Review: ASUS Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX 8GB

There is still time XFX and sapphire have there cards coming out it will be nice to see what they can do

 

i couldnt believe this card was too much for that cooler, considering the blower noisy thingy gets the same or even better performance this has to be a bad bios issue that they will eventually fix and let the card stretch its legs

but then if it still runs hot at 80º and gets loud, jeez, then it really cant handle it any better than the reference cooler, none of this looks right to me, maybe they are overvolting it?

anyway this is all this nonsense with automatic bs and things we cant control backfiring on us, I miss the days when we could simply set a frequency and the chip would just do it or die trying

 

Hilbert. There is a bug on wattman If you set P6 and P7 to the same clock the card actually downclocks to P5. You have to set P6 a couple of mhz below P7. Not sure if still happen this with new drivers. I tested the card in my work with 17.8 only.

 

Quite frankly I'm very happy with my reference Sapphire RX Vega 64.

I'm using a 1920x1080 3d monitor (My next monitor will be a FreeSync 2).
So I'm planning to stay with AMD for a while (I'm not a fanboy, all my previous cards were Nvidia).

The only problem that happens with all reference cards (Nvidia or AMD) is NOISE.
My card is noisy when playing with Anti-Aliasing on. After a few tweaks I found that switching to Bios 2 in the card and using Power Save profile in Wattman, my card is always very quiet.

I bought the Sapphire reference card because previous Guru3d review about ASUS Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX was pretty clear that is not better with temperatures or noise.

Vega chips are already overclocked so is pointless to me try to overclock even more, but noise and temperatures always are problem specially on hot summer days.

Maybe in a few months we can find Gigabyte, MSI or Sapphire custom cards with better cooling.

In June was a rumor about ASUS working in a RX Vega 64 X2 could be interesting, but after ROG fiasco who knows.

 

Vega 56 is actually a good card and most reviews i've read put it slightly ahead or at least equal to a 1070 despite the drivers not being mature. It consumes a little bit more power but it's not as bad as the 64. But yeah the pricing is awful.

It's very frustrating. I own an old Core i5 750 computer i built 10 years ago and i would like to replace it this fall. I would like to try Gsync or FreeSync. Problem is the cheapest 4k IPS Gsync monitor i can find in store is 1.2k CAD. The cheapest 4k IPS FreeSync one i can find is 500-600 bucks. The worse is the 1.2k gsync one is not much better. There's a HUGE difference in price between FreeSync monitors and Gsync monitors in canada. So i'll buy a FreeSync monitor for sure.

I would like to go Vega 56 so i'm able to use it with my eventual FreeSync monitor but those prices .... it's not like the 1070 is cheap but it's around 150-200 bucks less than a Vega 56 in canada.

 

Yeah! Price of RX Vega 64 should be similar to GTX 1080, i.e. about $550.

 

Do you guys remember when it was discovered that AMD uses 3 types of GPUs packets for Vega?
https://videocardz.com/72173/there-are-at-least-three-variants-of-vega-10-gpu-packages

Maybe it has something to do with AMD shipping the crap ones to 3rd party suppliers as a "gift" for their crap support and offers on sub-quality AMD cards and motherboards compared to the others.
I can't believe asus can be this incompetent, yet AMD is known for shipping everything without any technical documentations, like when Ryzen needed many microcode updates just to support DDR4-3200.
Well evga messed up with their ACX early this year so bad that they added 9 thermal monitoring zones and covered the whole card with metal... maybe asus will come around

Also, sorry for not reading the whole thread, if it was covered already but.. Hilbert, since you disassembled the card, did you notice the GPU, or can you recheck it if you still have the card, if it has the resin or no resin? Maybe it is also part of the issue since the heatsink has no full cover clearance because of the raised HBM modules

 

the tear down of this card I seen used an unmolded version of the gpu which has the hbm memory 40 microns higher than the gpu surface not an ideal situation for cooling explains why the memory would not reach that of the reference cards a bit disappointed in AMD will not be buying one of these cards now as it will be a bit like a lottery,aparently MSI and GIGABYTE will not be selling this gpu on custom cards

 

I think the problem is more that they can't get a Custom BIOS that adds anything better than the reference BIOS.
This card, I think, has already been pushed to its limits, and no matter how much better cooling you put on, you are not going to be able to get even +100MHz on all chips stable.
If they want to manually bin the chips, they could, but that is waaaay to lengthy, and costly, for a few extra bucks.

I'm pretty sure MSI and Gigabyte will be coming out with Custom cooled cards, just won't be expecting custom clocks.....

