Quote:MSI and ASUS have been sending us review samples for their graphics cards with higher clock speeds out of the box, than what consumers get out of the box. The cards TechPowerUp has been receiving run at a higher software-defined clock speed profile than what consumers get out of the box. Consumers have access to the higher clock speed profile, too, but only if they install a custom app by the companies, and enable that profile. This, we feel, is not 100% representative of retail cards, and is questionable tactics by the two companies. This BIOS tweaking could also open the door to more elaborate changes like a quieter fan profile or different power management.

MSI's factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X graphics card comes with three software-defined clock-speed profiles, beginning with the "Gaming Mode," which is what the card runs at, out of the box, the faster "OC mode," and the slower "Silent mode," which runs the card at reference clock speeds. To select between the modes, you're expected to install the MSI Gaming software from the driver DVD, and use that software to apply clock speeds of your desired mode. Turns out, that while the retail cards (the cards you find in the stores) run in "Gaming mode" out of the box, the review samples MSI has been sending out, run at "OC mode" out of the box. If the OC mode is how the card is intended to be used, then why make OC mode the default for reviewers only, and not your own customers?

(06-17-2016, 12:12 AM)SteelCrysis Wrote: But they weren't noting it to the reviewers. TPU looked back and found that MSI had been doing this for a long time prior.

Quote:The folks at TechPowerUp published an exposé of sorts this morning with the provocative headline "MSI and Asus send VGA Review Samples with Higher Clocks than Retail Cards." I nearly spit out my figurative coffee when I saw that lead-in. If that story was true, it would be quite the scoop. As with so much in life, it turns out that the situation on the ground isn't quite so simple.

TechPowerUp's actual beef with Asus and MSI isn't that the companies shipped it GTX 1080s with higher clocks that one could get with a retail card, as that fiery headline might lead one to believe. Instead, what's going on is that these board partners are shipping the site cards with an aggressive clock profile enabled by default: the so-called "OC Mode" you'll see advertised on many spec sheets these days. Retail GTX 1080s are shipping with a milder "Gaming Mode" or similar profile that feature slightly lower clocks than the peak "OC Mode" numbers in marketing materials would suggest.

The somewhat shady part of this story is that MSI and Asus alike appear to be pre-tweaking their cards by way of a custom BIOS, according to Hardware.fr. (Gigabyte appears to be playing by the rules and shipping reviewers unsullied hardware.) The Hardware.fr folks note that these custom firmwares don't always behave as expected, either. For example, switching to the milder "Gaming Mode" in software might not actually cause a card with this "review BIOS" to switch off its highest clock profile. TPU has a point in that manipulating the parameters of a graphics card this way raises questions about the trustworthiness of other settings, like fan speeds, that could also be changed to meaningfully affect the outcome of a review.

We can examine the real-life impact of this review-unit muddling with a quick look at some spec sheets. The Strix GTX 1080's default "Gaming Mode" offers clocks of 1759MHz base and 1898MHz boost speeds, for example, while turning on "OC Mode" pushes those clocks to 1784MHz base and 1936MHz boost speeds. MSI's GeForce GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G offers 1683MHz base and 1822MHz boost speeds in its "Gaming Mode." Switch to "OC Mode," and those numbers rise to 1708MHz base and 1847MHz boost. To be clear, the clock delta between modes on both cards is less than 2%, so goosing cards into these modes by default shouldn't have a huge effect on performance, but it could let one card or another win by a nose in a tight race.

Ultimately, I don't see this sort of move as consumer-unfriendly, necessarily. Anybody capable of downloading and installing software can easily get the utility required to enable "OC Mode" from MSI or Asus, and the potential performance impact of a few MHz just doesn't seem that great. Folks overclocking their GeForce GTX 1080s can probably extract far more meaningful amounts of extra performance through manual tweaking. Still, reviewers have a right to demand hardware that's identical to the stuff consumers will be getting, and we'll be pressing Asus and MSI to furnish us with firmware or cards that match what retail buyers should expect on store shelves from here on out.

Quote:Asus responded to PC Perspective’s inquiry on this issue by noting that reviewers and buyers alike can adjust GPU clock speeds via its GPU Tweak II utility, and that “The press samples for the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080 OC and ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 OC cards are set to “OC Mode” by default. To save media time and effort, OC mode is enabled by default as we are well aware our graphics cards will be reviewed primarily on maximum performance.”

The truth is, vendors have been pulling tricks like this for well over a decade. In the old days, they’d overclock CPU buses slightly, pushing a 133MHz base clock up to 136MHz. On a 2.13GHz CPU with a 16x base clock, that’s enough for a roughly 2% clock speed increase. Other scenarios have been more egregious — we’ve seen motherboards that would automatically enable optimized CPU overclocking settings when XMP memory profiles were enabled. In this particular case, that meant all CPU cores were set to run at the maximum Turbo frequency normally reserved for a single-threaded scenario. Optimizations like this can impact measured performance by significant amounts, much more than the 2% we mentioned earlier.

Asus claims that these changes are made to “help” reviewers, but that’s a secondary reason at best. Yes, we evaluate cards based on maximum performance, including overclocking performance — but what this is really about is securing top placement on a comparison graph between multiple vendors.

