AMD Radeon RX 500 Series 'Polaris' GPUs Recycled Into Keychains
Where did I leave my keys?
A Chinese computer shop, discovered by @Olrak29 apparently had plenty of malfunctioning Polaris based AMD Radeon RX 500-series graphics cards in its possession and decided to make keychains from them. The keychains — which retail for ~$5 — look a little too large for a pocket, but they will hang hang great in your office or from your gaming rig. If used as a keychain, their size is almost a guarantee that your keys will not get lost.
It is hard to tell how these keychains are made. It certainly looks like they are cut out from a graphics card, then processed to remove metallic parts, painted, and marked with the AMD Radeon RX 500 Series logotype. Yet, it is entirely possible that the GPU and memory are removed from a broken graphics card, then glued to a PCB that already carries the Radeon RX 500 Series ornament.
Launched in Q2 2016, AMD's Polaris microarchitecture represents the 4th iteration of the company's GCN architecture introduced in late 2011. Polaris GPUs were never meant to be AMD's offerings that would compete against Nvidia's top-of-the-range gaming solutions (e.g., the GeForce GTX 1080 or GTX 1080 Ti), but were aimed at high-volume mass market.
With MSRPs ranging from $109 to $239 per graphics card, these GPUs were instrumental to increase AMD's discrete desktop GPU sales from 8.88 million units in 2015 to 13.49 million units in 2016 and 15.89 million units in 2015, according to data from Jon Peddie Research. Hence, while they hardly were the best graphics boards of their time, they were certainly among the best graphics cards at their price points.
By now, AMD's Polaris GPUs and Radeon RX 400 and RX 500-series graphics cards are morally outdated and are good enough for office PCs in the best case scenario. Meanwhile, they are plenty of malfunction graphics cards made in 2016 – 2017. That said, we are not surprised to see that some of those GPUs and boards are turned into keychains.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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Eximo I have an old Athlon in a block of resin as a keychain, but that was just the bare die turned into a keychain sized object. What possessed them to leave the whole substrate and a board with memory chips.Reply -
bit_user AMD's Polaris GPUs and Radeon RX 400 and RX 500-series graphics cards are morally outdated
LOL, good one!
: D -
bit_user
IMO, this would be nicer if they had either encased it in resin, or at least snapped a plastic case around it. Besides just keeping it nice, you don't really want sharp edges on your keychain that could snag on stuff.Eximo said:I have an old Athlon in a block of resin as a keychain, but that was just the bare die turned into a keychain sized object. What possessed them to leave the whole substrate and a board with memory chips. -
Friesiansam
What have morals got to do with it?Admin said:By now, AMD's Polaris GPUs and Radeon RX 400 and RX 500-series graphics cards are morally outdated -
Makaveli lol you mean the rx580 I sold during the mining boom for $500 CAD I could have turned into a keychain... damn I missed out :)Reply -
Eximo jaydenmiller1 said:doesn't Intel Arc lose a bunch of performance without resizable bar which my CPU doesn't support? Also, would it work to use a 6-pin to 8-pin adapter for those cards since they draw less than the 150W total for the PCIe slot + 6-pin?
Arc does lose performance without resizable bar, but it depends a lot on the title and API. But it runs fine for the most part with any DX12, and the new DXVK based driver does a pretty good job converting everything to Vulkan for better performance with older titles. I had mine plugged into a 4th gen system for the last year or so. Admittedly I didn't play a whole lot of games with that system. I did put together an i3-12100 though, that can be done for under $250.
Dual Six-pin to 8-pin is okay. I wouldn't want to run a straight 6-pin to 8-pin adapter. If I knew the wire gauge was more substantial maybe. -
dalauder I was pretty happy with my RX 480, but then I saw an RTX 2080 Ti on sale for $247 and had to replace it. Personally, they're not that outdated. If you play on 1080p, they can still play anything except the newest and most demanding games on medium.Reply -
domih I guess it depends on usage.Reply
I'm running a Sapphire NITRO+ RX 590 8G on my TR2950X home workstation.
~$ sudo lspci -s 42:00.0
42:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Ellesmere (rev e1)
I feel fine :-)
I don't play games. I'm not into graphics. My main activity is development, DBs, VMs, networking and cryptography (not crypto-mining!)
For this kind of usage, with a 4K monitor downsized to 2560x1440 (for my eyes...), as long as the card is <= ~$400 and as long as it's a Radeon (Linux user here), I'm OK. -
bit_user
You'd do fine with a RX 550, even.domih said:I don't play games. I'm not into graphics. My main activity is development, DBs, VMs, networking and cryptography (not crypto-mining!)
For this kind of usage, with a 4K monitor downsized to 2560x1440 (for my eyes...), as long as the card is <= ~$400 and as long as it's a Radeon (Linux user here), I'm OK.
These days, RX 6400 would be the one to get... though the lack of AV1 acceleration could be a little annoying. And then there's the fact that it has only 2 display outputs. -
bit_user
I took it as just a reflection of the level of disdain some people seem to exhibit towards older GPUs. I'm not sure if it was said in jest, but that's how I read it.Friesiansam said:What have morals got to do with it?