AMD GPU advice (keep Xfire Vegas or sell and move to VII)

[Hellfire]

Hi All,

Looking for advice, Firstly, I am not interested in the NV cards, I am an ATI GPU fanboy, I'm big enough to admit it, well mostly, I am a Sapphire tech fanboy.

So, I currently have the following:
2x Sapphire Vega 64 Nitro+
2x [Unsued] Bykski Water Block for Sapphire Vega 64 Nitro+ RGB, including remotes & controllers + all accessories

However, I am tempted to sell these all and get a Radeon VII with a EKWB WB (if they release them, which I am sure they will)

Notes:
- I know my current CPU will be the bottleneck right now, but I am upgrading to either I7 9900 series or a ZEN II once released (just waiting on which is best)
- I also know my current monitor is a 1440 144mhz monitor but I will probably upgrade to a 4K 144mhz monitor to in the new rig,

These will eventually being going into my new PC build.

So, advice people

 

[infrared]

I'd have a tough time making that decision too tbh. How well does crossfire scale in the games you play? I'd love to see how you get on with a wc'd radeon VII

 

[Hellfire]

I'd have a tough time making that decision too tbh. How well does crossfire scale in the games you play? I'd love to see how you get on with a wc'd radeon VII

Crossfire for me has been a pig if I am honest, I have constant problems with Freesync and a lot of my games I play don't even support Xfire,

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Performance wise definitely keep the 64s They are basically two 2070s in Sli so youre getting or should be getting around 2080Ti performance or even beyond that.

At the same time all the excess heat and power draw not to mention possible issues with crossfire support in games. Ive been there. Ive had crossfire 4870s, 5850s, 6970s then went SLi when AMD kept breaking Crossfire support with games and not owning up to it. Sometimes crossfire would cause my PC to BSOD when I loaded up a game. Some people blamed the OC on my 3930k back then but I switched over to GTX680s in SLi and NEVER suffered from that issue again.

This was years ago however and AMD did get called out for their shitty performing drivers, especially when it came to Crossfire. Their drivers meant your 2nd card you had for crossfire was pretty much a paper weight because it kept dropping frames. or 'runt frames' if you will. It was a really big thing a few years ago. All the major tech websites and youtube tech channels were talking about it.

AFAIK AMD have fixed this as they use some form of frame pacing to keep the two cards in sync.

The RADEON VII will only give you around RTX2080 levels of performance so it would be a slight downgrade.

I went from sli GTX970s to a single 1070, then a 1080Ti and TBF, when i switched from 970s to single 1070 i didnt notice a huge amount of difference though 970 SLi to single 1070 was more of a sidegrade at best. My setup still kept pumping out the frames as usual and didnt skip a beat. I game at 1440p@60fps. (though i dont enable Vsync)

If anything. i would say youre better off spending that money on a newer platform to drive those 64s harder/better. your CPU Is getting too close to bottlenecking territory (or its already in bottlenecking territory) for my taste. Others might not agree with my opinion but that 4790k is old. Even something like an 8600k or Ryzen 2700X will really unlock the potential of those cards

Have a think about it. I think you would get more benefit from a platform upgrade for the same price of the Radeon VII





Just my $2

 

[ratirt]

Crossfire for me has been a pig if I am honest, I have constant problems with Freesync and a lot of my games I play don't even support Xfire,

So if Xfire sucks why you even bother with the cards. I honestly think VII is great and I will buy one for myself. I also wonder how will this beast perform with water cooled dedicated block. Gamers Nexus is going to test it. Waiting for part 2nd to see the result of the OC and benchmarks. Have you seen the thread here about VII and water cooling? One guy did the mod kinda thing with a different block to fit the VII and he got 2200Mhz out of it For me this is convincing

 

[Hellfire]

Lots of sensible advice too long to quote
Just my $2

Hi Freedom, I totally agree. I will be upgrading the whole system very very very soon, I have a new Corsair 1000D case sitting empty waiting for it, However I didn't want to jump into a new CPU like a i9 9900k if the new Zen II CPU's come out in a few months and crush the 9900k, which is why I am holding off, but trust me, once I have the best CPU picked (either Zen II or i9) I will be changing everything, new CPU, Mobo, 32GB ram, NVME SSD's and a lot more.

