. Having followed this release for years now, the biggest thing that bugged me was only getting to see the limitations of the chip tested on 240mm AIOs. The question on my mind was, “Could someone get reasonably past the 5.0 GHz barrier if they had some uber cooling?” AMD was kind enough to send a sample my way and let me have a go at it. To be clear here, this isn’t just trying to reach 5.o GHz and run a couple of tests. The real test of the 5.0 barrier is if a user could run that as a 24/7 clock speed, and be able to do so with a fairly easily involving just a multiplier changes. With that in mind, let’s begin looking into how the experience went, the results of the tests, and just how worth it a 9590 would be for the ...

Rumors are flying everywhere about Polaris, Pascal, Zen and even Kaby Lake. While I love following the rumors, not much is being leaked that gives a concrete idea of performance, price, etc. What is catching my eye is what AMD is doing right now. Last week gave us the release of the 16.3 drivers. The release schedule on these drivers is certainly improving, but what really caught my eye was some of the fixes. The bug list is getting smaller and that’s the kind of improvement enthusiasts like to see in drivers. We have to wait for Polaris and Zen to know if AMD’s financial future will look brighter in the years to come, but the things I’m seeing now indicates that they are already turning things around for the better. I already touched on the 16.3 Crimson driver, but I will elaborate further on that. The bug fix I’ve been closely watching is one that involved AMD GPUs losing their clock speed settings during use. This is kind of a big deal and I was fairly certain this was affecting those who were overclocking their video cards. March’s driver fixed that issue and it’s off the list of known issues. In fact, the known issues seem pretty minor now, with most issues related to new game releases. There is the issue of the Gaming Evolved app causing games to crash that I’m hoping get’s resolved soon, but that’s mostly because it keeps crashing my WoW. At least it’s easy to close for temporary fix but for those who use...

Introduction It’s always nice to receive a surprise in the mail, especially the kind where you were expecting one thing, and got so much more. AMD managed to surprise me in this way this January! As it happens, Josh (in the normal course of things), throws out to the reviewer pool opportunities to review the odd piece of hardware that a vendor has offered to let us review here at PureOC. People volunteer, and through some magic, Josh picks a reviewer. In this case, the hardware in question was a low profile cooler called “The Wraith Cooler” from AMD. I suppose I should have realized that this was AMD specific hardware given the manufacturer, but I’ll be honest, I saw low-profile, nearly silent, and thought “Me! Me! Me!” and threw my proverbial hat into the review ring. Josh cast his magic spell, shook his magic 8 ball, or whatever, and I received the nod. Joy! Color me excited! I’m going to get to review a low profile cooler! My thoughts immediately shift to the planning stage, and off I go. Now, keep in mind the Northeast had been snowed in for a few days, and packages had been delayed. So this gave me plenty of time to consider my approach. I’d open up the Pandora containing my i5, remove the Noctua low profile cooler, and install the Wraith, and then do some comparatives. Easy. And the Wraith sounded kinda sexy too. I Love the Noctua, but the fans… that beige and brown theme just isn’t my favorite… So. I ...

AMD has been talking up the Asynchronous Compute Engines pretty much since DirectX 12 has been announced. In short, these are hardware components in AMD GPUs that can hopefully be leveraged to add significant performance in games. We’ve been waiting for the final say for some time and while certain Beta releases have shown some promise, it’s only official releases that will not only prove the benefit of Asynchronous Shaders, but will also help determine how legit DirectX 12 is for being the next big thing for gaming. AMD just shared some info that Hitman has been working specifically with them to take advantage of their Asynchronous Shaders and it looks like we have about a month before the official release date. Whether or not Hitman is your kind of game, this will certainly be a big moment in the PC gaming industry. So keep your eyes peeled because March 11th is the official release day for Hitman and I’m sure tech sites will be looking into the performance with DirectX 12 and various AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Below is the full statement from AMD. AMD is once again partnering with IO Interactive to bring an incredible Hitman gaming experience to the PC. As the newest member to the AMD Gaming Evolved program, Hitman will feature top-flight effects and performance optimizations for PC gamers. Hitman will leverage unique DX12 hardware found in only AMD Radeon GPUs—called asynchronous compute engines—to handle heavier workloads and better image quality with...

