We have been talking about mining-specific cards for a few weeks now, and most of us are aware of the video card shortages caused by the recent Etherum mining craze. Sapphire has the first “mining only” card that we know of for sale.


Product information: RADEON RX 470 MINING EDITION 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-EXPRESS GRAPHICS CARD

SAPPHIRE’s acclaimed Dual-X Cooling is powered by two massive yet silent fans and state-of-the-art radiator design. The new form of our 95mm blades mean greater airflow and superior heatsink coverage at lower noise compared to standard cooling designs. These feature dual ball bearing fans, which have an 85% longer lifespan than sleeve bearings in our tests. The improvements to the fan blades means the solution is up to 10% quieter than the previous generation.

These cards of course do not have the hardware needed for video output as all HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI outputs have been removed in what is very much likely an effort to save cost. It looks as if these cards have shorter warranties as well. While miners are going to be saving a bit of upfront cost (maybe), selling these into the used secondary market will of course be hampered greatly since gamers cannot use these cards.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Sapphire RX 470 Mining Edition Card for Sale in UK

Samsung sent us over a press release this morning highlighting its award winning advertisement. While we usually would not care about this in any way, while it is not attached to “real” VR gaming, it is about VR and it is actually quite entertaining. Enjoy.



The Golden Ostrich: Samsung Electronics’ creative efforts received top marks for its Galaxy S8 flagship ad, “Ostrich,” which took home three gold awards, as well as two silver and two bronze. Samsung collected the golden hat-trick under the film craft category for best direction, animation, and visual effects.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Samsung VR Ostrich

The guys over at Tech Power Up do some good work when it comes to computer hardware reviews and you have likely noticed that we try to pass along the site’s content here on our news page, but something caught my eye last week in its review section, and that was an AMD RX 560 vs. GTX 1050 “review” that was authored by “Advertorial.”



It seems that many of TPU’s long time readers are not big fans of this kind of advertising approach even though it was very much labeled as an advertisement. And there is even talk of graphs not being scaled properly in the review to show the GTX 1050 in a bad light.



You would be surprised what all we here at HardOCP get offered money for that is simply over the line, but AMD has not ever talked to us about this kind of content, and I am good with that. But while adblockers continue to be used by more and more of independent hardware website readers, many are simply having to turn to different avenues of revenue to stay afloat.

I have noticed more and more content over at PCPer.com that is “Sponsored by AMD,” but most of these are build guide types of content although some of it has been content specific to game streaming. But we have seen content outside of that realm, such as AMD Radeon RX 580: Prey You’ll Upgrade. This was a “review” that was, “Testing commissioned by AMD. This means that AMD paid us for our time, but had no say in the results or presentation of them.” Now that said, I do not question PCPer’s testing, they are tops in the biz when it comes to that, but when you compare a brand new RX 580 to the competition, is using GTX 960 as the only NVIDIA comparison the way it should be done? I get that PCPer is showing you an upgrade path from an earlier GPU, but is leaving out the current competition (GTX 1060) the way to go about it?

While doing my due diligence and performing some preliminary testing to see if we would utilize Prey for graphics testing going forward, AMD approached me to discuss this exact title. With the release of the Radeon RX 580 in April, one of the key storylines is that the card offers a reasonably priced upgrade path for users of 2+ year old hardware. With that upgrade you should see some substantial performance improvements and as I will show you here, the new Prey is a perfect example of that.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Advertorial Review at Tech Power UP