I kind of thought you were kidding, because nobody on earth cares what color their workstation/datacenter graphics card is... but indeed they are using YInMn blue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMXS1A2uBeE And made a video about how cool they are for putting certain paint on a graphics card.
I will continue to be amused because people call Intel "team blue" and AMD "team red", but in this case AMD's product is blue.
>AMD announced in July 2016 that the pigment would be used on new Radeon Pro WX and Pro SSG professional GPUs for the energy efficiency that stems from its near-infrared reflecting property
> I kind of thought you were kidding, because nobody on earth cares what color their workstation/datacenter graphics card is...
I’m not sure if you’re joking here or something, but as it turns out, many people buy video cards to play video games, and many of them care about how their gaming device looks like. They install LEDs and stuff. It’s pretty cool.
True, but these are workstation cards, they're for GPGPU workloads or Rendering workstations for pro artist. You'd rarely if ever find them in a gaming PC (too expensive with no real benefit for gaming workloads).
There are other uses, too. AMD makes low profile (?) radeon pro cards like the WX2100 which are smaller and have lower power requirements than their consumer offerings.
I got a used one off eBay for my tower, mostly because I wanted something AMD for linux usage with as low heat emission as possible, but honestly I really like the look of that blue too :)
Even if I have a black boxy case with no fancy windows or anything else... Interesting to learn it's this neat pigment.
But straight up it would make no sense for a non professional workload. You could get a AMD 5500 XT 4GB GDDR6 (WX2100 is 2GB GDDR5) for a similar ball park in price with 5x the bandwidth and a lot more graphical horse power for a gaming workload. And if heat is the concern it would be trivial to underclock and undervolt to get it quite chilly.
You may have some special situation and have got a great deal but for the most part they should be of little interest to standard consumers.
Looking briefly at ebay, the 5500 XT goes for around 250-300 USD, while the WX2100 goes for around 50-70 USD.
And the 5500 XT has a TDP of 130 watts, vs 25 watts for the WX2100. The WX2100 is also smaller, and doesn't require additional power from the PSU, running entirely off the PCIe slot power.
Not that I'm saying it's great for gaming. But I'm running it on a IBM POWER processor which can't really play x86 games anyway, just open-source and java games (it can tank minecraft at 4k pretty nicely). It lacks an on-board accelerated GPU too, so going without isn't really an option.
I agree almost everyone should probably just get a better gaming card, but for the price this thing runs a 4k monitor great, has good video en/decoders, and a cool blue exterior ;)
Radeon Pro is the professional line, for workstation use cases (CAD, rendering, that sort of thing). They are not aimed at the consumer market, and AMD doesn't appear to paint their consumer cards blue.
> because nobody on earth cares what color their workstation/datacenter graphics card is
I think some HPC applications do actually have some aesthetics because the bean counters want to be able to look at their billion dollar datacenter and say "My datacenter is bigger/prettier than yours" rather than just having a black front panel.
