The most luxurious flagship in history! In-depth evaluation of AMD Vega 64 water-cooled version

Compared with the excitement of CPU products, graphics cards are obviously caught in a strange circle this year. From Q1′ s slump to Q2′ s turnaround by mining storm, the whole graphics card market seems to deviate from traditional consumers more and more.

In the product release, the graphics card has also been very tepid in recent years. AMD has temporarily bid farewell to the high-end graphics card market since the beginning of the four series, and has been wandering in the middle end. NV also significantly slowed down the pace of research and development, focusing on the optimization of energy consumption ratio.

Now AMD has finally brought Vega series graphics cards. Can this series make some waves for the stagnant water of graphics cards like Ryzen?

Product specification introduction:

There are actually four models of Vega at present. There are three models with complete cores, namely, the water-cooled limited edition, the air-cooled limited edition and the air-cooled retail version of Vega 64. There is also a Vega 56 with castrated cores, and a set of stream processors is missing.

This test is the highest-end water-cooled limited edition Vega 64. In terms of specifications, the core is basically inherited from Fury X, but the core frequency is greatly improved, and the benchmark turbo frequency is close to 1.7GHz.

The video memory part uses HBM2, and AMD continues to popularize HBM as its differentiated feature.

Packaging and accessories of products:

This test is the top-end water-cooled version of Vega, and the whole package is very huge, catching up with the packaging of an ITX chassis.

Because the graphics card comes with water cooling, the box needs to be so big in order to protect the product.

Now Vega doesn’t provide the driver CD, and the driver needs to be downloaded from official website.

The only thing in the graphics card that can be called an accessory is the installation screws of four water cooling rows, which are really not equipped with anything.

Product appearance appreciation:

You can see the whole picture when you take out the graphics card. This limited edition of Vega is made of aluminum anode shell, and the texture is not bad.

There is a complete backplane on the back of the graphics card, which is also made of aluminum anode material.

The display interface of the graphics card is 3*DP+1*HDMI, which is a relatively conventional practice.

The power supply socket of the graphics card is double 8 pins, and there is a row of load indicator lights on the back of the interface.

There is a set of light switches behind the power supply socket to control the switch and color of the power supply load light respectively.

This cube in front of the graphics card is quite fun, ensuring that the "R" of the A card logo can be seen from every angle.

There is also a belief light on the top of the graphics card to meet the light control.

There are only warranty stickers on the graphics card, so it is not recommended to disassemble it by yourself.

There is a small switch behind the water pipe, which is not specified, but it should beBIOS switch, you can choose the graphics card mode.The default is on the high performance file.

The heat dissipation part of the graphics card is aCold row of 12 cm fanThere is a metal nameplate of RADDEOM attached to the fan.

The water cooling row is a thick row with a thickness of about 45 mm.

The fan is provided by NIDEC in Japan, but the scheme is very similar to Sanyo’s gentle typhoon, so it should have a certain blood relationship, and it is quite suitable for water-cooled row.

Product disassembly picture reward:

The disassembly of Vega is complicated, and it requires two kinds of Torx screws and two kinds of Phillips screws, so the tools must be prepared in advance.

It is suggested that the backplane of the graphics card should be removed at the end, and the front shell and the pressurized backplane at the core should be removed first, so that the graphics card can be protected a little more.

There are also many screws on the back of the graphics card, which are used to fix the water-cooling parts on the front. The black pressure backboard should be removed first.

The back of the backboard is stamped as a whole, and then the protruding part of the graphics card components is milled off, which is quite complicated to process.

The front of the graphics card is an integrated water cooling head, which is the most complicated scheme ever seen in integrated water cooling.

Near the graphics card baffle are the water-cooled water pump and the core cold head. The red color next to it corresponds to the materials of each power supply part of the graphics card. It can be clearly seen from the LOGO that this is a cool and supreme OEM.

At the other end of the graphics card is a single connected position, which should play the role of a water tank to ensure that the water cooling system has enough water cooling liquid for long-term use.

From the back of the cold head, it can be seen that the PCB will be fixed on a metal reinforced board, and it can be seen that the MOS and inductor related to power supply will contact through the thermal pad to ensure the PCB to completely dissipate heat.

The base of the graphics card core isPure copper materialThe mirror effect is not obvious.

Product PCB introduction:

Next, introduce the supply situation of graphics card PCB.

First, let’s take a group of photos of the front and back of the graphics card PCB. Due to the adoption of HBM memory, the original memory around the core is cancelled, and the PCB density is reduced a lot.

Behind the power socket of the video card isTwo 0.56uH inductorsUsed to get the first pass.

There are two sockets under the graphics card.The long one is the power supply socket of the water pump, and the short one is the socket for the fan.

The core power supply of the graphics card is 12 phases, and many materials are placed on the back of the graphics card. It can be seen that this time Vega is all made of patch materials, and the capacitors are all made of polymer and ceramic capacitors, which saves money.

The power supply chip at the core of the graphics card is IR 3521, which is a set of power supply scheme customized by IR for AMD.

The core power supply of each phase is driven by an IR3598 as the Driver. The input capacitor of power supply is ceramic+polymer, the MOS is IR6894+IR6811, the inductance is 0.19uH patch inductor, and the output capacitor is polymer capacitor. The materials for the whole power supply are quite in place.

The core of Vega is packaged with two HBM2 video memories, with a total capacity of 8G.

The biggest advantage of HBM2 video memory is that the package change greatly reduces the delay, but because AMD only uses two video memories this time, the bandwidth advantage is not as obvious as the previous generation.

