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Water Cooled Vega 64 Overclocked And Tested By TomsHardware

the54thvoid

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Okay.

I'm wrong.

It's not GCN. It's entirely different. Nothing like it.

I accept my errors and will move on.

Back to the OP. Vega 64 is not going to get much faster. The review sites seem to concur that it is already running at pumped up volts and speeds to fight with the 1080. Water cooling makes it quieter and gives it a little headroom but it is already up near it's limits. Not unlike the Ryzen chips I guess and one of the reasons there are power limits on cards now with limited voltage controls.
 
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Toms blow bro!

Christ it's a pathetic site for any info imho.

Basically anything owned by Purch.

SPOT ON LOLZ! @ TOMS fail site!

Okay, if you guys say so. Toms has yet to let me down in probably a span of a decade, just about everything I have read has been factual and reviews are generally nicer but seem unbiased for the most part. If you guys don't care for Tom's then why did you guys even open up this thread? However, I am willing to listen, what do you guys find so fail and bad about Tom's? Their forums are actually full of a lot of helpful and knowledgeable members in my opinion.

Okay.

Back to the OP. Vega 64 is not going to get much faster. The review sites seem to concur that it is already running at pumped up volts and speeds to fight with the 1080. Water cooling makes it quieter and gives it a little headroom but it is already up near it's limits. Not unlike the Ryzen chips I guess and one of the reasons there are power limits on cards now with limited voltage controls.

Right, personally I didn't think it would. However, there were/are plenty of people that may change their minds now after seeing how the liquid cooled variant performs. Oh well, I hope they do better on their next cards although that may be in another couple to few years.
 
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Damn @the54thvoid tried to talk some sense into egotistical fans. Don't bother dude, it ain't gonna work. Grown ass adult would rather do a million other things than agreeing with you over internet debate.

Plain and simple, emotionally invested in certain brand/product.

As for me I simply got burned hard by AMD next to nothing technical support. I am not even mad about Fiji performance, as I was not really expecting much from beginning.


At the end of the day, action speaks louder than any words. See these people defending vega, are they actually supporting AMD with their money? Heck no. They are not stupid. Vega is hot, slow, late, power hungry, hard to find and on top of all that, freaking expensive. Just like @RejZoR who was defending Vega furiously, what did he do? He bought another Nvidia GPU, 1080Ti.


@the54thvoid

No, GPxxx are very much similar cores as they are based of the same thing, just different basic elements arrangement and clocks. Vega is NOTHING like Fiji. Same arrangement of basic units, but the rest in between, underneath and above is totally different.


Go read Anandtech Vega review. Vega is GCN. Good old plain GCN with some minor patch at front end.

CU arrays, exact the 64*64 array copy and paste from Fiji
Async Engine, exact 4 like Fiji
ROP and TMU are also exactly the same.

The bulk of the additional transistors are used to increase pipeline stages to allow higher frequency. Or as people are familiar with: the route of Pentium
4 and faildozer
 
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Engineer or not, Vega is middle of the road for gaming, doesn't meet power consumption goals, and if anyone unbiased looks at the chip can clearly tell it's more compute oriented.

It's the F35, over budget, underperforming, attempt to be too much for too many.
 
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Engineer or not, Vega is middle of the road for gaming, doesn't meet power consumption goals, and if anyone unbiased looks at the chip can clearly tell it's more compute oriented.

It's the F35, over budget, underperforming, attempt to be too much for too many.


Nah, it is Raja trying to make something good when Lisa only gave him some crayons. RTG is piss poor. And good design requires good engineers that are well paid.
 
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tl;dr Vega 64 is a turd and no amount of polishing AMD can do will change that. They should've accepted their inability to compete with Pascal, released Vega as Vega 56 and not Vega 64, and moved on.

As we know by now, Vega10 gpus can be heavily undervoltaged.

I guess you didn't actually bother to read the linked article, in which Tom's did just that, and found the only result was horrible instability.
 
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As we know by now, Vega10 gpus can be heavily undervoltaged.
Rubbish.
If Vega can be undervolted, why didn't AMD do it?
Rationalism is weak among AMD fans. :eek:

Undervolting and underclocking makes sense, if you don't need some of the performance (I don't think Vega buyers will have this sensation).
Undervolting and leaving clocks unchanged is just asking for trouble.
 
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Oh for god sake, will you all stop drooodling about fucking GCN already, geeeeeeeeeeez. For you lot, Everything from HD7000 up to Vega is EXACTLY the same.

