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- Today’s hosts: the full cast! James Schell (Aibohphobia), Jay Mattison (Tek Everything), John Morrison (confusis) and Joshua Ramirez (PlayfulPhoenix).
- 1:01: The winner of the very first SFF Build Challenge is… Joshua’s Hitachi “Deathstar” build! Well played, well played.
- 5:07: One of our longest podcasts yet, and almost all of it went into discussing the maelstrom of speculation, events, and developments surrounding NVIDIA’s hotly-anticipated release of the GTX 1070 and 1080, the first Pascal GPUs to arrive on the consumer market.
- Joshua wrote on the deluge of rumors and leaked info just before NVIDIA’s Pascal event.
- You can watch a recording of the event (with intermittent commentary you can ignore) on YouTube.
- Discussion of the aftermath has held steady on a thread on SFF Forum since the event, and as more information has become available.
- A lot of confusion surrounded the MSRP and the “Founders Edition” coolers; the short explanation: they’re reference cards that also happen to cost $100 more. No binning or other such silliness.
- Finally, Joshua spent some time in the forum exploring the known knowns and known unknowns of the performance of the GTX 1080, relative to Maxwell-era cards. He also did the math to demonstrate the generational perf-per-dollar improvement Pascal introduces, as well as the effective value (in perf-per-dollar terms) of Maxwell and Pascal cards today.
- 1:10:10: NVIDIA’s not the only graphics manufacturer making news! Although they don’t have an imminent product announcement (that we know of), AMD’s upcoming Polaris has many (us included) on edge.
- AMD lets loose on Twitter an upcoming Polaris event on 5/18. It’s only expected to explain the architecture in depth, however – no new parts quite yet.
- Rumors, as well as public comments from AMD, indicate that Polaris is likely to focus exclusively on the bottom half of the market, or “sub-1070” in NVIDIA terms.
- James, Jay and Joshua spend some time complaining about the current state of AMD’s lineup, and share fears of an uncontested high-end for the remainder of the year.
- We also speculate as to what Polaris and Vega might look like, and talk through a “dream team” list of cards that would win our hearts, if only we could have them now.
- 1:25:00: This episode’s Freaking Fully Favorite Forum Fread of the Fortnight (please clap): What did you do today? It’s an ongoing thread where community members can comment on… well, what they did today. For the episode, we focused on James’ trip to California, which included a visit to Riot Games, as well as a test drive of a certain electric vehicle…
With our first SFF Build Challenge victor selected, we are in need of a new build for the next episode of Low Volume! Navigate to the official suggestion thread to put forth your ideas, and vote for the best community-generated one – the winner will be used in only two weeks’ time.
