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R9 M295X Life Span

MrNomNoms

MrNomNoms

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 25, 2011
1,159
296
Wellington, New Zealand
Well, it has been around a year since the iMac 5K with the M295X was made available and I'm wondering whether there have been any reports of the GPU suffering from a premature death. I ask this in the light of past AMD/Radeon GPU failures (the 6000 series being the most recent) and I'm worried about purchasing a iMac 5K with a X395M but I don't want to do so if there has been a rise in failure rates.
 
I've been plugged in pretty well and have heard nothing of these recent gpus failing. I mean hey there can be a failure in ANY piece of tech, of the millions sold there's going to be a few dozen with problems, that's reality. But these seem to be reliable. Applecare is 179 bucks for three years so that's a no brainer to get. ;)
 
iemcj said:
I've been plugged in pretty well and have heard nothing of these recent gpus failing. I mean hey there can be a failure in ANY piece of tech, of the millions sold there's going to be a few dozen with problems, that's reality. But these seem to be reliable. Applecare is 179 bucks for three years so that's a no brainer to get. ;)
Click to expand...

I'll be grabbing AppleCare after I purchase my iMac mainly because I don't have all the cash upfront. When it comes to hardware failure I'm more referring to endemic failure that is widespread due to a manufacturing/design fault akin to the nVidia fiasco a few years ago but all the information I've seen so far is that things are going well - the MacBook Pro's with the AMD GPU's are performing great without any rise in failure rates.
 
I suspect you would have really heard about it if even 1 member here had had a failure of the iMac GPU ... :eek:

I am unaware of any actual failures being reported.
 
hfg said:
I suspect you would have really heard about it if even 1 member here had had a failure of the iMac GPU ... :eek:

I am unaware of any actual failures being reported.
Click to expand...

All good, I've taken the dive and bought the following:

• 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz
• 16GB 1867MHz DDR3 SDRAM - two 8GB
• 512GB Flash Storage
• AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB video memory
• Wired Apple Mouse
• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (International English) and User’s Guide (English)
• Accessory Kit

Scheduled to arrive 30 November but knowing my luck, it'll probably arriving on Friday.
 
just 1 year? i didnt known
i was thought we are talking about that the 295x is heating very often and i think in this regard will have problems after 3-4 years
 
Serban said:
we need to wait for another 2-3 years to see the long life of M295X
Click to expand...

I guess it comes down to how hard one pushes the GPU but for someone like me I've never pushed any of my computers to the absolute edge so knowing my luck I'll probably end up dying before the computer.
 
MrNomNoms said:
Well, it has been around a year since the iMac 5K with the M295X was made available and I'm wondering whether there have been any reports of the GPU suffering from a premature death. I ask this in the light of past AMD/Radeon GPU failures (the 6000 series being the most recent) and I'm worried about purchasing a iMac 5K with a X395M but I don't want to do so if there has been a rise in failure rates.
Click to expand...
The 28nm GCN GPUs, launched in early 2012, are very mature now. There have been very few reports regarding failures and the reputation has been fairly good.
 
desmond2046 said:
The 28nm GCN GPUs, launched in early 2012, are very mature now. There have been very few reports regarding failures and the reputation has been fairly good.
Click to expand...

All good - all bought and I'm excited about it being delivered this Monday - I was going to hold off till next year but I thought I might as well splash out as an early Christmas present.
 
Throwing a Radeon radiator into a Mac after the 2011 fiasco was always going to be a bad idea. Their failure rate is much too high and they run far too hot. Plus the graphics performance of the dGPU in the 15" Retinas is less than that of the 750Ms anyway - what a joke.

It's probably because AMD offered Timmy boy a $0.02 saving compared to the NVIDIAs - too good to pass up.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Throwing a Radeon radiator into a Mac after the 2011 fiasco was always going to be a bad idea. Their failure rate is much too high and they run far too hot. Plus the graphics performance of the dGPU in the 15" Retinas is less than that of the 750Ms anyway - what a joke.

It's probably because AMD offered Timmy boy a $0.02 saving compared to the NVIDIAs - too good to pass up.
Click to expand...

At average 5 million Macs per quarter this may add up to at least $100,000 in savings. I know this may not sound pretty much but, also the $0.02 savings you are claiming may not be accurate at all. Always remember a saying that says "Never leave a penny on the table".

http://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-mac-computers-since-first-quarter-2006/
 
h9826790 said:
A repair guy reported that he already fixed >50 burned M295x.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...and-performance.1815601/page-40#post-22032365
Click to expand...

I always got the feeling that the M295X was going to be like what happened with the Intel HD 3000 and the first generation of Retina MacBook Pro's where there was just enough grunt to drive the screen but with little in the way of wriggle room left over for anything more. In the case of the M395X it feels a whole lot smoother than when I tried the iMac 5K with the M295X and it pretty cool running as well - just surfing the net, updating my blog via MarsEdit, listening to music and it pretty much flat lined at 40°C and when running Simcity 4 and Civilisation V at half the native resolution (full screen) the temperature hardly budged and inch so things are going well.

keysofanxiety said:
Throwing a Radeon radiator into a Mac after the 2011 fiasco was always going to be a bad idea. Their failure rate is much too high and they run far too hot. Plus the graphics performance of the dGPU in the 15" Retinas is less than that of the 750Ms anyway - what a joke.

It's probably because AMD offered Timmy boy a $0.02 saving compared to the NVIDIAs - too good to pass up.
Click to expand...

It isn't always price, it also comes down to how flexible the supplier is when it comes to giving Apple more control over the drivers and developing them not to mention whether they can supply in volume what Apple requires and when they require it. That being said, there weren't wide spread problems relating to the GPU outside of Apple which tells me that it is an Apple design fault of sacrificing heat in favour of quietness. That being said, I tend to use my notebook for portable stuff and my iMac for any heavy lifting like music and video encoding/capture etc.

There is also the other problem; Intel and AMD are more open to giving Apple access to hardware specifications and driver source code where as nVidia demands that they keep everything close to their chest which is one of the reasons why nVidia didn't win the contract to provide for the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Then add to that the move to their new RISC based GCN architecture and it appears that although nVidia might boast the benchmarking crowd the AMD side have a lot of strengths going for it that developers and OEM's like.
 
I'm enjoying my m295x more than ever! (also a bit ironic that I also have the rMBP 650m and owned an AMD fat iMac that's still kicking). Since the latest driver it seems the fans are much much more quieter than before (unscientific 50% reduction at least) and the performance is very nice. It never heats up in OSX, but again I only taxing thing I do there is photographic work.
 
UniDoubleU said:
I'm enjoying my m295x more than ever! (also a bit ironic that I also have the rMBP 650m and owned an AMD fat iMac that's still kicking). Since the latest driver it seems the fans are much much more quieter than before (unscientific 50% reduction at least) and the performance is very nice. It never heats up in OSX, but again I only taxing thing I do there is photographic work.
Click to expand...

I'd probably say that the drivers are getting better optimised for the GPU given that the GCN series is an entirely new architecture which is based around a RISC design philosophy where as the previous generations were VLIW based. It'll be interesting to see how Metal developers given that it is very much designed in a way that the AMD and Intel architectures benefit from and things will start to get interesting as more of the system UI is moved from OpenGL to Metal which should mean cooler running and better performance.
 
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