WEBVTT

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every once in a while i get my hands on something so special so unique that not

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only does nobody have one almost no one

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even knows that it exists and today is

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one of those days thanks to rare tech collector yuki ons

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i'm gonna go with yuki on our forum i

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have this a hopefully working prototype of the

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long lost vega 16 a graphics card from

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AMD that never saw the light of day was it

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for the best does it suck well we're gonna find out

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aren't we ladies and gentlemen

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this is crazy sometimes you'll see a prototype card

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that you look closely at and you go yeah that was basically a qualifying sample

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this not so much this thing is dev board af

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so all these leads up here on the top edge of the board so you'd be able to

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plug like some kind of custom proprietary harness onto them these are

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all soldered on so they would use that usually for things like monitoring the

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thermals or the power consumption of the board while they are developing the

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drivers for it on the other side we've got just the right mix of what i would call

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professional cluj this is a proper-ish

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cooling solution you can see there's Radeon branding on the fan and this

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heatsink here looks to be actually custom made for this board but then in

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terms of how they're keeping it cool well it's just like yeah there's you

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know this random fan kind of bolted onto it and we've got a theory as to why it's

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set up like this now with a desktop card you would create a reference cooler for

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it at the same time that you're creating the reference board

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but check this out the bottom edge of the card only has enough pins for a pci

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express 8x interface so it's got a 16x

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connector on it because they would have been validating this GPU in a desktop

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motherboard they would have needed to just chunk it in there but

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this would have been a laptop product at

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the end of the day and until very recently pretty much all dedicated gpus

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and laptops ran 8x interfaces another

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oddity is this check this out it's got all displayport ports no HDMI so that

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would mean that this board if it was ever destined for release would have

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probably been like a workstation board or something like that like there's no

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way this would have ended up in a gaming GPU eight pin power connector oof

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on like a a low tier vega 16. i mean i guess you would just put it on and then

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we've seen this before actually finished reference designs that just have the

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contact pads for a connector but it's just not on there so maybe it's just in

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case hoping for the best oh

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we're lit up ladies and gentlemen oh wow

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that's gross okay so this seems to be running at 24.

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it hurts i don't even think that's 30.

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one hurts

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that is 24 times more cinematic than your favorite films the only option in

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the basic display adapter properties here is 64 hertz yeah wait no that can't

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be one hertz that's not even right what's even going on right now 4k 24

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hertz i believe that i don't believe 1 or 64 looking at this

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wow that is that is some tearing ladies no one so we've just got the microsoft

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basic display adapter driver uh Anthony did you have any AMD drivers on this

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before like did this have an AMD jeep unit before would it have had a chance

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to grab it uh no no okay no okay so that

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makes sense uh let's go ahead and fire up GPU z and see what this thing picks

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up as normally even if we're talking about graphics cards that have had their

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firmware tampered with by you know wish scammers or

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pre-production cpus it'll normally be able to grab things

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like you know how much cash is on the CPU or whatever else like

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half of these fields are not populated directx support unknown shaders unknown

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rops unknown it just has no idea what's going on

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so it knows default clock but not GPU clock it can't read it

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it knows it has hbm2 memory but it thinks it has zero megabytes even many

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of the fields that are populated are clearly wrong it says it's running at

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PCIe 16x 3.0 but we know it doesn't even

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have enough pins for that these are the latest adrenaline drivers from AMD's

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website if there's anything that would know what this card is it would

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obviously be AMD's own drivers right i

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doubt this is going to work normally they have to manually add the ids for

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every card that the driver works with so if there was some way for us to know

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what that was and add it in i don't know maybe but probably not lttstore.com

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oh something wrong now that's interesting though that error message

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it did detect AMD graphics hardware

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but just not supported AMD graphics hardware

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we might not be defeated yet this wouldn't be an Anthony video if there

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wasn't some reason to have Linux come in and save the day where's my Linux boot

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drive i'm legitimately excited about this i had no idea that any of that

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random grab mega stuff yuki sent was going to actually fire up

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and nothing we are not defeated yet though vega owners even the ones who

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bought finished cards have had some issues in Linux and there's kind of a

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list of tips and tricks that we can try starting with unplugging our display

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cable from the graphics card and plugging it into our onboard GPU which

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means we need an HDMI connection

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HDMI to the rescue hrvg oh look at that

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oh interesting vga compatible controller

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nba ti vega 12.

