AMD Radeon VII Review

[MiNo]

Seems to be much more fair to compare it to a 1080ti than a 2080RTX


It's with +/- 5% performance of the 1080Ti

The memory sizes are more similar than comparing to the 2080

There are no Gigarays or other fancy RTX tech in neither VII or the 1080ti.


So : Congrats on a 1080ti clone.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

Quite a few reviewers have noted vastly different scores. I think drivers or something else need tweaking before we can get a precise average. At 1080p for instance, Guru3D shows the Radeon VII beating a 2080Ti in BFV.

 

[demonking]

Prices are all over the place for these atm. Sapphire £650, Powercolour £700, Asrock £750 and Asus, Gigabyte and MSI £800.

 

[Dicehunter]

Prices are all over the place for these atm. Sapphire £650, Powercolour £700, Asrock £750 and Asus, Gigabyte and MSI £800.

Yeah OCUK tried putting the prices up to £850 but someone called them out and the prices were quickly lowered again, Going off OCUK as they love price gouging, I know a business is not a charity but over the top greed is unnecessary.

 

[trawetSluaP]

Yeah OCUK tried putting the prices up to £850 but someone called them out and the prices were quickly lowered again, Going off OCUK as they love price gouging, I know a business is not a charity but over the top greed is unnecessary.

You seen how much they're charging the for the 2080 Ti Lightning Z? The small sum of £2000.00...

On topic, this card looks real nice. Can't wait to see some AIBs!

 

[AlienALX]

Yeah OCUK tried putting the prices up to £850 but someone called them out and the prices were quickly lowered again, Going off OCUK as they love price gouging, I know a business is not a charity but over the top greed is unnecessary.

Yeah OCUK are the worst when it comes to gouging. However, they are also the best when it comes to package deals like the 56 and 64. They deffo have the most buying clout, being part of Caseking.

But yeah the gouging is pretty shameful. Gibbo does all of that, and the pricing. However, on the plus side I have also seen him do deals at people's request (like Vega 56 for £299) and so on. He will actually drop the price if you ask which is pretty cool.

Where did you get yours dude?

Quite a few reviewers have noted vastly different scores. I think drivers or something else need tweaking before we can get a precise average. At 1080p for instance, Guru3D shows the Radeon VII beating a 2080Ti in BFV.

I have absolutely no doubt that once the drivers are sorted out this will be an immense card for DX12. The 64 kicks total ass in DX12 already.

It will only get better too, thanks to the tank design of Vega. Give it a year and it will perform much higher up the hierarchy than it does now, and so will Vega. It's only getting better.

 

[Warchild]

OCUK really have lost their way. I blame lack of competing sites though. We need more of them.

Never have i seen such bad pricing on OCUK these days. I know the GBP is hammered because of Brexit but they can't raise prices as much as they are now.

 

[AlienALX]

OCUK really have lost their way. I blame lack of competing sites though. We need more of them.

Never have i seen such bad pricing on OCUK these days. I know the GBP is hammered because of Brexit but they can't raise prices as much as they are now.

Yeah it doesn't seem to be a case of who can undercut any one else now it's more a case of "How much can we gouge compared to our competitor".

There really should be laws against that. Manufacturers should set a price in stone. It only makes them (like, AMD and Nvidia) look bad when sometimes it isn't their fault. At least then if AMD or Nvidia over priced a GPU we could say it's their fault and they simply wouldn't sell.

 

[Warchild]

Yeah it doesn't seem to be a case of who can undercut any one else now it's more a case of "How much can we gouge compared to our competitor".

There really should be laws against that. Manufacturers should set a price in stone. It only makes them (like, AMD and Nvidia) look bad when sometimes it isn't their fault. At least then if AMD or Nvidia over priced a GPU we could say it's their fault and they simply wouldn't sell.

Well when AMD and Nvidia quote their sales. It includes what has been sold to vendors like OCUK. So if it doesn't sell on their site, its still a sale for the red or green team.

I'm starting to think that if vendors put pressure on manufacturers about pricing they could help us bring it back in line. But many simply deploy the horrid cost plus model so we will never see such a thing happen.

 

[grec]

I guess during shortages the issue nowadays is more a side effect of sites like Amazon, eBay and so on, if a card has a higher market value than its MSRP but a vendor sticks to the MSRP someone will just buy them up and list them elsewhere for the markup. Manufacturers should never react to stuff like crypto surges by making more cards, as NVidia has learnt with their GTX1060 inventory issues, because it takes many many months from that decision being made to production actually increasing and in that time someone could have made an ASIC and killed GPU mining, like with Eth and such during the last crypto boom. It might seem like a way to deal with the price surges but misjudging something like that absolutely destroyed NVidia's Q4 financials & stock and can have long term harmful effects if the company can't sponge the damage.

 

[badtaylorx]

Fury

This, to me, seems more of an upgraded FURY (nonX) than a Vega....

 

[AlienALX]

This, to me, seems more of an upgraded FURY (nonX) than a Vega....

It's a slightly cut down 64 on a shrink with more VRAM.

 

[grec]

Yeah while Fury had the same 4-stack layout, to me it was defined by its relative lack of memory capacity in comparison to bandwidth or processing power, lacking even to other cards lower in their stack, while VegaII has pretty excessive memory capacity for most of its consumer uses that dominates the cost but is a requirement to reach that bandwidth.

 

[Dicehunter]

Turns out AMD made quite the booboo on the heatsink cold plate or whoever they contracted it out to made the booboo, It's VERY concave so not much is actually making contact, Even the graphite pad they used isn't really helping hence the 110'c junction temps and loud fans trying to cool it down.

I actually took mine apart and bust out the sand paper to flatten the cold plate out, I used 400, 600 and then 2000 grit to get a mirror shine and more importantly make it flat, Temps on the junction at stock were 110'c and would cause instability and even hard locks unless an aggressive fan curve was used, Now on auto fan the temp on the junction has dropped down 40'c, 40'c !

That's how badly the cold plate was NOT making contact with the die.

Gamers Nexus pressure/contact test, As you can see there is no contact at all in the centre of the heat sink and AMD using a graphite pad to try and overcome this is just utter laziness.

Reddit thread where I got the idea from to sand down the cold plate, Which immensely helped.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/arrxt2/radeon_vii_how_to_drop_40c_on_your_stock_cooler/


I'm not sure how much it would have cost to make each cold plate actually flat but I'm sure it would have been pennies on each unit.

 

[AlienALX]

I thought it odd as the cooler looks more than sufficient.

 

[looz]

Oh wow, Tom should sue AMD for infringing on his RushKit trademark.

 

[Dicehunter]

I thought it odd as the cooler looks more than sufficient.

Yep, First time I launched Res Evil 2 it hard locked the system as temps shot up to 110 on the junction and 90'c on the core itself, Maybe newer batches won't have this uneven cold plate but it shouldn't have been released like this.

Oh wow, Tom should sue AMD for infringing on his RushKit trademark.

Lolz XD

 

[AngryGoldfish]

I'd seen that when GN posted it. It's not acceptable in my opinion. It's incompetency that should never happen, and if it does should be rectified as soon as possible.

 

[AlienALX]

It looks like it is pressed. It could either be warping when other things are pressed onto it, or is warping from heat possibly from soldering. Either way it ain't good.

 

[Dicehunter]

It looks like it is pressed. It could either be warping when other things are pressed onto it, or is warping from heat possibly from soldering. Either way it ain't good.

It's actually from the vapour chamber pipes that are creating a concave surface, This could've easily been remedied in the factory.