I was surprised to find there isn’t a Radeon VII owners thread here on the Level 1 Techs forum, so I felt duty bound to create one. This is an awesome GPU particularly for content creators like myself. It had plenty of quirks earlier this year at launch (drivers and mounting issues with the stock air cooler), but I think that’s all sorted out now.
I was concerned about the cooler mount issues highlighted by Gamers Nexus, but I decided to tough it out. I ordered one of the last new Asrock Radeon VII’s from newegg last week, and I was happy to see it works great right out of the box.
Forums and reviews gave me the impression these cards are always thermal throttling because the stock voltage and frequency are set too high… My first impressions with this card are totally different.
Before installing the graphics card I hand tightened the four heatsink mounting screws on the back… then I set a manual fan curve for 100% on load… and magically my radeon vii is staying reasonably cool at stock speeds. In a Time Spy benchmark my Junction Temp didn’t go over 86C.
Anyway, I expect used Radeon VII’s to be a hot item with content creators, and the undervolting/overlocking options are endless, so I’ll share my tips and tricks here as I come across them.
I’ve been using mine for about 24 hours and haven’t seen anything buggy. I’m running a video editing rig with dual 1440p monitors.
*One minor thing to be aware of is you need to turn on CSM support in the bios until you can update the gpu firmware for UEFI. I knew that ahead of time, so it was easy.
I gradually dropped voltage with the classic Heaven Benchmark running in the background… the card got all the way down to 950 mV at stock speeds before it crashed. I bumped it back up to 975 mV and the Radeon VII has been perfectly stable for the last 24 hrs.
I use a CoolerMaster Haf XB EVO with plenty of airflow. That’s gotta be helping the Radeon VII stock air cooler keep this hot card under control.
Having upgraded from dual RX 580’s, the performance improvement is massive. DaVinci Resolve loads really fast and editing is smooth as butter. I didn’t expect it, but my heavily modded copy of Fallout New Vegas plays nicer too… it loads super fast now and there aren’t any fps dips during combat.
I’ll need to bolt on a waterblock for Cyberpunk 2020, but for now I’m good…
I wasn’t really able to find a certain answer to this:
NVIDIA recently allowed Pascal- and Turing-based GeForce GPUs to do 10 bpc acceleration in windowed OpenGL applications like Photoshop et al (only Quadros were able to do this in the past).
Is the Radeon VII also able/officially allowed to do this or is this still a feature that requires Radeon Pro SKUs?
I’m not sure about that one. I use Photoshop CS6 but don’t do much heavy lifting with it. Here’s a screen shot of how the Radeon VII comes up under Preferences/Performance…
Do you have a 30-bit Display connected? Even if not it shouldn’t be a problem except for maybe viewing artefacts.
Can you create an image file with 10 bit per channel color and edit it with a filter/method that usually uses GPU acceleration (cp. GPU load in Task Manager) if you use it with a “standard” 8 bpc color file?
(I imagine) the 10 bpc color acceleration feature should be quite obvious if it’s active: Does the GPU have usage spikes during the editing of 10 bpc color image files or does it just idle around? I always thought that this was a clear-cut yes/no feature switch.
Maybe a short comparison with manually deactivated GPU usage in PS.
I got one in September and I’m pretty happy with it. I liquid cooled it with an EK full cover block and liquid metal compound (with conformal coating to protect it). It’s fun to overclock. I use it to game at 4K, mostly Destiny 2 right now.
I thought I’d share my experiences as a creator with this card after 2 mos. of use.
I use duel 1440p monitors and the Radeon VII is over-kill for everything I’ve done thus far. So much so, I’ve rolled my card back to the stock clock speed to reduce noise playing The Outer Worlds. My current settings are:
1800 Core Clock at 1000mV
+20 Power Limit
1100 Memory
Stock Fan curve with one change, set to 100% fan at 90C
For work I’m primarily in DaVinci Resolve and that runs like dream. I produce 4k content and it uses up to 10 GB of video memory occasionally. The video decoder does have artifacts though, so I recommend disabling GPU decoding on final renders.
On the gaming side I’ve been playing The Outer Worlds since launch. No surprise, It runs everything at max settings in 1440p and 60 fps flawlessly (my IPS displays are 60 hertz). Heat-wise the highs are around 65-75C while playing. Again, I’m running with the stock air cooler which works really well for me.
Before AMD broke VII overclocking in Wattman, mine was OCed to 2100 core with an EK Vector block, but those days are over, LOL. AMD broke everything with a driver update, and after that it would only hit 1700mhz. Lately I’ve been experimenting with the MPT tool, and have managed to get some overclocking back, maxing out the HBM speed at 1200mhz, with the core boosting to 1970-ish mhz tops. But it still won’t break 2000 for some reason, when it was happy as a pig in poop at 2100mhz back around driver 19.5.something.