The core size is smaller than the previous generation FURY X, but it is still much larger than 1080.

Vega’s core power supply is a little more complicated than traditional graphics cards, and there are many kinds of small power supplies, as shown in the figure below.The video card is powered by MVDD.

The power supply of VDDCI and 1.8V is shown from top to bottom.

There is a group of VPP power supply below the core, and the power supply capacity is not high (1.*V, 2A), which also supplies power to small things.

Because the display interface is all digital, the low-pass part is very simple.

Product test platform:

The following is the detailed configuration table of the test platform. Since 8700K will wait until October, we will continue to use 6700K for the time being.

The motherboard still uses Z270-Phoenix GAMING.

The memory is DDR4 8G*4 of the pirate ship. The actual operating frequency is 2133C15.

SSD is three pieces of INTEL, and the system disk uses the mainstream 535 to ensure that the test is closer to the average user. 240G is used as the system disk, and 480G*2 is mainly used to play test games. There are more and more games, so you can only add SSD.

The radiator is captain 240 of Kyushu.

Graphics card performance test:

Simple evaluation conclusion:

Because there are many miscellaneous test items, in order to avoid dizziness, first of all, provide the refined version of the test conclusion:

This test mainly uses five graphics cards, RX 480 8G Ultra Platinum, GTX 1060 6G Red Dragon, GTX 980 Ti Extreme Edition, GTX 1070 Red Dragon and RX Vega 64 LIQ.

From the overall test,Vega 64 can still maintain more advantages in the face of the non-public versions of 980 Ti and 1070.

· In terms of power consumption, Vega has made obvious progress compared with AMD’s original products, and its energy consumption ratio is also better than that of NV’s older 980 Ti, but it is still not as good as that of 1070.

Due to the great changes in the testing items of graphics cards in the past year, the tests of 1070 and 980 Ti are relatively old, so the proportion of DX9 games is relatively large, which will have a little advantage for N cards.

Introduction of performance test items:

For children’s shoes interested in further understanding the comparative performance, detailed test data will be provided here.

The test will be roughly divided into the following parts: GPU theoretical performance, GPU benchmark test, game performance test, professional software test and power consumption test.

The amount of data in this article is violent. If you feel dizzy, take your time. You always have to pay a price to know the truth. If it doesn’t matter, just don’t complain when you are trapped.

Performance test and analysis of graphics card：

The theoretical performance test of GPU is carried out with the built-in tools of AIDA64. At present, the theoretical calculation ability of A card will be much higher than that of N card.

3D benchmark, mainly running some benchmark software, from the test results, Vega 64 and 1080 are roughly the same.

In the 3D game test, the games of different generations of DX9~DX12 are classified in the table, which will be more clear. Due to the time of performance test, the test items will be different. I bought a lot of games for the test last year ~

Similar to the results of other AN tests, with the evolution of the game generation, the advantages of Vega gradually expanded, with the gaps of 10.36%, 18.50% and 27.86% respectively. However, due to the relatively small number of 1070 DX11 game tests, the overall proportion of DX9 is relatively large, with an overall gap of only 18.88%.

It is good to have a simple look at the performance test of professional software. Generally speaking, A card will be better than N card of the same level in this project.

Finally, a simple performance test summary.

Graphics card power consumption test:

From the power consumption test, compared with the past A card, the optimization of energy consumption ratio is still obvious. Even in high performance mode, Vega is still lower than 980 Ti. Therefore, the energy consumption is much better than that of the previous generation N card.

Actual operating parameters:

The running frequency of Vega 64 water-cooled version in the test software is about 1688~1750MHz, and the memory frequency is 945MHz.

The fan speed cannot be displayed on AIAD64 and GPU-Z, but the actual operation is really not noisy. The temperature can’t be displayed on AIAD64 and GPU-Z, but FURMARK does display normally.In FURMARK baking machine, the core temperature is about 65 degrees, which is quite good.

Historical test comparison:

Here is a comparison of the graphics cards I have tested since this time. Because the test items will be quite different, the results can only be used for reference. Especially in the test of 1080FE, there were few games in hand at that time, so DX9′ s weight in statistics exceeded 40%, and it directly won Vega 64. This time, I just finished the evaluation of 1950X. It’s good that Vega can send it normally. I really don’t have time to borrow 1080x for comparison. Let’s make do with it.

Simple summary:

About the performance of the graphics card:

Because the core specification is similar to FURY X, the performance of Vega is roughly that FURY X increases linearly with frequency. Because the core frequency has really improved a lot this time, the overall improvement is still obvious.

About the power consumption of the graphics card:

This time, the energy consumption ratio of Vega has been optimized, so although the frequency has been improved a lot, the power consumption is still within the acceptable range.

About the workmanship of the graphics card:

Although there is a blank space on the front of the PCB of Vega’s graphics card this time, the overall materials and scheme are still relatively strong, and the heat dissipation part of the graphics card should be the most luxurious scheme among its own radiators at present.

About the heat dissipation of the graphics card:

The cooling effect and workmanship of the graphics card are good, and the water pipes are relatively soft. To talk about shortcomings, I think AMD should consider making two universal interfaces at the top of the graphics card, so that people who want to toss can use this cold head to directly integrate into their own water cooling system.

Generally speaking, compared with the previous RX 500 series, Vega has improved more obviously and has more sincerity. Compared with the A card itself, it has obviously improved in performance, energy consumption ratio and heat dissipation.

However, compared with its old rival, Vega is obviously incompetent and can only reach the level of mainstream flagship (1080 non-public), or it depends on what good things AMD will come out next year.