The source link in the article goes to a video that explains like 90% of the questions being asked here. The tape is to cover the connectors presumably because the power delivery is not final (this is linus's explanation as well). Most likely because it has more than 1-8pin for testing (you'd probably want the ability to add additional power on an engineering sample) and when angry anti-amd people see 2, 8pins they'd lose their minds. Either way reddit PSU specialists figured out that it only has 1, 8 pin plugged in so it's using <=225w while running the Doom demo. The extra board with the USB-3 connector is for AMD engineers to monitor the board. Raja seems excited about it - said all the engineering samples being used internally by AMD have little extra board. They can pull monitoring data directly from the GPU with zero overhead. The motherboard is bare because it's a Ryzen sample engineering board - No, according to Raja the clockspeeds aren't finalized and most of the estimates put the final product at 3-4 months away. I think in one of the videos from CES Raja says they got the first sample back 2-3 weeks before the New Horizon demo.

Thanks for the info! There are some clocks that are finalized for Vega, though. Unless it's not a 4096 shader part (which is very unlikely), Vega has to be able to hit 1525MHz to get to 12.5Tflop for the enterprise parts. One part of me says that usually enterprise parts have lower clocks, but it's an open field at this point. Still I would guess that if the configuration is indeed that, 1.5GHz for Vega seems to be an absolute minimum.

Linus's video also showed that Doom was running all Ultra settings, no Nightmare ones. Anyone got some 4k numbers for latest version of Doom with Ultra settings using GTX1080?

It doesn't matter. That system was there so that people in Dell, HP and all the rest of the HPC crowd could see that AMD had indeed high performance silicone almost ready and that they weren't bullsh*ting them during the presentation. Whatever performance it got is so ballparky that doesn't really matter. For all we know it might be faster than the Titan X, or it could get a last minute errata and end up slower than the 1080. We have to wait for some actual samples with actual drivers and not a debug ES made to show that they actually have something. Although, compared to Polaris, they have shown more of Vega, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see it earlier than we did with the RX 480, maybe around April-May.

I really hope it will be on part with performance of 1080, and then most importantly cheaper then it. Hopefully that will result in Nvidia finally doing something about those prices.

I´m going to be disappointed if the new cards from AMD aren´t significantly faster than the current 1080... After all, Nvidia still has the 1080TI to counter the new Vega cards.

thx for the info - looking foward to a new cpu since newer games need a lot more than 4 threads

Looks like Vega 10 only works with Doom 2016 😀 Must be cheap 😛

Damm that would be cool if they released the pcb in its final form with the usb attatchment on it! Looks hella cool in my opinion.

reminds me of car models at there last stage development and test drive..front and rear are covered so we don't know how the final product gonna look like 🤓 i just hope AMD is going to deliver something really special with VEGA

It doesn't matter. That system was there so that people in Dell, HP and all the rest of the HPC crowd could see that AMD had indeed high performance silicone almost ready and that they weren't bullsh*ting them during the presentation. Whatever performance it got is so ballparky that doesn't really matter. For all we know it might be faster than the Titan X, or it could get a last minute errata and end up slower than the 1080. We have to wait for some actual samples with actual drivers and not a debug ES made to show that they actually have something. Although, compared to Polaris, they have shown more of Vega, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see it earlier than we did with the RX 480, maybe around April-May.

I think it does matter, especially for people who've decided to wait. There is this one video I found; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13V8lYS--Pg Bare in-mind, he's using the same PC to record the video as well.

I´m going to be disappointed if the new cards from AMD aren´t significantly faster than the current 1080... After all, Nvidia still has the 1080TI to counter the new Vega cards.

The max performance we get from NVIDIA until Volta is the Titan XP. The Ti will be lower than that. The Titan XP is the performance benchmark.

I think it does matter, especially for people who've decided to wait. There is this one video I found; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13V8lYS--Pg Bare in-mind, he's using the same PC to record the video as well.

Only it doesn't really. As I said before, even properly scaling Polaris CFX is as fast as a 1080. Even if Vega had zero improvements over Polaris and was a "dumb" duplicate running with double shaders/rops/hbm2 at 1.5GHz, it would destroy the 1080. On top of that we have what looks to be the biggest GCN revision to date. All logic dictates that the card will be close to the Titan XP initially. People need to stop squeezing that demo. It was literally running on debug boards so that financial people and the press could see that AMD has actual silicone. Saying that we can judge performance from that is ridiculous.

Young GPUs without burqa are haram

Get a life!

Lol...

come on you know that they want you to see it in its upmost finest light....it cant be that good at this point. you know how amd is. if it could destroy a top competitors card they would have shown it in another green game that thier cards have issues with. nv would have like it will matter anyways I know I know just saying