 

Hi Hilbert,
Asus released new bios for RX Vega64 just few weeks ago. You have mentioned in your review that you might retest once new bios is released I know it has been some time since your review, but I'm an AMD fan and I still want to buy Vega. But vega is very hard to get these days. The prices are ridiculous.. I ordered this ASUS Vega64, but I'm on back-order list for weeks now, but I believe I might never get it anyway because of the short supply. The shop will just give up and cancel my order. In case of any miracle and I will get the card, I would like to know if the performance is different with this new BIOS.

Or anyone out there.. if you have this vega with this BIOS, please share your benchmarks.

Many thanks.

 

Not sure HH wants or has the card to revisit this. I do not like posting reviews from other sitesm but here is one from Feb. 8th:

https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/02/08/asus_rog_strix_rx_vega_64_o8g_gaming_video_card/1

 

Cynical perhaps but maybe there's simply no stock left for them to send, there's been several posts stating buyers are picking up the Vega GPU's straight from the manufacturers for retail pricing so between you asking for a review sample and someone buying it straight up for I'm guessing somewhere around 1000 USD or above I'm guessing there's probably not much stock left heh, well there might be other factors too but shortage is probably one of them too.

Currently from a quick glance the Asus Vega Strix 56 is selling for 8500 SEK which is 1067 USD but they're all out of stock and then up to 10900 SEK for the one store that has a few cards left in stock which after conversion lands at 1369 USD.
No idea how many of these chips AMD can get ready in a month and how quickly Asus, Sapphire, MSI and who else is in the market with custom Vega can put out full GPU's but with the current pricing being so skewed if some of these buyers made a offer like that they'd probably sell.

Even starting to affect NVIDIA now too with their own GeForce.com web store running out of stock, not sure how much AMD is profiting from all of this in comparison but the retailers are likely very happy.
(Same with the 580 GPU's selling for 600 - 800 USD or higher depending on availability.)


The demand and lack of availability is likely also hitting Asus, Sapphire, MSI and of course AMD as they can't deliver enough GPU's in time plus there's a risk of the mining market turning or shifting which can leave a lot of people trying to return GPU's too or otherwise offload via other sites leaving AMD with stock that isn't selling. In this case though I believe the complexity of the HBM memory modules were the primary holdup and it's not entirely on AMD producing a more limited supply or something.
(They've also ramped up production but that might take time.)



EDIT: Though there are other factors too, if Asus doesn't find the current reviews to reflect favorably on their Vega model which well it seems they pretty much perform on a similar level and then it differs a bit in cooling efficiency then perhaps they're not interested in sending more review samples out even if there's a newer bios improving results a little bit.

Stock Vega aside from the air model being a blower type GPU is already really solidly built from my understanding, not too much room to improve on and not much headroom for overclocking due to the GPU already being pretty far up with voltage and what not.

 

Thanks.

 

I'm not sure how much relevance it will have for you, but Phoronix tends to indefinitely benchmark hardware over the course of several years; basically whenever there's new drivers or a major OS release. The caveat, of course, is they're Linux benchmarks. Though Linux's AMD closed-source drivers (known as amdgpu-pro) share a lot of base code with Windows, most of the tests involve the open-source drivers, which are wholly developed independently.

If I were you, I'd sit out on this current generation of Vega. By the time prices become reasonable, AMD is likely going to release the next-gen parts. Considering how much cash AMD has raked in due to mining, they ought to have put that money back into R&D so I would hope the next-gen parts are better than what AMD initially planned.

 

Thanks for the advice, but the problem is waiting. Was waiting for Vega, then I was little bit disappointed once it was announced. Then I was waiting for non-reference cards, but they are hard to get or are so expensive that it makes PC gaming almost a sci-fi. I had to buy an XBOX1X as a temporary solution, as that's the closest to a high-end PC gaming I can get these days..

 

Hoping this thread is not dead, but I actually got my hands on one of these and I am wondering about these new bios. The only thing I can find is the bios updater from ASUS and if I use that it seems to update my bios but then it screws up my drivers because wattman just doesn't work anymore. Anyone have an idea what is happening?

 

Does TechPowerUp have the new bios in their database? If so you could use AtiBiosFlash (NOT AtiWinFlash, don't use that.) and do it that way and see if the flashing works better, back up the existing bios though just for safe keeping, ideally switch the bios position on the GPU and dump both bioses for backup purposes which can be done without needing a reboot or anything though if you don't flip it back it'll use the other bios when you restart.

EDIT: AtiFlash.
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/ati-atiflash/