ASUS Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX 8GB review - Introduction

ASUS ROG Radeon RX Vega 64 STRIX Gaming(8GB)
All custom all the way

It's been a bit of an ill-received launch, the Radeon RX Vega series graphics cards that is. AIB cards apparently is what it is all about, better cooling / lower noise levels. Today is that day, ASUS is the first to send their Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 8GB in their STRIX Gaming flavor. The first finalized all custom Vega that finds its way towards our lab, we'll take you through the product its architecture and yes of course, performance numbers.

** September 25th 2017 - Please read ** 
A day after initial publication and sharing our results/review ASUS of this article asked us to take the review down. The story at the time was that they shipped the card to us with the wrong BIOS. We've been eagerly awaiting the new BIOS for two weeks now, but nothing is coming from ASUS. ASUS did present a specific driver on their website, we tried it yet it is based on the 17.7 driver series which (obviously) did not make an improvement either.

Ergo, we are re-publishing the results as-as. I do want make a side-note on temps and noise levels. After we disassembled the card for a photo-shoot, we reassembled it and obviously applied new thermal paste on the GPU. This shaved off 3 degrees 3 in heavy load conditions. That three degrees is significant as at that stage the card is more silent as well. That said, we are publishing the results as-is. When you purchase a product as your average end-user, you're not likely going to swap out TIM as it breaks warranty. But for those daring enough and interested in this card, it might be a nice tip. ASUS states that the STRIX has a more extensive power limiter and should be faster, however we state that the thermals are throttling the card down rendering the extra power limiter fairly inoperable. 

Should ASUS come up with a new BIOS (which we doubt) we'll update the test results.

A lot has been said and spoken regarding this graphics card series. Earlier this year you have seen AMD's Mi25 series release as well as the Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition. VEGA for consumers, or Radeon RX Vega 64, will offer you a comfortable 12.66 TFLOPs of single precision (fp32t) game performance. You guys have seen all the rumors, leaked benchmarks and FE edition results. Fact is that the product will battle the reference clocked GeForce GTX 1080, which is rated at 9 TFLOPs and the GeForce GTX Titan X (Pascal) at roughly 11 TFLOPS. This means that AMD can position itself at a comfortable position in the PC gaming domain. AMD released their Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 series graphics cards, the numbers in the suffixes are based on the actual shader clusters and thus you are looking at two air-cooled graphic cards initially being released, one with 3584 and one with 4096 shader processors. The reference standalone cards are priced at 399 and 499 USD for air-cooled versions respectively. We do expect the all custom AIB partner cards to have a bit of a price premium. As you know, there is also a reference liquid cooled edition at a price of 699 USD

So today you'll see our take on the Republic of Gamers RX Vega 64, the one with the GPU has 4096 stream processors - the custom cooled Vega holds a tri-fan cooler that tries to keep the card at lower temperatures whilst remaining at a fairly low and inaudible RPM. Obviously only that VEGA chip is the one thing original, as hey  the PCB was modified and customized to seat that RX Vega chip with its on-board 8GB of HBM2. The end result is a beefy looking 12inch sized card, but one that managed to impress. The card comes with FanConnect II meaning you get two four-pin headers at the far end of the PCB so you may attach case fans for air flow that is in line with the load of the GPU. The RX Vega 64 can clock to 1,546 MHz and boost to 1,630 MHz if there it doesn't run into too many limiters. ASUS has specced the card at 1298 for the base and 1590 MHz for the boost frequency on the STRIX. The HBM2 memory is ticking and tocking at the very same 945 MHz as well. Have a peek at the STRIX. 

Also, rest assured that this is a full review of what is to be the retail product. Not the non-finalized engineering sample / beta coverage you have been able to see like two weeks ago. 

ASUS ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX Gaming