It’s that time of the year again folks, AMD is releasing another top end graphics card that is in seriously short supply and we at eTeknix won’t be getting hold of one, at least not from AMD.
We have previously posted articles that shone a bad light on AMD, this was primarily revolving around the performance figures of the R9 Fury X graphics card. This was down to AMD figures being extremely positive, while leaked benchmarks were painting a different picture. We posted what we saw, but kept an open mind ready for our sample to make the final decision, as we would and often do with many products. In fact, you can read our reviews of the new AMD R9 Fury X, R9 Fury X Crossfire and R9 Fury here. We loved the cards, the architecture, and the new HBM which has so much potential, showing very little memory impact at 4K compared to traditional GDDR5.
The official word from AMD is that the Fiji and HBM are in short supply and every effort is being taken to land the product in the hands of the people who want it, i.e. the consumers. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all well and good, cards need to get to consumers. However, media samples are an important factor for consumers too. Most consumers looking to spend £500+ on an extremely niche graphics card will look for reviews first, find out how it compares and without a good range of reviews from multiple sites, it’s hard for a lot of consumers and our readers to build their trust in a product; it’s not like you can take one for a test drive as you would a car.
We are doing everything in our power to source a sample, but sadly we are extremely unlikely to have an article up for launch, as most tech review sites at this time. However, we’ll update you as soon as the Nano lands in our office ready for an independent review.
Other sites more known than eTeknix also didn’t got a sample. PCPer and Guru3D did got one, so we can expect at least too reviews from known sites.
As for those who are about to pay $650 for a Nano, no one forbids them to wait one more month, so they can read more reviews of the card.
It is understandable that sites that are left out of this, wouldn’t like it, but I bet you don’t get every piece of hardware, in every category, from every manufacturer there is, the first day that hardware is available. It’s just something new in the graphics card category that it shouldn’t have happened, but to be honest, the tech press is usually very harsh on AMD. So AMD reacts, not in the best way, but at least reacts. In the past you(general, not a comment about eTeknix) could write whatever you like to bash AMD and be also absolutely confident that this will have no impact with your relations with them. It seems that this changed.