The RX Vega 64 Owners Thread

[Panos]

Oh I know mate, when I was pushing for 1850mhz in first week or so of owning, my card was peaking at 400w, no word of a lie haha

That is why I haven't posted those benchmarks. Might look good but ashamed of

However wondering I can find a setting for 1700-1710 @ 276W.
Already watercooled GTX1080 @ 2164 is been beaten at 1600 with 240W on air by Raptorpg

 

[TonyTurbo78]

@Panos

I hear ya mate, totally get it, the card is so much better than that it really is. Theres so much extra to be had when undervolting and overclocking to find the sweetspot. I refuse to push more that 280w through the card now, that gets me about 1700mhz there or there abouts.

This was one of my early tries, back on the old 3770k and was running 1230mv quality is rubbish but was getting some lovely stable 1750mhz speed.

And this one was about as high as I could get it, 1800mhz. Didnt post the score as it was just a custom try with way to much voltage so didn't want to show the results as it would be a bit misleading.

 

[Raptorpg]

To be honest though we shouldnt have to tinker like that. The card should come pre-tuned as not everyone is comfortable overclocking and tinkering.
And when it comes to perf game engine optimization are the real source of the issue not helped by Nvidia practices .

 

[Panos]

@TonyTurbo78 Brute forceeeeeee

@Raptorpg imho takes more time to learn how to use the Boost 3.0 power curve and successfully push your Nvidia Pascal card to the limit.
I remember spent more than 20 hours tinkering with Boost 3.0 power curve to get 2190 core from my GTX1080.
While the GTX1080Ti Xtreme refused to overclock on air over 2050 (2021 was the factory overclock). That's pitiful overclock.

And this is first time for AMD making such GPU. Fury, Polaris, and all previous cards used brute force for overclocking.
Somehow from the whole behaviour of the chip, I am suspicious Vega was designed as proof of concept for many things hence shines on computing but not on gaming per se.

Feels it was designed in "hurry" as a 7nm chip, as a deep learning/professional/number crunching chip. While at the same time can be used everywhere (Kabylake G, integrated APU, external APU). And as proof of concept for all those weird effects we encountered in relation to power, heat and performance that are needed for future consoles.

Also we know that the resources allowed for this GPU were less than the usual because of the Zen CPUs.
While still we have no idea what all those extra transistors in the chip are doing, because their count doesn't justify the gaming performance.

Who knows. We all hope Navi is more straight forward and GCN 6.0 less mystery than GCN 5.0
And imho we should have faith because Navi is a gaming chip designed for SONY according to AMD.

 

[Raptorpg]

@Panos that is very much possible, but I feel that at least the undervolting part should have been there from the start but I could be totally wrong.

Still I am happy to be able to get so much from this card, It is fun.

 

[Panos]

@Panos that is very much possible, but I feel that at least the undervolting part should have been there from the start but I could be totally wrong.

Still I am happy to be able to get so much from this card, It is fun.

Yeah I know that also.
In addition AMD's persistence publishing boost clock TDP instead of base clock TDP like Intel & Nvidia doing.
It presents the cards in worse light than reality.

 

[Raptorpg]

Yeah I know that also.
In addition AMD's persistence publishing boost clock TDP instead of base clock TDP like Intel & Nvidia doing.
It presents the cards in worse light than reality.

Yup and we can't say that perception is on their side already that was not a smart move .

 

[Lokken86]

Same card as you mine is 200w,
Gpu-z is only taking the reading of the current draw at the gpu core side, and reporting it over the i2c bus for software to read off,
It doesn't include the power consumption of the hbm and the power regulation on the pcb which is around 35-40w. . That's why if you want to see real power consumption scaling then you need to measure at the wall, not by software.

Cool thanks. How does your card clock and undercoat?

 

[Davedree]

Cool thanks. How does your card clock and undercoat?

Just curious what bios numbers do you have?
Position closest to faceplate on mine is 016.001.001.000.008730 (220w)

It undervolts well 1500mhz held @ 0.925,
1600-1620 @ 1.050v, but the cooler holds it back from hitting 1700, It can hold 1680-1690 but it's just not worth the 100w for 1-2fps.

Depending on the game at 1440p 75hz freesync, I can use it at 1500mhz as this is quiet (2100rpm), or my 1600 setting at 2800rpm.

 

[melmac]

To be honest though we shouldnt have to tinker like that. The card should come pre-tuned as not everyone is comfortable overclocking and tinkering.

I hear what you are saying, it's something AMD always have done, well at least for the last few generations of cards, leave lots of untapped potential under the hood. The exception to this was the Fury X cards. But, the 69xx, 79xx, and 29x cards were all a lot more powerful with some tweaks. At least with Vega cards, the extra performance doesn't involve anything complicated. Most people who spend £400+ on a GPU can do custom fan curves, simple overclocking etc. Tweaking Vega to give more performance is easier than all of that. Not only do you get more performance, you use less power, there is less heat and less noise.

They are a completely underrated card.

 

[Panos]

I hear what you are saying, it's something AMD always have done, well at least for the last few generations of cards, leave lots of untapped potential under the hood. The exception to this was the Fury X cards. But, the 69xx, 79xx, and 29x cards were all a lot more powerful with some tweaks. At least with Vega cards, the extra performance doesn't involve anything complicated. Most people who spend £400+ on a GPU can do custom fan curves, simple overclocking etc. Tweaking Vega to give more performance is easier than all of that. Not only do you get more performance, you use less power, there is less heat and less noise.

They are a completely underrated card.

