AMD Announces RX Vega 64 & RX Vega 56 Launching August 14th.
The good news then is that even if today isn’t the Radeon RX Vega
launch, AMD is finally making significant progress towards it by announcing the
cards, the specifications, and the pricing. Gamers may not be able to buy the
cards quite yet, but everyone is going to have some time to size up the
situation before the proper launch of the cards next month. Overall this
situation is very similar to the unveiling of the Radeon R9 290 series, where
AMD announced the cards at a product showcase before launching them the
following month.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the Radeon RX Vega family of
cards and their specifications.
The top of AMD’s lineup is the Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition.
This is a fully enabled Vega 10 card and it has the highest clockspeeds and
highest power requirements of the stack. All told, this is 64 CUs, 64 ROPs,
boosting to 1677MHz, and paired with 8GB of HBM2 memory clocked at 1.89Gbps.
Typical board power for the card is rated at 345W. To cool such a card, you of
course will want liquid cooling, and living up to the name the card, AMD has
included just that, thanks to a pump and 120mm radiator.
The second member of AMD’s lineup is the shorter-named vanilla Radeon RX
Vega 64. Unlike its liquid cooled predecessor, this is a traditional
blower-type air cooled card. And for the purposes of AMD’s product stack, the
company is treating the vanilla Vega 64 as the “baseline” card for the Vega 64
family. This means that the company’s performance projections are based on this
card, and not the higher-clocked liquid cooled card.
The vanilla Vega 64 utilizes the same fully enabled Vega 10 GPU, with 64
CUs and 64 ROPs. The card’s reduced cooling capacity goes hand-in-hand with
slightly lower clockspeeds of 1247MHz base and 1546MHz boost.
Paired up with the Vega GPU itself is the same 8GB of HBM2 as on the liquid cooled card, still running at 1.89Gbps for 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Finally, this card ships with a notably lower TBP than the liquid cooled card, bringing it down by 50W to 295W.
Meanwhile, unlike any of the other cards in the RX Vega family, the Vega 64 will come in two shroud design options. AMD’s reference shroud is a plastic/rubber design similar to what we saw on the reference Radeon RX 480 launched last year. AMD will also have a “limited edition” version of the card with the same hardware specifications, but replacing the rubber shroud with a brushed aluminum shroud, very similar to the one found on the Vega Frontier Edition.
Though it’s important to note that the only difference between these two cards is the material of the shroud; the cards are otherwise identical, PCBs, performance, cooling systems, and all.
On that note, AMD has only released a limited amount of information on the cooler design of the Vega 64, which is of particular interest as it’s an area where AMD struggled on the R9 290 and RX 480 series.
We do know that the radial fan is larger, now measuring 30mm in radius (60mm in diameter). The fan in turn is responsible for cooling a heatsink that’s attached to the Vega 10 GPU + memory package via a vapor chamber, a typical design choice for high performance, high TDP video cards.
Finally, the last member of the RX Vega family is the Radeon RX Vega 56. The obligatory cut-down member of the group, this card gets a partially disabled version of the Vega 10 GPU with only 56 of 64 CUs enabled. On the clockspeed front, this card also sees reduced GPU and memory clockspeeds; the GPU runs at 1156MHz base and 1471MHz boost, while the HBM2 memory runs at 1.6Gbps (for 410GB/sec of memory bandwidth).
Following the traditional cut-down card model, this lower performing card is also lower power – and quite possibly the most power efficient RX Vega card – with a 210W TDP, some 85W below the Vega 64. Meanwhile, other than its clockspeed the card’s HBM2 memory is untouched, shipping with the same 8GB of memory as the other RX Vega members.
Moving on, perhaps the burning question for many readers now that they have the specifications in hand is expected performance, and this is something of a murky area.
AMD has published some performance slides for the Vega 64, but they haven’t taken the time to extensively catalog what they see as the competition for the card and where the RX Vega family fits into that. Instead, what we’ve been told is to expect the Vega 64 to “trade blows” with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080.
Paired up with the Vega GPU itself is the same 8GB of HBM2 as on the liquid cooled card, still running at 1.89Gbps for 484GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Finally, this card ships with a notably lower TBP than the liquid cooled card, bringing it down by 50W to 295W.
Meanwhile, unlike any of the other cards in the RX Vega family, the Vega 64 will come in two shroud design options. AMD’s reference shroud is a plastic/rubber design similar to what we saw on the reference Radeon RX 480 launched last year. AMD will also have a “limited edition” version of the card with the same hardware specifications, but replacing the rubber shroud with a brushed aluminum shroud, very similar to the one found on the Vega Frontier Edition.
Though it’s important to note that the only difference between these two cards is the material of the shroud; the cards are otherwise identical, PCBs, performance, cooling systems, and all.
On that note, AMD has only released a limited amount of information on the cooler design of the Vega 64, which is of particular interest as it’s an area where AMD struggled on the R9 290 and RX 480 series.
We do know that the radial fan is larger, now measuring 30mm in radius (60mm in diameter). The fan in turn is responsible for cooling a heatsink that’s attached to the Vega 10 GPU + memory package via a vapor chamber, a typical design choice for high performance, high TDP video cards.
Finally, the last member of the RX Vega family is the Radeon RX Vega 56. The obligatory cut-down member of the group, this card gets a partially disabled version of the Vega 10 GPU with only 56 of 64 CUs enabled. On the clockspeed front, this card also sees reduced GPU and memory clockspeeds; the GPU runs at 1156MHz base and 1471MHz boost, while the HBM2 memory runs at 1.6Gbps (for 410GB/sec of memory bandwidth).
Following the traditional cut-down card model, this lower performing card is also lower power – and quite possibly the most power efficient RX Vega card – with a 210W TDP, some 85W below the Vega 64. Meanwhile, other than its clockspeed the card’s HBM2 memory is untouched, shipping with the same 8GB of memory as the other RX Vega members.
Moving on, perhaps the burning question for many readers now that they have the specifications in hand is expected performance, and this is something of a murky area.
AMD has published some performance slides for the Vega 64, but they haven’t taken the time to extensively catalog what they see as the competition for the card and where the RX Vega family fits into that. Instead, what we’ve been told is to expect the Vega 64 to “trade blows” with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080.
AMD Announces RX Vega 64 & RX Vega 56 Launching August 14th.
Reviewed by Unknown
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Reviewed by Unknown
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