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huh like vega 12 uh that's that's a finished

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notebook GPU isn't it it's uh i believe

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it's built into the apus the high-end apus but i'm not sure at

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this stage we could attempt to use our vega 16 but it's very unlikely to work

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without a couple of kernel parameter changes AMD GPU dot vm underscore update

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underscore mode equals three is going to tell the driver to use the CPU to update

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video memory when needed we also need to turn dynamic power management off we

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need to disable some more power management features we need to make sure

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the system doesn't try and continue running the card if it runs into a

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problem we need to provide more information for troubleshooting that's

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not strictly speaking needed but it may help us diagnose any further issues and

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we need to disable GPU recovery in the case of a crash now this isn't going to

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let the card just boot up like it was able to in Windows but we should be able

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to render our games on the card and then pass through the work that's been done

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to the integrated GPU kind of like we did when we got that mining card running

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in Windows in games Anthony prepared all that stuff in

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manjaro Linux vega 16. it's our own special branch of Linux just in case you

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know you've got one of these cards that you need to run

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glx gears is a simple render test and we're going to run the vega 16 version

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of it to make sure that the rendering is done on the graphics card rather than

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the onboard like i described before and that is some really ugly artifacting

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like what does that look like does that look like a memory problem to you yeah

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it kind of looks like it but it's working

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yeah that's wow

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okay the only way to know if it's working for sure is to know that it's like heating up do we know for sure that

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that's rendering on this one so here we have all of the information saying the

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gl renderer is currently the AMD vega 12. if i ran it without that parameter

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it would just run on the standard integrated graphics

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it really isn't running very warm apparently this is running with vsync on

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though so that could be part of the reason it's just not working that hard

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let's fire up a game shall we roll cs go all right let's do it

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we're playing some vegas 16 cs go someone at home

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is like from that lab it's gonna be like what happened to that thing given that

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weird artifacting we saw on the render test this is way better than i would

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have expected oh and it's definitely heating up now we are looking at 50 60

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FPS running at 1080 all high anti-aliasing off

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i mean it's playable like well playable

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it's not great but it's playable

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unreal sorry source source source engine a

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gamer joke to put those performance numbers in context we went ahead and

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fired up the same game running at the same settings on the onboard graphics

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this time we're looking at about 30 to 35 frames per second

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so yeah given that that's a comparison to

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onboard graphics you know the vega 16 is not exactly a high performance part

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but it's working let's go back to our non-modified kernel Linux and try one

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more thing this is a little tool called core control we can pull up the system

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tab and have a look at what we got in here

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uh yeah that doesn't really oh hey you know we've got a new piece of

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information apparently it has four gigs of RAM

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fascinating i mean it might be right it also might not because it thinks it's a

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vega 12 and all that but okay anyway

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more interestingly we can go into our profile here

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fire up GPU one okay and check this out

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we can take this slider and move it all

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the way to the right

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pretty cool this may give us more performance

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i mean going from 300 megahertz to 1300 megahertz assuming those numbers mean

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anything should be a pretty significant performance bump dang

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it's real working now this is crazy

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so what is this thing

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it's a it's got 16 compute units which makes it more akin

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to a mobile part but it's got like

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you know 1300 megahertz core clock speeds hbm2 memory what is it maybe it

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was gonna be like a mid-range fire gl card but then if that four gigs of RAM

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is right that wouldn't be enough for work so it crashed

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in fairness it wasn't you know done right now there are a few more things

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that we could try what we suspect is that by dragging the sliders all the way

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to the right we were actually putting the card in kind of an overclocked state

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like it's its maximum possible turbo and so the way that AMD would probably be

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working on this card is they would be trying all these different power

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profiles monitoring voltages monitoring temperatures monitoring power draw using

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all these leads on the back and you would eventually end up with a driver

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that's tuned so that it will it'll burst up like that but won't necessarily try

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to stay there so we're not going to try and do the entire AMD hardware

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engineering and software driver teams jobs with this one

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engineering board so that's pretty much the end of our

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experiment then i'm sure you guys would love to see us pull the cooler off take

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off the thermal paste like really dig into this thing and look at what's there

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but remember guys we didn't pay for this we do need to return it still as

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functional as it is so i'm just gonna leave that alone and just

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thank yuki for lending us this card thanks for watching guys if you're

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looking for something else to watch why not check out our sort of similar-ish

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video where we got an old mining GPU so one with no display outputs whatsoever

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and used it to run games babyface me is gonna see you there