We might have heard about AMD’s new Navi GPUs at Computex 2019, but we didn’t get to see them or even get the full lowdown – for that we’ll have to wait for E3 2019.
In the meantime, ASRock’s mocked up Phantom and Taichi GPU cases may have to tide us over. Three concept GPU cases – two Phantoms and one Taichi – were hung conspicuously from the walls of ASRock’s stand.
Trusted Reviews spoke with ASRock personnel at the stand, none of whom would go on the record, when asked what ASRock’s designers had in mind when dreaming up these GPU cases.
Related: AMD Navi
Style-wise, the concepts are in keeping with similarly named GPUs and motherboards.
The Phantom concepts both feature a silver and black design and relatively subtle illuminations, while the Taichi concept’s central fan is entirely lit up. All of these GPU cases would work with ASRock’s Polychrome SYNC software.
Perhaps tellingly, all feature three fans instead of the two seen on the RX500 series cases, and while officially no-one knows how much heat will need to be diverted from a Navi RX5000 GPU in order to maintain performance, we can assume that the next generation of AMD graphics cards would run fairly hot underneath an older twin fan set-up – AMD’s Phantom Gaming X Radeon VII 16G, for example, has three fans.
Related: Best AMD motherboards
At the same time, they could also not. AMD chief executive Dr. Lisa Su admitted that the company was not done with GCN architecture – which the Radeon VII uses – during the Computex keynote, so these cases could be used for some future non-Navi GPUs.
AMD’s forthcoming Navi graphics cards feature new architecture – RDNA, short for Radeon DNA – and promise a number of improvements, including a 1.5x boost in performance per Watt and 1.25x performance per clock compared to first generation RX Vega cards, a new cache design, reduced latency, and support for PCIe gen 4.0, which means that load times for game data should be lightning fast.
Navi GPUs may support real-time ray tracing as well, and the custom AMD GPU sitting in the PS5 is also said to be capable of such a feat. Either way, we’ll have a better grasp of what both Navi and Sony’s new console can do when E3 rolls around.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.