I'm pretty new to the building your own PC community and I'm not a fanboy in anyway.
I keep reading that the the 780 ti is an unlocked 780 and that it was the "card we were meant to see but Nvidia saw no need to release it". I don't get it, so all 780 owners have Ti's but they're not activated, or Nvidia had space for more GPU power but decided not to include it in the 780 hardware wise? i imagine 'unlocked' meaning you already had the power but it was dormant.
Regardless I think I came into the PC scene at an interesting time, seeing the R9 release and how it effected the market. For this reason I'm planning on building an AMD rig. I'm not a hardcore gamer and AMD can cover my needs. It's simply voting with my money to increase competition. I'm sure the CPU market is similair.
To any Nvidia fans isn't something like this encouraging to support the competition? If AMD was more powerful you could have theoretically gotten the Ti last year.
It wouldn't be unusual. AMD released the 6950 as a locked 6970. By flashing the card, you could get the performance of the 6970 with some of the early revisions of those cards.
It's all about making the consumer pay a given price for different levels of performance, and everyone does it. Many lines of GPU all use the same processing unit, but they are all "binned" differently. It is cheaper than giving each and every card a totally different GPU, which would require several different lines in the manufacturing process. By that I mean, the manufacturing process would be more inefficient and wasteful. Producing less economies of scale.
Yes, it does happen in the CPU market too.
Nothing wrong with going AMD. I think the increased competition has produced some incredible results.
It might be that simple. It took Nvidia a long time to get production of Titans up to snuff, let alone Titans with all compute units working. A higher failure rate (in manufacturing, not in end use) is one of the drawbacks of making a big GPU die, and the GK110 series (Titan, 780/ti) are on a pretty damn big die.
Only benefit of going nvidia/intel is the thermals and sound. AMD tends to have cards/cpus that sip more power and make more sound/heat for cheaper. (only reason why I am running an nvidia/intel rig, other than no itx/matx amd boards)