In our previous articles featuring some of the ASUS Extreme series graphics cards we covered how allowing custom implementations of the Evergreen GPUs has rekindled some of the fire of AMD’s latest graphics card line-ups. Essentially, every AMD partner is able to throw their own customization in the mix, some of it is higher quality parts, some of it is cosmetics, some of it is redesigning the circuit board layout in order to add tweaks and some of it is omission of unnecessary ports to cut production cost and/or reduce electromagnetic interference. By the end of the day all of these customizations serve two purposes, that is, on the one side are performance gains that underscore the leading role of AMD graphics solutions, on the other side is the fact that deviations from the reference design will drop, almost by definition, the liability with respect to performance and reliability in the partner’s lap. The consumer wins, AMD wins, the partner wins, it is pretty much as easy as that. On the downside – for the competition – is the fact that every comparison now becomes a moving target.

PER ASPERA AT ASTRA or "to the stars through difficulties". The stars seem to be the motto embraced by AMD as of lately, we have Deneb, Propus, Heka and a few others and finally we have Thuban. And for the second part, there is no doubt either that AMD had difficulties enough in the recent past. Thuban is Arabic for Dragon which, given the role of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Investment Co. in GlobalFoundries, a.k.a. AMD’s fab spin-off is a nice homage to the Middle East investor group that came forward at an extremely critical time. Thuban is also a star, of course, but we already knew that. In fact, Thuban‘s Bayer designation is alpha draconis, or in plain English, the lead star in the Draco (Dragon) constellation, which closes the loop to the Thuban name, moreover, in ancient times it was used as the north pole star.