The VEGA 56 / 64 Cards Thread! General Discussion

I’ll be sticking a waterblock on it by the end of the year, and the reference board is very good even if the cooler isn’t.

If anyone else cares, EKWB will be releasing a Vega block for their inexpensive Fluid Gaming line on October 1st.

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will be undervolting and using powersave mode anyway (my PSU won’t run the 56 at full power), so noise shouldn’t be terrible; and I’m tired of 2160p30Hz (HD 7750). (To add: I ordered an ITX rx570 on June 3; by the time it was August 20, it still hadn’t been delivered. So I canceled that, and bought a 56 on launch day.)

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Waiting to get a third party card at a reasonable cost might also entail waiting until next year, given uncertain availability and prices.
I’m willing to wait though, since the idea of buying a new card for a performance increase of 20-30% over my current R9 Fury sits just about on the edge of reason.

So far it seems stable on 1070mv undervolt (1200mv is stock) and 930MHz on the HBM2 (800MHz stock there) with the power slider at +50%. I think there are going to be some curious improvements in the next few months with subsequent driver releases.

Really looking forward to getting this card on water.

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So has anyone in this thread put the Vega 64 BIOS on the Vega 56 card? I saw a video just minutes ago where this really made a huge difference in terms of performance. Also when overclocked after applying the BIOS change the cards was performing as GTX 1080.

IT doesn’t unlock any cores, so aside from setting a very easy OC, all it does is unlock the power limit to vega64 levels from the +50% limit (305w) above reference AMD had implemented. I don’t own a vega56, but apparently that in of itself is a huge deal, just don’t expect any other magic gains like happened unlocking r9 290 to r9 290x cards.

Yeah I know it doesn’t unlock any cores but it still is a worthwhile thing to do if you can do it.

it ups the hbm2 voltage limit, which makes it very worthwhile even when you ignore core clocks.

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I’m considering it.

This is why.

Well I went ahead and flashed the 64 BIOS to my 56, and I can definitely bump the memory higher now, and not getting any more heat that I can tell.

Anyway, thought I’d toss this in here. Buildzoid going over his experience with undervolting Vega 64:

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Well I’ll keep feeding this thread I guess!

Pushed the Vega 56 about as far as I think it’ll go in this case on air: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/22121913

All the benchmarks are reading the GPU incorrectly with the V64 BIOS. SiSoftware Sandra Lite Platinum seems to have gotten the CU’s correct though.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11836/raja-koduri-sabbatical

Legit time off or ‘Garden duty’?

That means he’s out.
Not surprising.

All I can really fault him for is timing the launch at a time where threadripper should have been grabbing all the attention, if that wasn’t a childish attempt to bury bad news then I don’t know what was.

So crowning achievement (threadripper) marred by the old ‘hot and loud’ meme.

There is an old interview with him alongside Lisa and you can clearly see how nervous he is… and he keeps repeating (over and over) how important graphics is to the business.

I think the biggest problem was to market vega still as a gaming card when it was absolutely clear that it’s strongpoints were somewhere else. With that kind of compute on every vega card, I would have gone after the titan and quadro users exclusively. Would that suck for gamers? Well, for most it wouldn’t because they already buy team green shit anyway.

But in any case, Raja was bullshitting around with packs and pricing and all of that. That happened with him in charge. If it was his decision, then he deserves the boot to the ass. If it wasn’t (more likely I think) then he had to smile into cameras while slowly dying on the inside and now just wants out of that chair.

Can’t agree more. He seemed more and more stressed/anxious as the launch came up and something felt off. If it was his idea for the packs, I don’t think he would have been acting that way. It seemed like he had to go along with something, but I still want to know where the idea for packs and pricing BS came from in the first place.

The packs seem like a desperate ‘we are helping towards the bottom line too!’ attempt

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that this was just the marketing departments fault.

Where I work, our marketing department has comiited terrible blunders in the past purely because they did desperate attempts to market stuff without involving other departments.

Would never happen now though as the bloke in charge of marketing is fairly clued up and its centralised (no more left hand not talking to right).

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I bought a pack and don’t feel bad about it. I had bought Prey the day before because it was on sale, and Steam let me return it. In the field asking why I wanted a return I even entered that I had bought the Vega 56 pack that came with Prey, and only had an hour into the game. Got a refund the next day.

I was planning on buying New Colossus anyway, so it wasn’t a big loss to me and now I’m having fun with the card.

I don’t really give a crap about drama with Raja. IMO most of the turmoil is the same old AMD shitstirring oozing out of Reddit. He can do what he wants.

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I agree, but also add that from about 2 days after launch till a few days ago packs where the only cards in stock for any retailers in my area (inc national online chains), I’m not going to make the assumptions about mining, but for whatever reason all the non-pack cards sold out right away, but the cards with packs (which included games worth most of the price difference) never sold out. Thus they did actually provide an avenue for gamers wanting a single card (and I note Xfire drivers where not even out for most of that time) to do so.

There is some speculation that Vega 11 may have a GDDR5 memory controller, where Vega 10 (the silicon for Vega56, Vega64, and Vega FE) did not.

He mentions that HBCC definitely has support for GDDR5, but I don’t know where that is coming from.