Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 64 Nitro+ Review

[FormatC]

Sapphire’s engineers took their sweet time creating a graphics card that heats up the third-party Vega 64 market by staying cooler than the competition. We run its Radeon RX Vega 64 Nitro+ through our test suite.

Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 64 Nitro+ Review : Read more

 

[docswag]

What mosfets is sapphire using for VDDC

 

[AgentLozen]

Even though Vega 64 is rough around the edges, I appreciate that you gave the Sapphire Nitro an Editor's Choice award for it's technical prowess.

There is so much hardware out there with cut corners that it's nice to see something work so well.

 

[FormatC]

What mosfets is sapphire using for VDDC

Plase take a look at page Two. You will get the full info, pictures included.

I wrote on page Two:

...This so-called doubling is achieved through a total of seven IR3598s located on the back of the board. Voltage conversion for the 14 circuits is handled by one IRF6811 (on the high side) and one IRF6894 (on the low-side) for each circuit. The latter also include the necessary Schottky diode.

 

[docswag]

What mosfets is sapphire using for VDDC

Plase take a look at page Two. You will get the full info, pictures included.

I wrote on page Two:

...This so-called doubling is achieved through a total of seven IR3598s located on the back of the board. Voltage conversion for the 14 circuits is handled by one IRF6811 (on the high side) and one IRF6894 (on the low-side) for each circuit. The latter also include the necessary Schottky diode.

My bad, I must have skimmed over that part. Thanks!

 

[Cryio]

So once the drivers will actually apply to 3rd party OEMs as well given the reference with slower clocks is sometimes faster, will basically make Vega64 universally and sometimes significantly faster than the 1080 and guaranteed substantially faster in DX12/Vulkan games.

So ... with some underclocking and undervolting, this should perform on the level of the 1080 while being more future proof. Got it.

Wonderful work AMD! Too bad miners skyrocketed the price.

 

[Sakkura]

Is this ever going to be sold to people, though?

And will there be a Vega 56 version?

 

[Wisecracker]

Thanks for the bench work. Interesting boost in minimums in some titles considering struggles with 'optimizations'

What's the verdict on the previously reported 'elevation difference' between the memory stacks and processor?

 

[FormatC]

This is randomly the molded version. That means, no difference.

Powercolor got unmolded and the result is well-known. But I also know from others, that Sapphire is using also both packages. The 3rd package version is Vega56 only.

 

[Cryio]

While also being more efficient or as efficient as the 1080 I might add.

 

[FormatC]

It depends at your preferences, what you need in your rig. Only the price is currently a big con. Too bad.

 

[mahone7]

a gtx 1080 equivalent 16 months later
WELP

 

[Martell1977]

Maybe I missed it, but did you OC the HBM2? I read a lot about how Vega tends to get a bigger boost from overclocking the HBM2 than from OC the core. Would like to see a comparison between this card at stock and with a nice HBM2 OC.

 

[FormatC]

We wrote OC und UV reviews, this card is not different

@mahone7:
I saw the first Vega over one year ago in Sonoma. And I got my first PVT samples of a custom card in summer. AMD lost too much time for nothing.

 

[techy1966]

Sapphire’s engineers took their sweet time creating a graphics card that heats up the third-party Vega 64 market by staying cooler than the competition. We run its Radeon RX Vega 64 Nitro+ through our test suite.

Sapphire Radeon RX Vega 64 Nitro+ Review : Read more

Very nice review of Sapphires new card as always they just do it right without to many issues. I currently have Sapphires Tri-X 390x 8GB card and it performs like a champ and runs way cooler than other 390 series cards I have seen in reviews for them. If I was going to get a new video card right now and it was gonna be a new AMD card it would be one made by Sapphire for sure as I just really like their cooler design and how effective it is on hardware that is not known to play nice with most other coolers out their.

 

[FormatC]

The Sapphire RX Vega Nitro+ is a good example to show, how to do cooling right.

 

[TJ Hooker]

While also being more efficient or as efficient as the 1080 I might add.

How do you figure that? Sapphire Vega 64 looks to be maybe 15% faster on average than a 1080 FE, while using ~90% more power. That means the Sapphire Vega 64 performance per watt is only ~60% of a 1080's perf/watt. Do you really think you can increase the performance per watt of a Vega 64 by 50% through underclocking/volting?

