Going with AMD Radeon

I recently discussed my frustration around Graphics cards and things got even more complicated for number of reasons over the last few months. Until today, I was in the market to get a new graphics card which not only can run multiple monitors but also can handle light gaming and video encoding for my YouTube channel.

First off, the prices of Nvidia graphics cards are skyrocketing and it's well above and beyond my expected range. My initial expectation of getting an Nvidia RTX A4000 SFF Ada Generation was over when I first saw it on a popular online marketplace. It's going over two grand on all the marketplaces and there are no sign of the price to go down anytime soon. In the mean time I was looking at Intel's Arc Pro A40 which aligns with my expected form factor and possibly price range. The specification of that card looks quite promising to me. However, we are yet to get that card available for retail market. I read somewhere that it may become available by the 3rd quarter of 2023. Well, we are already there and I am tired of waiting, so I simply gave up on that. Hopefully, in the future Intel.

Secondly, I am jumping in to iOS App development and actively looking for Mac computer alternatives. Turns out hacintosh builds are the only choice I have at this point and I have number of compatible Intel CPUs laying around which I thought could be useful. Intel's iGPUs are also well supported up until this point, so that's a plus but that won't simply cut it for me.

Once again, I just don't like Mac computers simply because you can't upgrade anything by yourself. You can configure it when you are buying it and that's about it. No future upgrade without buying a new one. That's some evil business practice right there. It's more like keeping someone hostage once they buy something from you. No matter how they or Apple fans wants to explain it to me, I heard that before and it won't work for me.

After lots of studying and experimenting, I decided to change my side and go ahead with the AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100 card which is an entry level professional card but it works on both the Mac OS and Windows. Just like my current Nvidia Quadro P620 card (specification), it also comes with four mini display port which is great. The only difference I see here is the size of memory. Radeon has 4GB memory while my P620 got 2GB only. I won't go on and on with the specs, you can check it out from here if you want. Apart form that not a whole lot is going on with the Radeon card but I am ok with that for the time being.

Update: After using the card, I came to realize that this card runs way hotter than my NVIDIA Quadro P620. So much so that it became a serious concern for me. At idle the temperature of this card would hover around 40 celsius or 104 degree fahrenheit. Simply watching online videos will push it towards 55 celsius or 131 degree fahrenheit. Worst part was while encoding my 4K game play videos it will reach to 80 celsius or 176 degree fahrenheit. That's definitely not normal for me while holding the fact that my NVIDIA quadro card doesn't reach 70 degree celsius, let alone 80 degree. This was a major issue for me. I reached out to the seller and shared some screenshot. We do suspect thermal issue, however I didn't bother opening up the card to void warranties.

I sent this card back on August 19th and currently back on the market again searching for a better GPU. Most probably I will wait until Intel Arc Pro A40 (specification) becomes available. I think it would be a great card for video encoding which is my ultimate priority at this point.