What defines the chip is not just the basis (GCN in this case) but what the chip is capable of. How can you call Vega the same as Fiji when Fiji has no HBC, no TBR, only has DX12_0 support, doesn't support Primitive Shaders and bunch of other crap? Not to mention they had to change whole rasterizer stage which is evident from higher achievable clocks as well as the fact that at low resolutions, it doesn't trail behind others like Fiji did which had problems with utilization.

Just because you see 4096 shader units and then it's just all the same. That's like saying Zastava Yugo is exactly the same as Lamborghini Aventador. They both have 4 wheels and a steering wheel, so it has to be exactly the same. Since people only seem to get it when you convert things into car analogy...
 
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Oh for god sake, will you all stop drooodling about fucking GCN already, geeeeeeeeeeez. For you lot, Everything from HD7000 up to Vega is EXACTLY the same.

What defines the chip is not just the basis (GCN in this case) but what the chip is capable of. How can you call Vega the same as Fiji when Fiji has no HBC, no TBR, only has DX12_0 support, doesn't support Primitive Shaders and bunch of other crap? Not to mention they had to change whole rasterizer stage which is evident from higher achievable clocks as well as the fact that at low resolutions, it doesn't trail behind others like Fiji did which had problems with utilization.

Just because you see 4096 shader units and then it's just all the same. That's like saying Zastava Yugo is exactly the same as Lamborghini Aventador. They both have 4 wheels and a steering wheel, so it has to be exactly the same. Since people only seem to get it when you convert things into car analogy...

Nah , it was Fiji all along. It was just a prank.

Quick ! A Scooby-Doo villain maymay. :cool:
 
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And we are back to car analogy again. :D
 
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Yeah, well, people look and number of shaders, oh it's the same, so it must be the same core. It's why I used the 4 wheels and a steering wheel analogy. If people don't understand core structure, damn, at least they'll understand from something they use daily. Or people here don't even drive cars?
 
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It is a truly unfortunate event you did not buy a Vega. That would boost your argument 100X times better. You know, wrtite your own reviews and prove all doubters wrong. Or better , prove all the professional reviewers wrong. Truly a shame you went with Nvidia once again.
 
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Tomshardware would be a decent site... if it weren't for the horrendous amount/placement of ads.
 
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Tomshardware would be a decent site... if it weren't for the horrendous amount/placement of ads.

Oh cat i hated that auto play video on every fucking page.
 
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It is a truly unfortunate event you did not buy a Vega. That would boost your argument 100X times better. You know, wrtite your own reviews and prove all doubters wrong. Or better , prove all the professional reviewers wrong. Truly a shame you went with Nvidia once again.

Well, I was not in the mood of waiting anymore. Aftermarket air cooled models are still so far away I just couldn't be bothered to wait anymore. They said RX Vega launch in 2H 2017 at first. Fine, I've defended them all this time and was prepared to wait. And all ve got was Vega FE. So we waited another month for anuncement of REFERENCE models. And then we're suppose to wait ANOTHER month for aftermarket ones. Cooooome on.

If they launched reference and aftermarket models on 14th August, it would be very likely I'd actually grab RX Vega out of curiosity. Performance metrics are quite ok actually as I was, I just realized I couldn't work out the AiO in my case (similar problem as Fury X. And there is no way I'm gonna use blower coz they all suck. Literally. So, I turned to products that had all that. And while I was at it, I just said, fuck it and went all out crazy on it buying one of the most beefy versions. Because why not.

Main AMD's issue is they keep on cocking up their release timings. I was fine with the late 2H 2017 release. Since we assumed they're hard launching the whole product line. Instead they streatched it from 2H across to Q3 for the actual consumer products and even then availability will be questionable.

I'm still all enthusiastic about features RX Vega offers, I just won't be experiencing them first hand. Now that I'll have the fastest damn thing on the planet, I'll wait for Navi easier. I don't know...
 
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Well, I was not in the mood of waiting anymore. Aftermarket air cooled models are still so far away I just couldn't be bothered to wait anymore. They said RX Vega launch in 2H 2017 at first. Fine, I've defended them all this time and was prepared to wait. And all ve got was Vega FE. So we waited another month for anuncement of REFERENCE models. And then we're suppose to wait ANOTHER month for aftermarket ones. Cooooome on.

If they launched reference and aftermarket models on 14th August, it would be very likely I'd actually grab RX Vega out of curiosity. Performance metrics are quite ok actually as I was, I just realized I couldn't work out the AiO in my case (similar problem as Fury X. And there is no way I'm gonna use blower coz they all suck. Literally. So, I turned to products that had all that. And while I was at it, I just said, fuck it and went all out crazy on it buying one of the most beefy versions. Because why not.