Edit: I forgot to take into account the fact that the sapphire card seems to be performing at less than it's full potential due to drivers. So it's perf/watt is probably going to end up a bit better at stock settings than I estimated here. Still doubt you can get it to match or exceed a 1080s perf/watt through tweaking.

 

[Rock_n_Rolla]

Hoowaah! Finally.., a heaivly OC'd Vega 64 \ii/ kudos to Sapphire, actually they're one of ATi's long time partners way back when the company was still on its own (not yet bought by AMD), till now they still have exclusivity (aside from other long time ATi partners) on Radeon's top end GPU models to fiddle and tweak with.

IMO, based on the benchies it really is freakin fast tho i dont have any idea what the percentage increase it will yield when AMD release a vendor specific driver for those heavily OC'd models like this one but based on the specs and benchies for sure it will perform much faster.

 

[silverblue]

I was wondering if it was possible that AMD would release a Vega Nano, as downclocking Vega should put it back within a decent efficiency window (like with the Fury Nano), however this time around the competition from the 1070 and its mini ITX derivatives is too strong. Moving Vega to the next manufacturing node cannot come soon enough, but we can't blame the current node for everything.

 

[rush21hit]

Good review. Good luck finding one of these, tho.

Even the reference are elusive, if not at sky high price. Understandably, all thanks to its monstrous compute output. It's an AMD's tradition; an overly engineered gpu with dissapointing actual performance because of driver incompetence.
Well, to AMD's defense, Gameworks titles run like crap on Nvidia's too. So there's that.

 

[photonboy]

VEGA-64 at a cheaper price, lower power consumption (coming in 2018), better drivers, and more GAMES that properly utilize it would make a really great product.

*However, NVidia will be coming out with a Volta product that adds in better ASync Compute etc so competition is going to heat up between quite similar GPU architectures in 2018.

(Gamers Nexus did a review of the Titan V100 that has a Volta GPU in it. It also has tensor cores that don't get utilized for gaming but in his quick gaming tests it appears it has good ASync Compute as it managed to get up to 2x the FPS as a GTX1080 at a lower frequency... I won't bore you with the details but normally things don't scale CUDA vs FPS etc so it's a good SUGGESTION at the very least that gaming Volta for DX12/Vulkan especially is on track... probably other features in there too, and frankly I think AMD and NVidia GPU's are going to get incredibly CLOSE in architecture especially considering that the PS4, XBOX ONE and likely PS5 etc will be based on a GCN architecture so I think we'll just fine-tune that)

 

[ddferrari]

So once the drivers will actually apply to 3rd party OEMs as well given the reference with slower clocks is sometimes faster, will basically make Vega64 universally and sometimes significantly faster than the 1080 and guaranteed substantially faster in DX12/Vulkan games.

So ... with some underclocking and undervolting, this should perform on the level of the 1080 while being more future proof. Got it.

Wonderful work AMD! Too bad miners skyrocketed the price.

I'm not sure a card that costs $150 more than a GTX 1080 and uses about 125 watts more power while gaming is a triumph. Why not spend the extra $50 and get a $1080 Ti at this point? It destroys this card regardless of the API and still runs cooler and uses less juice.

 

[jodeya.fw]

You guys' sure it's 42mm thick? It looks almost like a 3 slot card. 52mm seems more plausible. Some other website are reporting 54mm instead.

 

[FormatC]

Sorry, this is a typo. I had my German original 4.8 cm thickness + 0.5 cm back plate (+ 0.2 cm PCB).
Thx for finding, it's fixed

 

[raisonjohn]

Thanks for the review!

Spotted some corrections needed though:
"At the other end, a slot bracket hosts three DisplayPort 1.4-ready outputs and one HDMI 2.0 connector."

It should have been [two] DisplayPort 1.4-ready outputs and [two] HDMI 2.0 connectors. (Also applies to the error on the table showing "(3) DP 1.4, (1) HDMI 2.0", which should have been [(2)] DP 1.4, [(2)] HDMI 2.0.)

Reference: Bracket photo (in this review) and Official Website (http://www.sapphiretech.com/productdetial.asp?pid=B679632D-4931-4156-9DB5-0EFC5453C6D5&lang=eng)