Friday, December 15th 2017
SAPPHIRE Launches Their RX Vega Nitro+ Series of graphics Cards
After aeons of waiting, one of AMD's foremost AIB partners, Sapphire, has come out with a fully custom edition of AMD's RX Vega flagship graphics cards. The new RX Vega 64 Nitro+ and RX Vega56 Nitro+ graphics cards bring Sapphire's engineering to the RX Vega table, offering much better thermal, acoustic, and performance characteristics than AMD's air-based reference models.
The Sapphire RX Vega Nitro+ series of graphics cards feature a triple-fan, 2.5 slot design and a whopping 3x 8-pin power delivery system - and yes, you read that right, this applies to both the Vega 64 and Vega 56 models. The increased thermal headroom provided by the substantial cooling solution, and the beefed-up power delivery system, mean Sapphire are shipping these graphics cards with a hefty 12-14% base-clock increase over AMD's reference models, making these the fastest (in frequency) factory-overclocked RX Vega graphics cards money can buy. The cards also ship with dual-BIOS, a fan header for either a side-panel or front-panel fan whose speed you want to be under the graphics' card control, and a VGA support plate - a smart move by Sapphire, considering the RX Vega 64 Nitro+ comes in at almost 1.6 kg.
Sources:
Hardware Luxx, via Videocardz
The Sapphire RX Vega Nitro+ series of graphics cards feature a triple-fan, 2.5 slot design and a whopping 3x 8-pin power delivery system - and yes, you read that right, this applies to both the Vega 64 and Vega 56 models. The increased thermal headroom provided by the substantial cooling solution, and the beefed-up power delivery system, mean Sapphire are shipping these graphics cards with a hefty 12-14% base-clock increase over AMD's reference models, making these the fastest (in frequency) factory-overclocked RX Vega graphics cards money can buy. The cards also ship with dual-BIOS, a fan header for either a side-panel or front-panel fan whose speed you want to be under the graphics' card control, and a VGA support plate - a smart move by Sapphire, considering the RX Vega 64 Nitro+ comes in at almost 1.6 kg.
93 Comments on SAPPHIRE Launches Their RX Vega Nitro+ Series of graphics Cards
hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphics/113198-sapphire-radeon-rx-vega-64-nitro/
Good looking card but massively overpriced (£650) compared to it's competition, there are loads of nice custom GTX 1080 options for less than £500 now. Hell for a few quid more you can grab a 1080 Ti.
The price, power consumption and scarcity issues of Vega have made it very difficult to embrace. I'll still look to find one of these *somewhere*, just dreading how much I'll have to throw down for it when it's actually available.
No wonder these third-party designs are taking so long to come out - the guys building them are trying whatever they can to polish the turd that is Vega to the point where a non-reference design makes any sense, but they simply cannot do it because the chip is just plain bad. And then they price it at a point far beyond where it makes sense anyway... I guess they figured "hey, the only people who would shell out for this garbage are the die-hard AMD fanboys who complain about $ 3,000 compute cards that can actually overclock, so we might as well charge them whatever we want".
AMD partners that design their own cards (e.g. Sapphire and XFX) are going to end up sitting on basically all of their non-reference Vega inventory, which will ultimately result in those cars being shredded, and copious amounts of red ink in said companies' books. I'm predicting some "consolidations" from those companies in the next 6 months.
I wonder if consumer Volta/Ampere will land soon enough to deliver the knockout punch to RTG, or if Navi really is the messiah its fans are hoping for. Because if it ain't, RTG is done competing in the high-end consumer space.
If 18 months ago people could have told me "pay the same amount of money, but get a card that consumes 100W more" what would you think my answer would be.
As for the efficiency increase by tuning being the same for both Vega and nVidia gpus, in Vega's case you will get MORE performance for LESS power draw when tuned properly. While for nVidia you LOSE performance when you lower the consumption. So, while Vega isn't well optimised from AMD and has more potential than in stock settings, nVidia is very close to optimal efficiency already. Big difference imho due to their R&D money available. I wonder how many times is that needed to be explained...
What I find interesting about the benchmarks seen with this card is that there seems very little OC "wiggle" room. The stock cards have some OC headroom, so is AMD keeping the best binned dies for themselves and handing off the rest to the AIB's? That's how it seems. Maybe I'm missing a variable in this equation..