Review: ASUS Radeon ROG RX Vega 64 STRIX 8GB

Its always worth watercooling.
For one the VRMs are nice and cool, so low consumption, but on Nvidia GPU's, they will clock to the Max themselves.
From what I have seen, they will clock as high as they can, automatically. Cool them enough, and they will fly.
Once you have a watercooling setup, its like a monitor, you keep it a few generations, so it sort of pays for itself.
If you then get the ref card and WB for a few gens.
With AMD, this gen, its almost the same. Almost.

 

Well, it's good that you can keep the watercooling setup for a few generations, that's something for sure.

With Pascal you're right that they lower clockspeed as the temperature increases. I've got a GTX 1070 and I know my max stable overclock is a maximum boost of 2113Mhz, and it will drop to 2075Mhz stable/consistent clock during long gaming sessions in most games, so I'm only missing out on 2% clockspeed and probably something like 1% performance by not going with watercooling - that's the small performance difference between 2113Mhz and 2075Mhz. So, for Pascal it's not really worth watercooling from a performance perspective either.

(Small aside: in my signature you can see it's at 2050Mhz, but that's the stable/consistent boost I see without added voltage, so not my max overclock, that's just the one I game with most of the time.)

 

AMD yet again charging ahead and blazing trails... Can't help but think that there must be a big difference in routine frame rate performance for Asus to ask you to take down a review just for a bios swap. Be interesting to see what difference it might be! (I wouldn't think much--but if so, why bother asking you to take down the first one?) I think AMD needs to include some custom applications just to demonstrate the stuff their Vega architecture does so much better/faster than Polaris and GF1080, etc. Frame rate comparisons have become so boring of late as there's hardly any difference at all between cards @ 2560x1440 resolutions and up--would love to see the IHVs start putting out little apps again that demonstrate the power of their architectures that it will be awhile before game devs tap into...!

And I always come away amused when people with GF1080 SLI systems start bitching about AMD's power consumption. Now, *that's* funny--to hear people with 1k-watt PSU's or greater talk negatively about power consumption....

 

No matter what, Vega is still a decent upgrade for me.
Has more Vram. I dont leave my pc on 24/7 or play it 40hrs a week. So screw the but it consumes to much power crap.

 

Yes the 56 is more power hungry. With undervolt and HBM overclock it drops some 40-50w in power use (close to 1070 aftermarket power usage) and gains performance around 8-10%. With core oc and undervolt you get to +- power usage but get to vega 64 level of performance.

Of course the prices are not right at the moment. No point buying Vega 64 if it costs around 1080 ti or for 56 around 1080.

If the prices were MSRP both cards actually would make sense.

 

Well I'm over the moon with Vega, totally exceeded my expectations.

Took a £381 56, flashed with 64 bios. Undervolted, overclocked, and currently have a firestrike GPU score sitting in the middle of a 1080 and a ti. Not bad for £381

The card is drawing ~220w during benchmark, GPU and HBM hitting mid 70 degrees with the stock cooler.

It's so easy to fix these cards, once the OEM's get the cooling improved, and sort out the voltages, for the bottom, and top end I think the 56 v 1070 / 64 v 1080 will soon become 56 v 1080 and 64 v ti

 

Hilbert, will it be a NEW BIOS only (with which you will flash the EXISTING card) or the new card, altogether? Why do I ask? Because I smell a fraud here (from the Asus's side). If they promissed to send you a new CARD, that'll confirm my suspicion ...

 

That's one thing I've always wondered.

Why don't reviewerss apply new tim across the board because I've seen how bad a poor factory application of TIM can cause poor results.

Example MSI gaming x card review has high temps, people say its a garbage cooler when the issue was the factory TIM application.

I've had stock cards drop 10c easy from reapplying paste.

 

I looked at the review yesterday, and was like "this doesn't seem very unique."

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/719vy7/no_new_bios_coming_for_asus_strix_vega_64_oc/

 

Well that’s disappointing.

 

Only water cooling will make a different

 

Well thanks for the 25th September update Hilbert: that Asus haven't sent through a new vBIOS. I think it's shady & looks really poor that Asus said they included the wrong vBIOS on the card so you would pull the review and then not providing you with a new vBIOS - it smacks of desperation on their part. I don't really understand how they've got themselves into this mess, they've really not handled it well from a PR perspective. At least we know that this review is now representative of the final product - like you say, they're probably not gonna ever supply you with a new vBIOS.

 

how can this be consider "final retail" if Asus specifically said the BIOS is not the latest? Considering none of the other manufacturers have their custom Vega boards out yet, I can only assume at this point this a pre production sample. Vega was just released why is everyone so surprised by this? oh yea, bias....

 

Thank Hilbert for your review on this
To me this really sad that after market air cooler didn't archive any better cooling and is not wroth wasting $700 USA dollar on RX Vega 64 nor about $550 on the smaller RX Vega 56, and from what I have been hearing it like lottery carp shot with Vega die so they most still have some die issue where performance all over the map.
In long run Nvidia is the less expensive counterparts at this in time and AMD card got sky high price and I'm on Red Team to in fact all the video card I have are from ATI or AMD I even have few CPU system that are AMD as well.

 

i really want to like this card! If i lived in a igloo, that would be my house gone. Damn wattage puts me off. Still may go for the baby one '56 '

 

The guys over at io-tech.fi have had the similar experience like Hilbert, with Asus promising higher clocks. In the end:

 

Epic and tragic.

My Finnish is a little bit rusty: Has this site get the card directly from ASUS?

If it came from ASUS chips should be binned better and cover ALL review sites with golden chips to avoid this PR mess.