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Anyone running Vega 64 in a custom loop?

aaronyuri

aaronyuri

aaronyuri

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I'll be picking Vega up tomorrow, along with an EK water block. I'm going to run it on air initially and, if it's too loud, I'll add it into my loop.

Is there any significant overclocking headroom to be had with watercooling? I'm mostly doing this for the noise it may generate. I game with headphones on, however, so I may not even hear it and end up sending the block back if there's no OC headroom to gain.
 
Great, thanks for the feedback, Tony.

Last reference AMD card I had was a 4870 X2 so I can't quite recall the noise vividly. I do remember it being loud, however.

What size rad and CPU are you running? I have a 360mm thick core and an 1800X @ 4GHz/1.4 (I didn't win the silicon lottery). Just curious how our setups compare and what temps I can expect.
 
I've received the card today and just had a chance to fit it and have a tweak. Decent increase over my R9 Fury CF setup (63/64 CUs) and holy cow this thing is loud.

The biggest wall with this card appears to be the thermals. I was getting 96 FPS in Doom and then it tanked to 80 FPS within a minute or so. Core was hitting 1500 MHz when it was boosting (1652 set in WattMan) but as soon as the thermals took hold it throttled to 1100 MHz.

GPU freq state 6 & 7: 1652, 950 mV. HMB2 1000 MHz and 950 mV. This works well with the default fan configuration but throttles eventually. If I set the fan speed to 100%, it will cruise along at 1500 core but this isn't feasible long term due to the noise. The waterblock is going on this weekend... :)

More tweaking to come when I get the block on and start clocking the **** out of it!
 
Noticed that there's a big performance drop when you run HBM2 at anything above 1020 MHz. Tried 1025 MHz/1000 mV but this performed worse than 1020 MHz/950 mV.

Anyone else experienced this?
 
I figured something that like was at play. It's better than it crashing, I suppose.

The air cooler is an extremely limiting factor and WattMan isn't the best tool in my eyes. Hopefully the OC support picks up on third party apps and we can get a bit more granularity when tweaking.

I'll get the block on and report back. :) I see tonnes of untapped potential in this card.
 
I didn't encounter any issues when modifying my HBM voltage. It's cruised along at 950 mV just fine. Could explain why I keep hitting performance issues above 1020 though (having undervolted it). I'm getting 1514-1550 core on 950 mV so may have won the silicon lottery for once! I don't see it stacking up to the XTX bin, however.

Interesting info. I'll get the card under water before making any further changes. What temps are you getting at 1500 core and 1100 HBM?

The performance, when air cooled thermals are taken out of the equation, is substantial. Noticed that throttled performance isn't that much better than my single Fury. Makes me think Vega is Fiji on clockspeed steroids.
 
40 isn't that bad for gaming workloads considering 85 on air is a guaranteed temp! What loop setup are you running? Have you got the EK backplate? (I've got one ready to go on).

I just threw it on 100% fan, 950 mV core/HBM and started pushing the HBM (topping at 1020 before perf loss). I then pushed the core to 1652 in WattMan but it was getting late at this point.

It was, on occasions, trickling to 100 FPS in Doom (4k, Vulkan, and maxed out settings). Throttling was crippling it to 76 FPS with peaks to 80-82 once the fan was put back to stock settings. That's a varying 15-20% loss due to throttling (albeit in one game). I'm not a big fan of synthetics. I picked Doom as my test bed as it's probably Vega's best game so I'll see those 1-2 FPS increases with fine tuning whereas I'd see nothing in others, I suspect.

All this talk is itching me to tweak! I'll raise the voltages to 1000/1050 mV later and see if I can get the HBM higher.
 
Yes, PowerPlay comes into effect controlling the target voltages and clock speeds. Some reliable reporting software would be quite invaluable but I don't think there's anything out there yet.

I don't see third party app support coming until AMD have nailed the driver control itself.

The early adopter process as usual.
 
I set the fan to 100% with stock core clocks/voltage, then set 1100 HBM and ran Doom. FPS increase versus stock was on par with 1020 HBM and 1552 core but card got to 74C and started artifacting (core and HBM OC was stable for 30 minutes). I need to get the thermals under control before the card can truly shine, it appears. Still waiting on my fittings so nothing I can do about that for now.

1599 MHz is the highest boost temp I've gotten. As soon as it hits 75C the core clock speed rapidly drops along with the performance. I'll revisit once the block is on.
 
I've settled on 1050 mV and 1677 core, 1020 HBM. This gave the maximum performance with no throttling, core boosts to 1610 MHz.

Is anyone else experiencing a performance loss when going over 1020 on HBM? It's bloody weird. Would be interesting if those running 1100 or thereabouts could lower theirs to 1020 and see what the metrics demonstrate.
 
So I played some PUBG tonight and was getting a shutdown just before pulling the parachute. This happened consistently without fail (3 times in a row). I did a quick Google and a suggestion was not to use a daisy chained PCI-E connector (I have an RM1000i) and use two dedicated cables from the PSU and a single connector. This resolved the shut down issues.
 
Waterblock is on... and the results are good! I'll post some pics tomorrow. It's bloody quieter; that was necessary in every way. Can't get the core past 1699 without a crash. It needs more voltage but no joy putting anything over 1200 mV (only hitting 51C peak).
 
Haven't had a chance to do much with this (I've been grinding away at Destiny instead) but I'll be picking this up soon. LC BIOS is flashed and working fine. Slight performance increase at stock but doesn't compare to the OC performance.

Results to come once I've spent some time. :)
 
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