Unboxing

Our full review of the AMD Radeon VII is now live: www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Radeon_VII

We are bringing you a collection of pictures from our unboxing of AMD's latest generation of Vega: The Radeon VII graphics card. A comprehensive review with performance numbers will be published a little later this month. AMD surprised everyone at its CES 2019 keynote by announcing its Radeon VII high-end graphics card. What was even more surprising were the performance numbers and pricing put out by the company, which purport this card to be competitive with the GeForce RTX 2080.

The Radeon VII is the world's first consumer graphics processor built on the 7 nm silicon fabrication process and based on the refined Vega II architecture, using the "Vega 20" GPU. This is very much a consumer graphics card targeted at gamers, although it also has some hardware features that make it better at productivity tasks that don't quite require professional graphics cards. We'll will bring you finer architecture details, specifications, and a full suite of benchmarks in our performance review.


Our Radeon VII sample was supplied by AMD. It comes in a special reviewers-only package. The card sits in a vertical clam-shell paperboard box that looks like a PlayStation 4 from some angles. Apart from the Vega II and Radeon VII branding, there's very little printed on the box itself. Let's take the lid off:


Nothing like the sight of a brand-new graphics card! We are immediately greeted by the card itself, and an angled acrylic showcase stand with a very costly ornament: a full-fledged "Vega 20" MCM GPU! This seems to be a real GPU (not a mock-up). It's probably an early version of the silicon or a GPU that somehow failed validation. AMD did something similar with its Radeon Vega 64 review samples by including a "Vega 10" ASIC to be made part of picture previews. Both the card and this stand are embedded in a Styrofoam packaging cushion.


What's this? There's more to the showcase stand than a GPU worth hundreds of dollars! A puck-sized insert houses a battery compartment holding three (included) AAA cells, which turn on an RGB LED lightshow through the stand. Pretty cool.