Vega FE Hybrid: Fixing PWR Leakage & OC Boost
Gamers Nexus
Published on Jul 13, 2017
Our results & review video for the Vega: Frontier Edition water cooling mod using our hybrid kit, showing power leakage, thermals, noise levels, FPS, and overclocking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbS7c2Een8o
AMD Vega Hybrid Mod: Fixing Power Leakage for Higher OC
By Steve Burke Published July 13, 2017 at 5:12 pm
Vega: Frontier Edition Overclocking in SPECviewperf
"Getting into benchmark numbers, this next chart shows the SPECviewperf performance improvement in various workloads with our stock Hybrid and overclocked Hybrid mods. Again, the point isn’t comparison against the Titan Xp – the point is just to look at Vega air vs. water.
3DSMax posts a performance improvement of about 6% when overclocked with the hybrid mod, with equal performance for the stock air and hybrid Vega FE cards. Catia posts an 11% performance gain from the overclock and liquid, with Creo at a 5% gain, followed by the Energy test at a 15% gain, and then the Maya test with a 6.8% gain. The medical benchmark is responsive to the overclock, posting nearly a 19% improvement, with Showcase at 13%, SNX-02 at 9.5%, and SW-03 at an 8% gain from the overclock."
"Only a few of these are particularly exciting, with the rest feeling more like a lot of effort for not a lot of gains.
What this does do, though, is set the stage for potential growth from a 100MHz clock boost. The impact on gaming and synthetic tests is more pronounced, despite this card clearly not being gaming-ready at launch – and again, that’s indicative of a rushed launch on AMD’s part. The drivers were not ready, features are rumored to be left disabled, and yet the card was shipped. Even still, despite this being “not a gaming card” and having shipped with incomplete features, we can observe clock scaling headroom in an A/B test versus the air-cooled Vega: FE card ($1000).
We’re not yet talking RX Vega performance and suggest that you refrain from attempting to speculate or extract numbers; just wait for our review to see how RX Vega does in these games."
Vega Hybrid Mod – 3DMark
"With the 1080p FireStrike test, our graphics score on the Hybrid mod posted an overclocked score of 24,998, versus the 21,355 score of the stock air-cooled card – that’s a gain of 17% with the overclocked Hybrid card. With the overclocked air card, we were at 24,554, or a gain of 15% over the stock card. The boost strictly from our extra 40MHz on liquid isn’t tremendous – only a couple percent – but again, this is about thermal and noise performance more than anything."
1080p
Here’s a look at 1440p (Extreme) scaling:
And 4K (Ultra):
http://media.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2017/GPUs/vega/hybrid-fe/vega-hybrid-firestrike-ultra.png
FireStrike Ultra has our overclocked versus stock air gain at around 17.7%, once again, providing some consistency between 4K and 1080p.
And here’s TimeSpy, just to round it out:
Conclusion: Vega Limited by Cooling, then Max Power
"For anyone who skipped the thermals & power page because it’s less “exciting” than gaming, we’d advise going back and reading that page prior to commenting or reading the conclusion. That’s really the bulk of this coverage, and is far more important than the gaming benchmarks; that said, the gaming benchmarks do provide some insight as to clock scalability of Vega in different applications.
This card still should not be bought for gaming, and the card and its drivers still should get polish from AMD before it’s bought in general, really, but the gaming results are interesting. The clock behavior is the most deserving of attention, just be careful of how far you take those numbers, and remember to wait for RX Vega-specific numbers rather than speculate.
All that cleared away, the power leakage reduction under liquid was non-trivial, and granted us our additional ~40MHz of OC headroom on the core (by way of granting ~30W more to the core).
Under max consumption and overclock, we measured current at the PSU cables to be ~33.3A at 12V, or just under 400W (+/-2% error). Given that there’s also power going through the PCIe slot, this is one of the most power-hungry overclocks we’ve managed without modding BIOS to increase the power limit. The gains in thermals were tremendous, ultimately affording the reduction in power leakage (and overall increased power available to the core).
Noise is also down, falling to ~43dBA without the VRM direct airflow, or ~50dBA with it (as opposed to 90% GPU fan speeds with our air-cooled overclock). Performance gains range from 6% to 27%, depending on application and how the GPU is used. We noted that HBM2 overclocks, like with the Fury cards, offer an important boost to performance.
Uplift looks good in some titles, but is also at the expense of major power consumption and a lot of effort. As brackets become available for these new cards, it’ll be easier to justify the mod. We’re curious as to what AMD’s liquid-cooled variant offers beyond the CLC, given its ~+$600 price hike. Kind of steep.
Regardless, the big take-away is clock behavior and performance scaling with increased clock-rates on Vega: FE. It’ll be interesting to see how RX Vega manages and if its clock is boosted, but we’ll wait until RX Vega’s launch for more coverage of that aspect."
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2986-amd-vega-hybrid-mod-results-overclocking-liquid-vs-air