So if Xfire sucks why you even bother with the cards. I honestly think VII is great and I will buy one for myself. I also wonder how will this beast perform with water cooled dedicated block. Gamers Nexus is going to test it. Waiting for part 2nd to see the result of the OC and benchmarks. Have you seen the thread here about VII and water cooling? One guy did the mod kinda thing with a different block to fit the VII and he got 2200Mhz out of it For me this is convincing

Because I am a masochist lol.

It does work, just not as well as I was hoping, lol. but I think I need to do a fresh OS install anyway.

 

[eidairaman1]

The V64 cooler is 3rd party design, Radeon 7 is reference.

 

[xkm1948]

Single powerful GPU > CF/SLI less powerful GPU.

Simply because CF is not guranteed to work 100% all the time.

Get the Radeon 7!

 

[GamerGuy]

I have both actually, and I'd hate to let either go (how else would I be able to call myself a flag-waving, badge carryin', chest thumping AMD fanboy?)......, to be frank, I couldn't make up my mind so I kept both. When CF scaling works, like Strange Brigade, it can be quite exhilarating. Even when CF doesn't work, a single VEGA64 would normally suffice for a good enough gaming experience (as long as the presence of the 2nd card doesn't impede performance). To the OP, I'd suggest selling off that one VEGA64 and going for the VEGA II, yes, it has a reference cooler, but it isn't bad with custom fan curve, though it can be noisy (I'm immune to noise, more concerned about keeping GPU/HBM cool, or rather, NOT getting them too hot)

 

[Deleted member 158293]

IMO multi-card setups are for those who like to tinker with their hardware which can fun.

Otherwise go for 1 card.

 

[cucker tarlson]

Radeon 7.No brainer.If you can watercool it then it has decent headroom too.

CF sucks

https://www.techspot.com/review/1763-radeon-rx-590-crossfire/


40% scaling in AAA titles is absolutely abysmal.And this is average,so in 8 out of 20 games you get no scaling or negative scaling.In many of them scaling will be similar to using a faster card. So CF is only beneficial for those few games that scale well.There's the issue of microstutter too. I'd get 2080Ti SLI over Titan RTX but in any other case I'd go with a single,more powerful cards.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

It sucks in games where it's not working or utilised properly though a few show how good the scaling can be, that said I agree with the consensus of going to RVii less heat, power usage and headaches, though you will loose some performance in those titles where scaling is good and crossfire is working.

 

[ShieldHead]

Sell one of the vegas and all the waterblocks.
Upgrade when navi flagship arrives. Unless you are really keen for more performance

 

[Caring1]

I am an ATI GPU fanboy...…..

Good luck finding new cards from ATI
You probably mean AMD.

 

[64K]

The problem with Crossfie and SLI is that most Developers have moved away from supporting it. There are some that still do. There will be issues running Crossfire sometimes in games that still do support it as well. The mainstream advice for a while is to buy the single fastest GPU you can afford and skip multiple GPUs. That way you get maximum performance for all of your games though it won't be what you might get in a handful of games with Crossfire..

 

[John Naylor]

The VII is a decent card ... or better said, it would be at $550 - $575. Looking at what just happened in response to the 1660 Ti, I don't think it will be long before we see prices at this level. Good reading on the VII here:

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2019/02/24/amd_radeon_vii_chilling_undervolting/6

As for SLI / CF, it was the proverbial no brainer up to nVidia 9xx series when two x70s were 40% faster overall (All games in TPUs test suite) and cost the same as a x80. But there's something real odd going on here. Scaling, which used to not change wll that much suddenly changed. With 10xx we say 18% at 1080p, 33 % at 1440p and 55% at 2160p. To my view, this was nVidia's way of stemming the loss in profits as margins are higher on a single top end card, than a pair of lower tier cards and there was no downside as AMD didn't have a competitive entry at the highest tiers. There's still a decent ROI at 2160p but it's been quashed at lower resolutions. With less of a market, developers have less incentive to put in the T & E to enable the feature.

 

[skline00]

I have a Rad VII which replaced a GTX 1080 in my 2700x rig.

I also have a 5960x OCd to 4.4 with a GTX 1080TI.

Both rigs are custom water cooled and I just preordered a Bykski full block for the Rad VII.

I've had some previous experience with CF and SLI (2-RX 480s in CF; 2 R9-290s in CF; etc etc).

Overall the top end cards are so powerful, I decided it was easier to stick with a single top end card.

If you want to stay with an AMD card and are upgrading your cpu to a 9900k, get a water block for the 9900k to get max OCing and get a water block for a single Rad VII and "don't look back"!