As for untapped performance.....

https://twitter.com/SebAaltonen/sta...o/iframe/twitter.min.html#1032283494670577664

go figure -_-

Seems we are coming in a new period where a single unit of measurement isn't enough....

 

[Lokken86]

Just curious what bios numbers do you have?
Position closest to faceplate on mine is 016.001.001.000.008730 (220w)

It undervolts well 1500mhz held @ 0.925,
1600-1620 @ 1.050v, but the cooler holds it back from hitting 1700, It can hold 1680-1690 but it's just not worth the 100w for 1-2fps.

Depending on the game at 1440p 75hz freesync, I can use it at 1500mhz as this is quiet (2100rpm), or my 1600 setting at 2800rpm.

Yea it's the same bios. Yours seems to be better then mine but I still haven't tested any games yet. I bet after all this mine easily does 1600 in Doom or something and i'm just being an idiot trying to stabilize 3d Mark After all the temps are going to be highest doing what I'm doing.

 

[Raptorpg]

I hear what you are saying, it's something AMD always have done, well at least for the last few generations of cards, leave lots of untapped potential under the hood. The exception to this was the Fury X cards. But, the 69xx, 79xx, and 29x cards were all a lot more powerful with some tweaks. At least with Vega cards, the extra performance doesn't involve anything complicated. Most people who spend £400+ on a GPU can do custom fan curves, simple overclocking etc. Tweaking Vega to give more performance is easier than all of that. Not only do you get more performance, you use less power, there is less heat and less noise.

They are a completely underrated card.

While most enthusiasts have the ability, it also comes down to having the time.
Being a young father I don't have as much time as I used to to tweak cards, I agree that it was easy at least thanks to the help of @Panos that did the heavy lifting for me
It's just that it hurts AMD sales as a lot of people just want to throw the card in their machines and play .

 

[melmac]

While most enthusiasts have the ability, it also comes down to having the time.

Sure, if you want to do a ton of tweaking to get the absolute best out of your card, then, yeah, it takes a bit of time. But, that's just fine tuning. Huge improvements can be made in just a couple of minutes. And as you say, most people on forums are very willing to help, so that takes most of the work out of it.

 

[Raptorpg]

Sure, if you want to do a ton of tweaking to get the absolute best out of your card, then, yeah, it takes a bit of time. But, that's just fine tuning. Huge improvements can be made in just a couple of minutes. And as you say, most people on forums are very willing to help, so that takes most of the work out of it.

A solution for that could be having the drivers having more presets that would encapsulate the tweaking that the community find, that would be amazing and easy for a lot of people.

And just to reiterate I am very Happy with my card and don't mind spending time tweaking it especially with the support of such a great community. My comments are more around how to improve the user experience and get more people to enjoy the potential of those cards .

 

[melmac]

A solution for that could be having the drivers having more presets that would encapsulate the tweaking that the community find, that would be amazing and easy for a lot of people.

And just to reiterate I am very Happy with my card and don't mind spending time tweaking it especially with the support of such a great community. My comments are more around how to improve the user experience and get more people to enjoy the potential of those cards .

That's not a bad idea. More presets. Or even a little bit more of a graphical interface, dials that turn red if you push values too far etc.

I enjoyed my Vega card too, just wishing that AMD had more power with game developers to take advantage of some of the horsepower that Vega has.

 

[five8five]

Try this one first, 1620s boost, usually sits in 1610s some times dipped to 1595.




Also try this. I could get 1620s all the time with some dips to 1600 while running heaven but didn't saw less than during the whole heaven run.



Let me know how it goes.

Thanks for the invite Panos. Had a browse, interesting stuff.

Is this the benchmark we were talking about in the other thread?

 

[Panos]

Thanks for the invite Panos. Had a browse, interesting stuff.

Is this the benchmark we were talking about in the other thread?

The settings we were discussing on the other thread, were settings of the Power Save mode on Nitro, which cap it at 176W power consumption. Also there showed you what the actual settings the AMD drivers sets for that pre-set profile. With basically doesn't actually undervolt the card (still set to 1200mv) but reduces the power limit by 25% achieving 1350-1400 core clock.

Those settings above are true overclocking and undervolting. They were supposed to help Lokken hit 1600 "constant" at lowest possible power, but his reference card couldn't do it as it needs much more power than 240W to achieve it, and overheats with the stock blower cooler.
yet Raptorpg used them on his Nitro+ card and broke 26000 graphics score on Firestrike at 240W on air lol....

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/32059762/

If you see the above post, with that mediocre overclock (1600-1620 effective speed) beat my performance with
a) 376W 1737 core overclock on my Vega 64 (i was playing with the card with brute force in July)
b) watercooled GTX1080 @ 2164
c) And all review sites benchmarks, even those who overclocked the card and complained it runs hot with high power consumption

Yet took me only 40 minutes fiddling to come with those settings above..

 

[Panos]

@Raptorpg post your score here

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/firestrike-standard-bench-thread.18665940/

You have the second highest Graphics score on all Vega & GTX1080s combined.
Only Davedree has higher score (26239) at 1727/1125 but his card was on 370W+

Imho try to overclock your HBM to 1125 also and give it a try

 

[Panos]

@Raptorpg

Asked yesterday Sapphire and today got reply about the Nitro+ SE bios




However my experience differs.
The 2nd BIOS (left position as we see the card upside down) allows for higher HBM on the default settings (945) instead of the 1st BIOS (800).
In addition with BIOS 2, the clocks at Power Save & Balanced mode are higher consistently yet power cap is the same :/