Radeon RX Vega to be Air and Liquid Cooled - XL XT and XTX models
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JonasBeckman
So XT and XTX remains reference and the XL is the one getting third party designs but it will be a bit cut down (Unless it can be re-activated again.) with possibly different memory amounts as well, interesting. đŸ™‚
Basically a improved Fury then, voltage or power limitations might lower the max attainable clock speeds though on all but the water cooled edition but even that might require some tweaking. (Increasing voltage wasn't all that effective on the Fury after a certain point though.)
EDIT: Will be interesting to see what the reviews for these will be, will also be fun to read what overclockers might try with them and if they can be modified at all when it comes to things like bios editing and what not.
The XL and the XT are probably going to be throttled by the reduced power configuration compared to the XTX but by how much and how that will hit performance remains to be seen. (And how the cuts to the XL compare to the XT in terms of performance.)
Evildead666
Hopefully the XT and XTX variants will be physically identical, apart from the coolers.
that way if there is any BIOS limitations, it should be possible to flash an XT into an XTX (and slap a Waterblock on it đŸ˜‰)
RzrTrek
How come AMD always insist on putting liquid cooling on their high powered frying pans?
nevcairiel
Because they apparently can't make an air cooler powerful enough to run their power hungry cards without cutting them down.
Having two designs like this with different power and therefore performance profiles was always kinda dumb.
xIcarus
Like Nvidia's reference coolers are any less sh1t. Almost all reference coolers are garbage.
Nvidia's were especially bad during the Fermi period while AMD's during the 200 series. Hence the Thermi and 290x airplane/fryingpan/whatever jokes.
The only actually good one was the cooler on the Fury X, but you could say that it's technically not reference since it wasn't AMD who designed it.
Realistically, you usually get reference if you intend to watercool. AMD putting a watercooler on their high-end is a smart move, it saves you the trouble and you should pay less overall since they already have a contract with the cooling company, so they buy in bulk.
Exascale
Its not like using liquid cooling is a bad thing. The most advanced computers are liquid cooled.
Valken
Cannot wait to see the performance of the XTX vs 1080Ti, both OC'ed to the max stable clocks in 4K. That is where these will shine.
Loophole35
They better improve VRM cooling this time around. FuryX had horrid VRM cooling when compared to GPU cooling.
SirDremor
Well, at least some dumb AMD fanboys can't now deny 300W usage.
Still don't expect miracles from these cards, too hot, to hungry, requires HBM2.
Exascale
I was speaking generally about liquid cooling.
Tbh i dont really know of many consumer GPUs that have excellent VRM cooling. It usually seems like an afterthought in most designs, despite it being a common point of failure.
Loophole35
Yeah, it just annoyed me on the FuryX seeing how compact the whole PCB was it would have been nice had the water block covered the VRM not just stick a pipe over it with some thermal tape (honestly passive cooling may have worked better.)
Evildead666
I thought the Fury X had a heatpipe over the VRM's that connected to the Waterblock ? It should have been pretty cool, I would have thought...
gerardfraser
Well thank god my GTX 1080TI only runs at 278 watts undervolted,and not frigging 300 watts I would never buy that card.
https://s25.postimg.org/nkaaadu4f/GTX_1080ti_watts.jpg
Agonist
All of these crybabies crying about TDP.
We are enthusiast, not green power users..
Crying about the power usuage of a gpu, but many of you have a heavily overclocked CPU. Yes while the power usuage is lower on a cpu, i find it hilarious irony.
And the Fury X had a heatpipe over the VRM that was part of the AIO.
There was no VRM issues on the Fury X. I had one.
H83
Having high TDP is bad but not a deal breaker, at least for me. What really matters are the performance and the price of those things.
Also i really dislike the naming of them, what the hell are XL, TX and XTX supposed to mean??? Was somebody from AMD marketing watching a porn flick and thought those names are cool?...
Truder
It's a throwback from the original naming convention used by ATi, XTX being the top tier model, followed by XT and the XL being the value version of the top card.
Remember the 9800XT? X800XT or X800XL? Or the X1950XTX etc.
Loophole35
Because it was just the return pipe from the water block flattened on one side and taped to the VRM's the water was moving over it too fast to do any real heat transfer. VRM temps where reported in the 90's at default in some reviews. While that is within safe temperatures for the VRM it does seem very high for a water cooled card. In fact most AIO cooled hybrid cards with a blower fan going across the VRM's do good as well.
Rich_Guy
Lets just hope the AIO doesn't suffer from the whine the Fury X one suffered from, as everyone will be going for that, instead of the one with that crappy FE blower cooler on it :P
Loophole35
I'd go for the blower cooler and slap a full cover on it personally.
BTW what happened to that nice small PCB that Fiji had. This card is as big as a GP102.
Denial
The power usage is important when in context to the rest of the chip. If RX Vega performs 20-30% faster than 1080Ti across the board, I don't think anyone would care about the power usage. But so far all FE testing indicates Vega will perform roughly between a 1070/1080 and using almost double the power to get that. And what's even more troubling is that Nvidia claims Volta is getting an additional 50% perf/w increase. Which means a GV104 with the same specs as a 1080 would be like 120w, vs the 350w of the Vega FE WC that only hits 1080 performance in like 1-2 games.
And I get obviously that a lot of this is subject to change with driver updates, bios changes, potential hardware changes with RX Vega - but so far it doesn't look good for the architecture. It also doesn't look good for AMD's margins - having to drop a liquid cooler onto a card you can only sell for ~$500 at the most while also having more expensive HBM2, definitely isn't ideal.
