ASUS Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX 8GB review
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joshk
WTF ? "There is very little wrong with this GPU overall" LOL.
jortego128
Vega wouldn't be too bad if they can get the pricing right. Right now, price is still too high for what it brings. Rumor has it AMD is already losing ~$100 on every Vega GPU sold-- sounds unbelievable, but when you consider both the size of the chip and the HBM2 it uses, there could be some truth to it.
Vega + Freesync is its biggest advantage. Freesync monitors are quite a bit cheaper than G-Sync monitors overall. With a decent 1080p Freesync monitor, even a Vega 56 should almost never drop below buttery smooth.
Hughesy
The power consumption of these GPU's is hilarious, it's so bad that SLI 1080s only use slightly more. They came out swinging with CPU's, but I'm not sure what they were thinking with these.
Kaarme
They weren't thinking, they were dreaming. Nvidia was thinking and only used the troublesome HBM2 in the pro cards costing ten thousand dollars. Of course nothing gets done if nobody is doing it, so AMD's sacrifice is helping to drive forward the memory technology, but it's quite ironic the on the verge of a bankruptcy company needs to sacrifice itself while Nvidia is making so much money they don't even know what to do with all of it.
Silva
Not my money for sure 🙂
Ryu5uzaku
And they didn't have money to make Vega something more then tweaked Fiji kind of. HBM2 sure trouble in some forms. But I guess they wanted one size fits all solution in their current situation. Unlike Nvidia that actually has money to divide their designs for each segment. Going forward AMD might have cash to challenge Nvidia on the high end possibly since Vega while not the best is still selling decently. RX series in general sold pretty good and ofc Ryzen is selling really well.
Ryu5uzaku
That would be a suicide for AMD if they were losing money each Vega sold I kind of doubt that is happening HBM2 while expensive is not that expensive. Of course they are selling the same chips for way more money in other fields.
Silva
"HBM2 while expensive is not that expensive"
Get your facts right, HMB2 is like 4 times more expensive over DDR5.
Vega monolithic design plus HBM killed all appeal for the card. Only fans, miners and people looking for that productivity performance buy them.
Barry J
I was hoping the Vega with aftermarket coolers would be better
The Edge
This card doesn't seem to be better than the stock one. I mean okay a tiny bit better temps/noise/power but nothing really important and it sometimes even has less FPS.
nicugoalkeper
In compartion to Ryzen over Intel CPU, this GPU is a weak one for gaming !
Big power consumtion, big price, nearly same performance as 1080.
Using HBM2 they only manage to catch up with Nvidia so not a big deal.
Sorry AMD but you better rename the card as mining card (MPU or something) and not GPU. I hate the fact that NVIDIA has no oposition.
And the trend AMD is going to (card for mining) will pull Nvidia to make a more mining oriented card.
Now i need to wait for the next NVIDIA card for a better performance.
If you are a miner, those are good cards (AMD are making money from it).
Dazz
Hilbert can you try and overclock the memory on the sample? Apparently the Vega GPU's are quite memory staved and i am wondering if the direct contact cooler on the HBM improves memory overclocking at all. If a Vega 56 hitting 980Mhz on the memory can push it to Vega 64 territory i wonder how these much better cooler do with the HBM attach to the memory do. Apparently all them cores on the GPU still can't flex themselves in games due to the "limited" bandwidth but Open GL loves them extra cores as it's no saturating the memory. Think AMD really need to improve their memory colour compression, nvidias is around 70% efficent.
slicer
Did I miss the price or was that not included?
Evildead666
Gamers buy them too, and they aren't neccessarily Fans, or Miners, or "Productivity" people. It really pisses me off to be called that.
I bought it, because I wanted to upgrade my card, and stay AMD. 😉
Thats it. Not an AMD Fan, just happy to give them some money, and I think its worth it (once watercooled).
Great review Hilbert. I was expecting the Strix to clock much higher, due to the beefy cooler.
These really seem to need to be watercooled for Max performance.
BReal85
The 290X wasn't better with AIB cards except for the lower temps and somewhat less noise. A 300W card can't be cooled better with less noise only if they would use the Power Save mode.
I can't get to your point. Weak for gaming? Tell that the 1080 is an overall (pow. cons., price, performance) better card, but how can you say this one is weak? That would mean you think the 1080 is also weak for gaming... omg.
Robbo9999
Ok, so main thrust of the article, as in the only real difference to reference Vega64 - this GPU is a bit quieter than the reference version, well that's something, I suppose it makes Vega64 bearable!
EDIT: I heard many accounts of Vega performs better with overclocking the HBM VRAM, and doing so also doesn't really increase power demands (so is like free performance!), so overclocking would probably have been painted in a better light if that had been included in the review.
nashathedog
Hello,
I'm sorry if I missed it in the review as I admittedly light read parts but I didn't find any mention of which revision of the Vega 64 chip it uses. I bought an AIO on release which used the C0 chip and it was faulty, several members of my local forum also got faulty AIO's on release so the usual conspiracy theories started (call me guilty) about why the reference Vega 64 blower used the C1 variant, That in turn got given weight by the rumour we all heard about a delay and a new stepping a couple of months ago. To me that could gain more weight if the Strix uses a C0 chip as it would give a reason for why the temps and noise are barely better than the reference blower.
Since I returned my Vega AIO I've waited for more info on the Strix variant and as nobody can deny the numbers are very disappointing, The question is Why?
Is there a gpu shot available for the Strix you can get the revision details from please?
Cheers, David.
tunejunky
another job well done HH, aside from predictable outbreaks of snark.
what has me excited is what this card represents - a full scalable gpu. the very first.
now, when the miners see the next new shiny object we may see decent pricing, but to me that's the time when this card will actually be mature drivers -wise. and developers will know a lot more about vega.
but to me navi is the sweet spot. that will be my 1080ti replacement. the fact that gpu chip size will no longer be a factor in performance and for AMD to really get after power consumption - the lion's share will go with the die shrinkage. i also predict that navi may only come with a water-block or aio...unless they work wonders with the heatspreader...like threadripper.
now vega 56, if available, may go to replace my old htpc (Q6600, GTX 970), as i still have cannibal parts from my last build.
Robbo9999
Sounds like a fan to to me! Ha, but it doesn't matter, you can be a fan if you want, who cares. I'm sure I've seen a review of a water cooled Vega64, and the conclusion was that it's not worth the extra cost & hassle for the small performance increase - Vega64 is already pretty much pushed to it's limits on the voltage-frequency curve.
EDIT: oh yeah, here's the review of a watercooled Vega64, they conclude not worth it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-rx-vega-64-water-cooling,5177.html
StuST220
I was really hoping the non-reference partner cards would have a little extra performance over the reference cards and be a little more efficient on power but it doesn't seem to be the case.
I've been hanging on for quite a while now whilst deciding what to upgrade my MSI R9 290 to which is still great at 1080p which is pretty much what I game at, but now it seems nVidia is going to be the most sensible option for me out of the two.
