AMD, the underdog of the CPU and GPU worlds, made itself known at CES, with a large booth, various displays, and some impressive demos – namely Doom at 4K! Our reporter Drew visited the displays and brought us back these pictures:
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The booth was spacious, with many displays and demos.
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First up, a new M-ATX AM4 from Gigabyte, the GA-A320M-HD2. This board fits the bill of a mid-range board, with a solid complement of rear I/O, two DDR4 RAM slots, but no VRM cooling.
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MSI’s B350M-Mortar appears to be a higher end M-ATX board, with 4 RAM slots, armoured PCIe x16 slot, M.2 slot and moderate board cooling.
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ASRock’s A320M-Pro4, we covered here.
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This board, from an unknown manufacturer, seems to fit in the lower end of the range, featuring a unique chipset location, as well as a ‘Battlemix’ branded heatsink.
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Demos!
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Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group. Drew shook his hand, and “felt that power flowing through him.” We think maybe Drew just has had a bit too much coffee to drink.
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This is the Lenovo wireless VR Rig, featuring a liquid cooled RX480, 1.5 hours of battery life (dual batteries) and can be used as a desktop, or a backpack rig for immersive VR gaming.
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The rig is very compact, we like!
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VR!
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More VR! The backpack rig really does help remove a major limitation of current gen VR – tripping over the cables.
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All those cables, never to be tripped over again!
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And now for the juicy tidbits;
- AMD would not disclose the Vega reference GPU length, but did say that they love SFF (hence the Nano and Fury cards), but it is up to board partners to build their own products
- The reference cards will be blower cooled, which is usually a helpful thing for SFF rigs!
- The Doom 4k demo played well, but the case was well sealed up for secrecy reasons
- The SoC design of Ryzen means that there are more PCIe lanes free than a comparable Intel platform, enabling more M.2 slots for example
- 30+ Ryzen boards will be available at launch
- 3 board partners (who requested not to be named) will be making Mini-ITX AM4 motherboards
- AMD is really excited about their SFF platforms (X300, B300 and A300)
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What do you think about AMD’s presence at CES? Let us know in the forum.
