Posted on Thursday, May 03 2012 @ 16:03 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
TechPowerUp
reports Tom's Hardware Germany discovered that an AFOX-branded Radeon HD 7850 packs just 768 shaders, 25 percent lower than the usual count of 1024. It's unclear what's going on here, but a source at AFOX claims AMD has been shipping these 768 stream processor chips to some OEMs since March.
Upon looking at its stream processor count in GPU-Z, it was amazed to notice a value of 768, 25% lower than HD 7850 normal count of 1024. Attempts to replace its BIOS did not change the stream processor count, leading them to believe the stream processors were physically disabled. AMD was of little help, and they were redirected to talk to AFOX, which told them that since March, AMD has been shipping Pitcairn chips with 768 stream processor configuration to some OEMs. This is a retail-channel graphics card Tom's Hardware has in its labs. So either it's a case of bad QA, or AMD could have intended for Pitcairn chips with 768 stream processors for a newer SKU. HD 7830?
