Weekend of Excitement – AMD and Nvidia Edition

This upcoming weekend will be kicking off review season for the Ryzen 3000-series processors and Radeon 5700-series GPUs. Nvidia took the early lead in capturing mindshare with the release of its Super-series RTX GPUs. Early benchmark leaks for the Radeon 5700-series offerings, which can be found via capture and discussion at Resetera, demonstrates that AMD’s price cut on these products will better position them to compete against the refreshed Nvidia stack.

The proof will be in the pudding once the embargoes are lifted and a larger pool of data is available from multiple trusted resources. The top of AMD’s GPU stack, the Radeon VII, appears to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. While it comes with a generous allocation of HBM2 for creative and professional workloads, the power consumption, thermals and price are going to be a much harder sell after July 9th in our opinion.

We’re also disappointed in AsRock’s preparation for the impending launch of the Ryzen 3000 series processors. After Gigabyte’s epic failure to produce the Thunderbolt 3 solution for the Designaire X399 Threadripper motherboard, the Computex 2019 offerings captured by Anandtech are nowhere to be found 48 hours before the launch date. The X570 Creator and X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 are absent from the documented lineup. Our interest in the X570 Creator stemmed from the inclusion of the Aquantia 10Gb NIC onboard as well as two Thunderbolt 3 ports. There’s merit in having a high speed external expansion option when thinking about how the system will be used three or more years down the line.