Consider, after all, the plight of companies like Asus, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte, EVGA, and the other various GPU or motherboard vendors. They know that pricing is at least as important as brand when it comes to convincing users to buy a GPU. The problem is, many buyers do buy on price. The only way to justify asking an extra $10 to $20 is to offer something the other guy doesn’t have. Cooling, overclockability, and quiet operation are all ways to influence customer decisions, but those features only work if they can establish meaningful differences. Overclocking always varies by card and a GPU family may not be particularly loud or hot by default.

A card that turns in consistently higher performance is a card that’ll tend to either be at the top of the stack or will be highlighted in a different color. It’ll be the component that catches the eye, one way or the other.

There is a scintilla of truth to Asus’ statement. Because reviewers often review many cards at once, making certain that you’ve configured every piece of OEM software required to enable a given feature can be confusing. Since a review is a presentation of a product under objective testing conditions, Asus can make the argument that they want to make certain the product is tested in the right conditions. It’s not completely wrong. The problem is, those “right conditions” may be just as applicable to the end-user, who may not bother installing or configuring OEM software, either — particularly if they have the long-standing opinion that OEM software is more or less garbage.

Is a 1.5% overclock a fundamental betrayal of customers? No. We routinely accept much larger variations in products we buy. But the problem with pushing the envelope like this, beyond the fact that it looks pretty bad, is that it can lead to instability or other problems. In the motherboard case we mentioned above, the system would crash at full CPU load because the CPU we were using wasn’t a particularly good overclocker and couldn’t run all four cores at the single-thread Turbo Mode clock without a voltage nudge. Said nudge wasn’t programmed into the UEFI, which meant the chip seemed unstable until we hunted down the actual cause of the problem.

In some cases, even tiny increases cause issues. While our Fury X GPU runs rock-solid at stock speed, nudging it upwards even by 3% caused instability last year. The bottom line is that manufacturers should keep stock speeds stock and offer overclocking modes through clearly communicated alternate settings — not preloaded BIOSes pulled for reviewers.

(06-18-2016, 08:47 AM)SickBeast Wrote: While this isn't a terribly big deal, it is dishonest on behalf of the OEMs.  Good on TPU for uncovering this.  They have always been one of my favorite websites.

(06-18-2016, 08:49 AM)SteelCrysis Wrote:

(06-18-2016, 08:47 AM)SickBeast Wrote: While this isn't a terribly big deal, it is dishonest on behalf of the OEMs.  Good on TPU for uncovering this.  They have always been one of my favorite websites.

Fully agreed. TPU is one of my daily reads.

(06-21-2016, 06:52 PM)SteelCrysis Wrote: EVGA has taken advantage of the controversy: http://www.techpowerup.com/223552/evga-cashes-in-on-tweaked-review-sample-anger

(06-22-2016, 04:37 AM)RolloTheGreat Wrote:

(06-21-2016, 06:52 PM)SteelCrysis Wrote: EVGA has taken advantage of the controversy: http://www.techpowerup.com/223552/evga-cashes-in-on-tweaked-review-sample-anger

Gosh, in the comments some guys are taking the opportunity to wage war on the GTX970 3.5GB situation, wonder who those guys are????

Like I said, what Asus and MSI did, I could give a rats ass. For one thing the running slightly OCd adds to the heat and noise, so it's not just to their benefit. For another, it's still a warranted factory setting available to all buyers.

What AMD does all day every day is an affront to the tech forums and valid information on an epic scale.

(06-23-2016, 06:18 PM)BoFox Wrote:

(06-22-2016, 04:37 AM)RolloTheGreat Wrote:

(06-21-2016, 06:52 PM)SteelCrysis Wrote: EVGA has taken advantage of the controversy: http://www.techpowerup.com/223552/evga-cashes-in-on-tweaked-review-sample-anger

Gosh, in the comments some guys are taking the opportunity to wage war on the GTX970 3.5GB situation, wonder who those guys are????

Like I said, what Asus and MSI did, I could give a rats ass. For one thing the running slightly OCd adds to the heat and noise, so it's not just to their benefit. For another, it's still a warranted factory setting available to all buyers.

What AMD does all day every day is an affront to the tech forums and valid information on an epic scale.

Even if it's a 1% difference, lying to us (or the reviewers) is still outright, blatant lying.  It's like 1% tax evasion - you'd still go to prison for it, if you don't pay the remaining 1% of the taxes.
 

Quote: The MSI Gaming App allows you to apply one of three performance profiles with a single click, instantly giving you the desired performance.

(06-24-2016, 08:55 AM)ocre Wrote: The irony is that no one would have ever made a stink if the modes where selected by dual bios toggle switches.  When this much more accessible and superior solution which many more people could use had been turned around on them.  It's ironic

(06-25-2016, 08:10 AM)BoFox Wrote: Ocre, but the reviewers didn't know until now that their cards were running faster out of the box than the retail cards OUT-OF-THE-BOX.  If MSI shipped review samples with special software/BIOS setting to make these cards run at higher-than-stock speed, without acknowledging the reviewer, then that is sneaky.  The fact that none of us knew about it until TPU finally realized this has been happening since GTX 780 Ti (2 years ago) with MSI, and more recently with Asus makes it worthy of attention now, so that companies may not continue this without our awareness.  

Am I wrong here or not?  If I am wrong, then I'd appreciate a heads-up.

Quote:As standard and out of the box, the Gaming X runs at 1,683MHz and 1,823MHz for base and boost, respectively. This can be changed to 1,708/1,847MHz in OC mode along with a 108MHz bump to the 10,000MHz GDDR5X memory, while dropping it down to Silent ensures the card runs at 1,607/1,733MHz, or at reference speeds