Radeon RX 550 Linux Benchmarks: $89 Polaris GPU On Open-Source

[DeepDayze]

Open vs closed source drivers don't bother me a whole lot, but one thing that is really nice is that it's a lot easier to switch between kernels than between nvidia drivers. The nvidia driver also gets recompiled every time there's a kernel update, which is somewhat annoying.

Hopefully Nouveau will get that reclocking support for those newer generation cards on the nVidia side. That's the crucial piece missing.

[dungeon]

Lowest-end card is a dual-slot, dual-fan card. What a time to be alive!

It is cheaper to put fans of existing bigger chips than to design new i guess But there are one fan single slot RX 550 models from HIS and XFX as i see... but guess what - these costs more

That how all cards should look like, but gamers are crazy about demanding for more perf so we have half a meter cards

[ThrowAway3000]

That how all cards should look like, but gamers are crazy about demanding for more perf so we have half a meter cards

Having only 1 fan on a GPU is a little scary, there is a risk it stops working. Although I don't have statistics as to how often that happens.

[dungeon]

Having only 1 fan on a GPU is a little scary, there is a risk it stops working. Although I don't have statistics as to how often that happens.

15ish years ago this was normal for entry level cards

Triple combo again - DVI-I, S-Video and VGA ... no love for Brane215

[bridgman]

It is cheaper to put fans of existing bigger chips than to design new i guess But there are one fan single slot RX 550 models from HIS and XFX as i see... but guess what - these costs more

Up here the single-fan card is $20 cheaper than the dual-fan / higher clock card from the same vendor (Gigabyte):

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=rx+550&N=-1&isNodeId=1

[dungeon]

Up here the single-fan card is $20 cheaper than the dual-fan / higher clock card from the same vendor (Gigabyte):

https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...=-1&isNodeId=1

Single slot + fan , not dual + fan... single sloted cost more as that is rarity these days Only XFX is single slot there, they have dual slot one fan OC model too but also seems low profile dual slot - a already virtually hear a sound of this




No love for Brane215 again, as only WX 4100 have all features

Single slot, low profile, 4 DPs. Pay the price Brane it is also built by AMD

[Brane215]

I would think that an even more interesting consideration would be to see if the RX 550 would be a worthy upgrade of a Carrizo or Bristol Ridge APU.

For instance....I just picked up a HP Desktop with an AMD Bristol Ridge APU specifically the A12-9800 ...( this is a quad core process upgrade of the Carrizo so as to have higher top end speed at 3.8 Ghz and 4.2 Burst speed with an R7 class IGP with 8 graphics cores clocked at 1.1 Ghz with 512 stream processors and everything accessing 16 GB of DDR4-2400 Ram )

It wasn't a bad buy at $349 US.

Had Bristol Ridge been available as AM1 stuff was or even cheaper A8/A10 models, I'd have at least one. With a proper board, it could be great for 3 monitor setup.
But you simply can't have just a chip A12-9800 to pair it with a board of your choice. And when you manage to get it, it's already paired with a board adn the price is insane.

A8-something is €50ish and the board for it is itn the same price range.€100+ is not unreasonable amount to spend while waiting for a Zen APU...

[leipero]

Having only 1 fan on a GPU is a little scary, there is a risk it stops working. Although I don't have statistics as to how often that happens.

It's in margin of "almost never happens". Truth is, fans rarely die silently, most of the time they show signs for months (sometimes year(s)) before they stop working, at that point, people usually either replace graphic gard or fan just because annoyance of sound.

Personally, i prefer proper passive graphic cards (just heatsink, no fan), and it is actually a sad thing that even low-end graphic cards usually come with active cooling now, but it makes sense sicne most (excluding AMD) CPU's come with integrated solutions that work quite well for their purpose, both AMD and nVidia go for as much performance per dollar even in lowest-end. Not everything is lsot tho, since I'm sure there are few offerings on extreme low-end spectrum from both chip makers with passive cooling.


On topic, free drivers are far more convinient, and after using them for almost 2 years now, i can't immagine myself having to deal with blobs again, even on machine with nVidia GPU I'm using nouveau (with supported GPU ofc.), and it works just fine for tasks that PC is purposed for, no problem whatsoever. I remmember having to deal with nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, such a unpleasant experience, I will not even go into fglrx experience... Plus, DX9 games I play (just a few) with nine tracker run circles around nvidia blob and fglrx, those translations, no matter how good they are, introduce stutters and all sorts of other nonsense on complex maps with lot's of geometry, it simply doesn't matter what graphic settings you use, while nine works as (or even better) than native Windows .

bottom line, everything have it's use cases .

[bridgman]

Had Bristol Ridge been available as AM1 stuff was or even cheaper A8/A10 models, I'd have at least one. With a proper board, it could be great for 3 monitor setup.

Bristol Ridge really needs 128 bit memory to perform decently, but AM1 is limited to 64 bit AFAIK. Stoney Ridge might have worked in AM1 but anything higher gets limited by the single channel DRAM support in AM1.

[Brane215]

Bristol Ridge really needs 128 bit memory to perform decently, but AM1 is limited to 64 bit AFAIK. Stoney Ridge might have worked in AM1 but anything higher gets limited by the single channel DRAM support in AM1.

Poor wording on my part. Sure, two RAM channels should be very welcome on such APU, especially with some high frequency DDR4.
What I meant was, Bristol was never as available or cheap as other stuff.
Had it been available, I'd play with one. AM4 was announced to cover everything across AM1/FM2/AM3+ spectrum, but so far there are no that cheap AM4 boards that one could use just to play with - something that would really utilize SoC nature of the thing - no extra bells and whistles, apart from what's available on the chip itself.

If there was such cute cheap mini-ITX to micro-ATX board and with decently priced A12-9800, it would make sense. Later on, I could just plug in new Zen APU with HBM and fire away Gentoo system recompile. Sure, RAM might not be most optimal ( as they are ramping up speeds), but with HBM2 on board, this shouldn't matter much.


For a moment I was considering switching to A8-7600 + cheap board with existing DDR3 RAMs. Something like this

https://www.mindfactory.de/shopping_...7656c86d8a4b0d

But OTOH this means €200 expense just for quite old and intermediate solution until Zen APU Has Ryzen...

And with his AM1 being so cute, I think I'll wait for a bit longer. ANd use that time to do a few things, amongst others, figure out how to roll my own Coreboot for AM1 and tweak it with extra bells and whistles. And for AM4/Zen for docs to appear...