Looking at Vega 56, which cooler?

Hardware GPU
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Hi All,
So the other day I asked about a 1080ti bussing from the power connector, the card has now been RMA’d and I am looking at picking up a vega 56, specifically for its linux support.
But I am unsure which cooler design to get, I am thinking the sapphire pulse as its the cheapest but I can opt for a strix if I want but I don’t think its worth the extra cash.
my case will have good airflow around the GPU (3 fans) so airflow isn’t an issue and neither should the cards cooling.
Is the sapphire pulse enough for cooling the GPU or should I opt for the strix?

Many Thanks

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The Sapphire looks like a really well designed card. Also I do like Sapphire as a company and Asus … well, I liked them more before the whole GPP thing. But mostly I would go with Sapphire because AMD GPUs is all they do, they focus on that and nothing else. And that shows, their cards are always top notch.

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if i am not mistaken sapphire is also considered one of the lead designers for AMD boards and have a hand in the reference board designs.

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I have never had a bad experience with a sapphire card, only good experiences. I dont know if the whole GPP thing has influenced your buying decisions but it has influenced me, prompting me to not want to deal with Asus and others for a while. That said, the pulse design despite its small size will perform very well, as the back half of the cooler effectively “overhangs” the PCB, which allows the air to go right through the cooler. This is something they used on their fury design as well, which lets the card perform much better than other coolers of its size usually would.

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Go for the Pulse unless you’re planning to push into some overlooking, which isn’t generally worth it anyway on Vega. Otherwise the Nitro has a beast of a cooler and I agree that Sapphire might be preferable anyway considering GPP.

I ordered a Nitro four months ago and just might finally receive it in a few weeks. Could have gotten a Strix instead already but now I’m glad i didn’t.

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Thanks all, I think ill get the pulse then.
@mkk I will be doing a little overclocking but unfortunately my PSU doesn’t have 3 8pins

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Not to get off topic but what did Asus do?

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they changed branding for AMD and Nvida cards. gaming branded cards are for Nvida only. so say the strix moniker is now Nvida only.

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They agreed to participate, which they are pretty much forced to do, sure. That is also my stance … mostly. But I still would not buy an AMD GPU from them right now.

Here is most of it: Klick.

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Ok, just making sure there wasnt something else I didnt know about.

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How does Vega 56 do for gaming? Where does it stand in the Nvid lineup?

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Out of the box it’s on par or a bit better than a 1070. If you like voiding warranties you can push over 1070 Ti (really the Vega 56 is the reason that card was released anyway). It’s a fun card.

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Are the Nvidia drivers really that bad on Linux? I know on Windows a 1070 Ti is equivalent or better than Vega 56 in most scenarios and is ~$120 cheaper right now.

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I don’t know about Linux, didn’t think @dot404 was asking in that regard, but I could be mistaken. I also noted that pushing 56 higher requires breaking warranties. I have mine flashed with a 64 BIOS and on water running significantly faster than stock.

I’m also having trouble finding recent benchmarks with both in Linux, so that doesn’t help. I know I’ve seen articles with noted improvements in the latest kernels.

Edit 2: not good for Mesa it seems: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=tomb-raider-20&num=1

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Depends how much you value open source drivers.

The NV binary drivers are a pain in the balls every time you look at the kernel funny.

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At the moment my wallet doesn’t care about open source drivers. It cares about dollar per performance. I’ll give it a stern lecture about open source free software though.

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