At this point, refreshes on old architecture is becoming even older news. Zen is getting closer and closer with each passing day, but in the mean time AMD is trying to keep some refreshes coming our way so that sales won’t completely stagnate until their whole line-up gets a much needed refresh. In looking at these releases, it’s not the products themselves that piqued my interest, but certain changes that indicate good things about Zen. Let’s look at two in particular. The first thing I liked was the 8370 being offered slightly cheaper without the Wraith cooler. For serious overclockers, even a stock cooler as nice as the Wraith is something we’ll never use. If AMD starts offering chip-only packages that save the buyer a few dollars that can go towards the high end cooler of choice, that’s a great deal for enthusiasts. I understand that this could also lead to some headaches when certain buyers don’t pay attention to what they’re getting, but I hope it’s something that becomes a trend with upcoming releases. The second thing I liked was an impressive amount of power savings on a new APU coming up. The A10-7860K is replacing the 7850K, but even with the same CPU boost frequency and a higher GPU frequency, the chip is only rated at a low 65W TDP. Saving 30 watts in power consumption is impressive considering the stats and it makes me think think that between this and the demo at CES, AMD’s next GPU lineup is going to m...

4k is all the rage these days. Everyone is trying to get a single GPU to be able to play 60 FPS on a 4k display with modern titles. But what if I told you that you really don’t need 4k? You’d probably be asking me to show you the red and blue pills as well. The reality though is that in spite of all the 4k resolution displays and high definition VR experiences I saw, the thing that impressed me the most was a simple 1440p display that was absolutely gorgeous to look at. Oh, and I got to find out about some new CPUs and stock coolers as well. Let’s start out with this notion of unnecessary 4k resolution. There are two main details in display technology that are integral to a better viewing experience and I’m going to try to sum them up as basically as possible, with the understanding that I was able to muster. First, the display has to be manufactured as HDR. Simply put, it means that the display gives the widest range possible from lights and darks. OLED screens are great at this because they can dim individual pixels, hence the “High Dynamic Range” (HDR), so darks and lights contrast well. Also, the TV has to be programmed to support HDR so that it can properly display it. If this sounds difficult, this technology is actually already part of numerous displays in production from companies like LG. However, there is one other key component. Most pixels are designed to create colors using the RGB spectrum, but this standard has been around...

The Nano was quite an interesting release from AMD. The small form factor and power efficiency made it a great fit for mini-ITX systems, but the performance was surprisingly close to the full-fledged Fury X cards. It’s a hard card to beat when compared to other small cards, but the price was still at a premium side. Now the price is not only much better for the Nano, but it’s at a very competitive point for other full sized cards as well. AMD just announced that the Nano will dropped to $499 and that’s a great price for this card. It puts it at a very competitive point with the GTX 980 but the 980 isn’t going to easily fit in a small system. This is an interesting move from AMD but I have to admit, I think consumers are going to eat this one up. Check out the AMD link below for more details on the R9 series and there’s a Newegg link so you can easily keep track of when those prices hit the retail space. http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/desktop/r9 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007709%20600566293

UPDATE: As requested, here’s an update about the availability of the GA-990FX-Gaming since it just showed up for sale. Links below. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128886 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019C3S2CS/ref=s9_simh_gw_g147_i1_r?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=0K6H28YZ47R31PRV6DY5&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop I spend far too much time scouring the internet for anything hardware related. As it is, I see a lot of comments from people asking why nobody is coming out with better FX series motherboards, especially with the 9590 having been out for quite some time now. To be fair to manufacturers, nobody wants to invest too much in a chipset that is on the verge of being obsolete. This makes what GIGABYTE is doing all the more confusing but I think I can shed some light on what’s really going on. Between certain supply issues and what amounts to a surprisingly high demand, GIGABYTE may be positioning themselves as a sole contender with the release of the GA-990FX-Gaming. First, let’s talk about what could be bringing this on. Both ASUS and GIGABYTE are experiencing about a 10% drop in their motherboard sales. Most of the time when this happens, everyone is quick to point out that desktops are going to fail and be replaced by the all-powerful tablet (seriously?). But there are other factors attributing to a possible rise with AMD, namely, Skylake. INTEL really missed the...