Main AMD's issue is they keep on cocking up their release timings. I was fine with the late 2H 2017 release. Since we assumed they're hard launching the whole product line. Instead they streatched it from 2H across to Q3 for the actual consumer products and even then availability will be questionable.

I'm still all enthusiastic about features RX Vega offers, I just won't be experiencing them first hand. Now that I'll have the fastest damn thing on the planet, I'll wait for Navi easier. I don't know...


I can buy you a vega64 in US and trade for your 1080Ti if you want. That would be a fair trade right? Besides all of these GPU should be overkill for your 1080p panel.

Also I don't think 1080Ti is the fastest. By your definition Vega is. Not now of course, maybe 5 yrs down the road.
 
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What's wrong with not driving a car?

The problem is that a Fiji refresh could potentially perform similarly... or better.

I don't think it would. Knowing they had to redesign the render stages to hit current clocks of Vega, they'd realistically hit maybe 1.2 GHz on a 14nm Fiji. I don't think that would be enough. Plus, Fiji had issues with underutilization on lighter loads which was also solved on Vega with redesigned scheduler. So, we already have 2 things that needed to change. And they added highest DX12 support which also required chip redesign and HBC that extends memory constraints of HBM memory (on RX Vega 8GB you realistically have 16GB and on Vega FE 32GB of on-line memory or for "offline" compute, almost unlimited).

AMD actually has brilliant ideas, they are just screwed resources wise which is why they aren't hitting timeframes and bunch of stuff is dragged behind that. I hope Vega will still work out great in compute segment where margins are enormous and where real money is made so they'll be able to work on better consumer chips as well. And for people who wnated GTX 1080 level of performance and they don't mind waiting for AIB models sometime in september.
 
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tl;dr Vega 64 is a turd and no amount of polishing AMD can do will change that. They should've accepted their inability to compete with Pascal, released Vega as Vega 56 and not Vega 64, and moved on.



I guess you didn't actually bother to read the linked article, in which Tom's did just that, and found the only result was horrible instability.

A live video of RX56 is better proof of the opposite imho

 
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Undervolting is known to work very well on AMD cards. AMD always gives their cards a lot more much voltage than they actually need , probably in an attempt to make it so that they can use more dies.

It was the same with RX 480 , 290X , etc.
 
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AMD actually has brilliant ideas, they are just screwed resources wise which is why they aren't hitting timeframes and bunch of stuff is dragged behind that.
Intel and NVIDIA also have brilliant ideas. It's just that their products work, so we're not talking about "great ideas" so much. With AMD you're forced to droll about all these technologies inside, because the sum of them, called "Vega", just doesn't stand out, so no one would care.
I hope Vega will still work out great in compute segment
To succeed in the compute segment they'll need a card made for compute segment. RX Vega is not that, AMD has pro cards in the lineup.
Undervolting is known to work very well on AMD cards. AMD always gives their cards a lot more much voltage than they actually need , probably in an attempt to make it so that they can use more dies.

It was the same with RX 480 , 290X , etc.
LOL. You've just said it. Some dies will be stable at lower voltage, some won't. That's true for all GPUs and all CPUs.
Yet, you and @HD64G are trying to make a general rule out of it.
You can buy your dreamed Vega and do with whatever you want.
Companies buying Vega-based cards for computation will not undervolt or overclock them. For them only the stock performance and efficiency matter.
 
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You haven't actually read the rest of that post haven't you? You know, the part where I mentioned AMD's inability to materialize these brilliant ideas due to resources constraints...
 

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So 64 has potential
 
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You haven't actually read the rest of that post haven't you? You know, the part where I mentioned AMD's inability to materialize these brilliant ideas due to resources constraints...
LOL on the low resource constraints. If they don't have cash, they can find an investor. And if no other company or bank believes in their products, they can always try crowd-sourcing with their loyal fanboys.
This is just business. Your product is either profitable or not. Your forecast is either reliable or rubbish.
AMD is pretty small compared to major players in consumer electronics. There are many companies in US and Asia that could provide them a larger R&D budget - both financial institutions and companies within the industry.

It's not about lack of money. It's just that AMD can't (or doesn't want to) make proper mainstream products.
We know they can design and make proper chips. Things they do for other companies (consoles and Macs) are top-notch.
But with their own products they're aiming at niches - that's why they're becoming a niche manufacturer. Simple as that.
 
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