Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Redshift Status Update, RX 480 Issues, and more

With the summer months slowly winding to a close, folks here who are somewhat attentive might notice something: Redshift still isn't a completed project. Come September, Redshift would now have been under construction for over a year. Sad, right? Well, I have some explanations for it that are rather frustrating.


RX 480 Supply

The AMD Radon RX 480 has been one of the most successful GPU launches that AMD has ever had, with small issues aside. The demand for this card has been intense, especially with a lot of the "HD" card owners picking this card as their next upgrade. You also have to factor in crypto-currency mining, which has taken a particular liking to the RX 480 as well.

In Redshift's case, the demand hasn't been much of an issue because I wasn't going to get the reference design anyways, but rather I've been waiting patiently for MSI to put out their own custom version of the RX 480, the MSI RX 480 Twin Frozr. According to the reviews that I'm seeing, this card should be coming out in a week or so, so I really hope that I can manage to snag the card before that too sells out.

G.Skill KM 780 MX

As mentioned in a previous post, I did plan to do an overview of this keyboard. However, the pictures that I've taken of the keyboard when I unboxed it didn't come out so well, so I'm planning a new shoot of the product when I take the final build photos of Redshift to put here on the site. All of this being said, I can still say this: the keyboard is great! I've been using it for the past few weeks, and I'm very proud of it. Some folks, particularly on Reddit, seem to dislike this keyboard heavily in favor of the Corsair K70, but I differ in opinion.

Everything else aside, I hope to have Redshift finished as soon as possible. It's been down to the final part for months now, but as some already know I decided to delay and get the newer RX 480 since my original purchase was going to be right up to the new GPU launch anyways, but waiting for custom RX 480s has definitely taken longer than I would have liked.

Meanwhile, I've been working on other things that involved Redshift, like rolling back to Windows 7, which I might explain later at some point.