I’ve been using a Fractal R5 for 2 years and I remember being seriously awed by all the details put into it. It was like a Mercedes and my old case was a 1970’s Pinto. Highly recommended.
I have the Define S. No front bays (so no optical). Awesome case. So quiet. I love it. Got the non-Windowed version myself.
Just finished putting all my stuff into the Define R5. Truly a superb case and for the first time, I actually enjoyed spending time fiddling with the cables and components. I am glad I made the right decision re: the case. It also POST’d at first try and all is well, except the front USB 3.0 didn’t work (will be rectified soon). Not a bad experience at all, really! One thing not mentioned in reviews - I hate the sunken reset button! Too tiny to push.
Back to Vega as we get closer to release:
Key information
NEW: Vega Frontier tested NEW: Vega gaming models leaked? Vega gaming models to launch 30 July...
…Now, onto the latest rumours about products.
We already know that a form of RX Vega will appear in the upcoming iMac Pro, but the official Vega product launch is coming on 30 July. Tom’s Hardware has the scoop, and it’s looking interesting.
There’ll be three Vega models called XTX, XT and XL. The specs are as follows:
XTX: Water or air cooling, 64 compute units, 375W TDP XT: Air cooling, 64 compute units, 285W TDP XL: Air cooling, 56 compute units, 285W TDP
These reference designs sound like hungry beasts, offering up TDPs that exceed the likes of the GTX 1080 right off the bat. Let’s hope they’re at least as powerful.
The other piece of news that Tom’s Hardware seems to have gathered is that none of the cards will exceed 8GB of HBM2 memory. That’s not a huge deal, most games will never exceed that requirement. But it’s still perhaps just a little underwhelming…
…AMD hasn’t just made those improvements in Vega’s memory configuration: new Radeon cards will also feature high bandwidth controllers and cache. Both of these change fundamental memory options – but will need to be properly supported by games developers.
Older graphics memory has only functioned by data fitting into the frame buffer before it’s processed by the memory itself, but Vega won’t be confined by such restrictions.
Instead, Vega can now store data in your PC’s main memory, or even an SSD. That, potentially, gives Vega GPUs the ability to move a huge amount of data that isn’t limited by the capacity of the GPU’s memory – up to a hardly conceivable limit of 512TB.
These changes are important, because there’s only so much progress that can be made with creeping clock speeds and bus widths – especially when bigger demands are always being made of graphics memory. AMD is doing important work here, and HBM2 should be superb – so long as game developers take full advantage of Vega’s new technologies.
There’s no reason to believe that gaming-focused Vegas will outperform the FE. Of course performance will improve as drivers mature, but that takes time.
Vega absolutely does gulp power-- the FE is capped at like 500w TDP even with high-end water cooling, and most reviewers believe it will perform better once the TDP can be increased via editing the firmware. Of course that’s a completely insane amount of power utilization; the 1080ti is substantially faster and it uses 250w. The 1080 non-Ti uses 180w and is quite a lot faster than the Vega FE.
That’s why it’s always a bad sign when they release water-cooled reference designs. It means the GPU is power-hungry and they’re trying to make it perform adequately via high-end cooling. Like the old pentium-4.
The one bit of good news from Vega FE tinkering is that some people have been able to undervolt it by pretty massive amounts. 1.2V to 1.075V. So cards that were throttling either due to power or temperature caps at 1.4Ghz are now able to hit the full 1.6GHz boost.
The bad news is that AMD felt 1.2V was the appropriate factory setting. Sounds like there must be a major silicon lottery aspect to this.
Guess Vega stock may not end up being as hard to get as we thought a week+ ago.
Heh, who is going to want to pick up a GPU that was used by these guys? At least the stock should go back to normal.
Grumble grumble grumble
And I just picked up a GTX 1060 5 days ago, grumble grumble grumble…
If it’s only been five days, can you return it? Or is it likely not worth the hassle?
Probably not worth the hassle. Besides, I also bought a nice Define R5 case to fit this super long board. Anyway, one doesn’t always win in life :)
New card, new case. Sounds like winning to me.
Nobody right now (at least nobody with any sense), as my quick spot check of Ebay showed USED 1060 6GB cards still having asking prices of between $350 and $425, which is ridiculous for a card with a brand new MSRP of $250.
It will take weeks for the prices to settle back to around MSRP levels, by which time another crypto-currency craze will have started. The only way to break the cycle is for companies to begin selling GPUs specifically made for mining.
NICE! MSRP of $225 on that card as well means prices on it’s 1060 counterpart might finally stabilize back to MSRP levels.
Assuming of course that supply meets demand, otherwise we’ll just have TWO $400+ versions of the same card…
Yeah, both Nvidia and AMD have products coming out that specifically target mining.
I don’t really see the point, though. How much could sawing off the displayport connectors really save on the bill of materials? And if you buy one of these mining-only GPUs, you can’t resell it to gamers when your currency of choice crashes.
It depends on how they price them. ASUS is stating a 36% increase in hashrate with their mining specific cards over the regular cards.
Well sure, except that’s complete hogwash.
They should market a Founder’s edition of that card with miner’s hat and vintage lantern included.