RX Vega 56 & 64 are HERE! Are they HOT or NOT?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,156 words · ~5 min read
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gtx 1080 or vega 1080 1070 or waiting
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for 1080 ti bill switch to investing in a new build
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1080p wait for vegas wait for rx vega
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wait for navi so at gtc last year
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we expected to get AMD vega in early
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2017 but as the slide helpfully points
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out the timeline was subject to change and change it did it is now
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august but today we finally find out
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was vega worth the wait
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synergy allows you to share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers
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at once check it out now at the link in the video description
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meet vega or more accurately rx vega 56
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and 64. the consumer versions of the
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vega founders excuse me frontier edition cards that
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launched back in june of this year it's named for the number of next-gen compute
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units on board if we compare it against the frontier edition we can see that
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we're on par for compute units on vega 64 but we've got about half the video
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memory at eight gigs and our clocks are a little lower much lower in vega 56's
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case but like that card and one of the likely reasons behind the delays they
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both have hbm2 memory the newest
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revision of the blazing fast memory that first debuted on AMD's own fury cards
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back in 2015 which both does and doesn't
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feel like a long time ago depending on how you look at it anyway
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aside from actually basically everything
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new to vega is a tile-based rendering mode that AMD calls the drawstream
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binning rasterizer a feature similar to what NVIDIA implemented on maxwell that
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AMD tells us will improve performance without any extra work from game
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developers let's meet the lineup for today we've got vega 56 both air and
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liquid cooled flavors of rx vega 64 and the gtx 1070 and 1080 that their pricing
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puts them up against and we'll be treating all three cards to our
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mainstream gaming platforms from both the red team and the blue team at the
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top end we immediately see the vega 64 liquid cooled card pull out into a
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comfortable lead though this quickly changes in rise of the tomb raider where
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the gtx 1080 overruns it moving a tier down while the vega 56 significantly
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widens and closes these gaps on the 1070
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at times appearing like a kind of 1070 ti this theme of trading blows seems to
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take place across all of our gaming benchmarks and our synthetics tell a
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similar tale so if you're an AMD fan who wanted to see competition you're going
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to be happy but if you wanted AMD to blow the doors off NVIDIA
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well you might be a little disappointed you'll be more excited about the
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productivity applications in cinebench r15 blender and adobe media encoder we
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see a clear trend favoring even the air cooled rx vega 64 over the gtx 1080
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something that we're not entirely surprised by but we're happy to see
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considering AMD's traditional strength in general purpose GPU tasks
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unfortunately another point of divergence is power consumption the rx
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vega 64 is an absolute hog when it comes
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to power to say nothing of the liquid cooled version and thermal performance
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isn't much better for the air cooled vega 64 either with the heaviest
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throttle out of any of the cards we tested
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you actually need both eight pin power
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connectors for these cards ouch
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with that said the value proposition here is still pretty compelling our air
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cooled rx vega 64 is quite close to the gtx 1080 founders edition in gaming
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while the liquid cooled variant is a better performer but one that's
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ultimately held back a little by its higher price tag
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for productivity and gp GPU though rx
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vega really shines of course the same is true of the excellent productivity
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performance of rx vega 56 but the real
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story is gaming holy balls we're actually doing pretty great at this
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price especially since we couldn't even find a gtx 1070 for less than about
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430 dollars though with that said the
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value argument of the entire vega lineup
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is pretty complicated because the higher end cards may not be purchasable without
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AMD's value-added bundle so we're talking a discount on a ryzen 7 a free
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sync monitor and some free games that seems to add about a hundred dollars to
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the price though AMD says it's worth 420
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dollars so the question really becomes
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vega 56 looks pretty good with or without the bundle depending on whether
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you want that stuff that's part of AMD's strategy to deter coin miners from
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buying these cards but at the very high end the vega 64 liquid cooled at 6.99
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with rebates and games that one becomes a tougher sell but feel
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free to tell us if we're wrong in the comments below so conclusion then the
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wait is finally over vega might bear
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more similarity to the performance and power consumption profile of NVIDIA's
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last generation maxwell architecture when it comes to gaming tasks but the
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good news is that it's enough to be in the conversation for high-end GPU buyers
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and those poor folks with high resolution free sync monitors that now
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finally have a real option for a graphics card to drive them the only
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thing remaining then is to see what NVIDIA has up their sleeves with volta
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synergy it's symbiosis it's energy
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it's a software product that lets you solve the problem once and for all of
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having two keyboards and two mice because you can share one mouse and one
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keyboard between multiple computers so
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whatever your reason for having more than one computer laptop and desktop um
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you know Linux workstation and Windows machine for gaming or mac or whatever it
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works on everything it's amazing you just install synergy and you just
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seamlessly move your mouse between the computers wow they've got basic and pro
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options with a one-time payment and advanced features include things like
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clipboard sharing between the computers for easy cut paste dragging and dropping
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files between computers the ability to set up hotkeys and more and the best
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part is you can use our link in the video description to get 50 off synergy
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today so thanks for watching guys if you
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dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider
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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch
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store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you
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should definitely join