AMD Vega builders thread - rx 64 & rx 56

[krumme]

honestly not sure, but I take great care of all of my cards so if this is something widespread AMD's gonna be in for a real treat if everyone's reference cards start failing less than 6 months in. never any indication of imminent failure either...

I might remove the card from the system and try it in another, just to see what happens but so far everything points to the card itself

Surely try in another.
I am not sure the small heatsinks for the morpheus is adequate for the mosfets. Damn shame. The card was very silent. Lol.

 

[EXCellR8]

yes, the card's in one of my other haswell machines that also runs Windows 10, just installing the latest drivers now. 3D will run at a lower resolution but this machine's got a 1000w PSU so if it crashes then I'd consider the card shot. surely is a damn shame if that's the case.

hopefully sapphire dispatches a response tomorrow or the next day

EDIT: card hasn't crashed on the other Windows 10 machine yet... OpenGL and DX11 tests have been running without a hitch so far. if it turns out that all I need is a slightly more powerful PSU in the Ryzen 7 machine then that's an easy fix; I've been wanting to try one of those Focus+ units anyway.

 

[EXCellR8]

still no crashes.

one thing that was very indicative of a potential power issue was that each time a bench started on the haswell machine, the small desk lamp I had set up nearby would start to flicker a bit... suggesting some pretty heavy power draw. I'm not 100% convinced that the other machine's PSU is insufficient, because the card's been working very well prior to this crashing, but I will try to source a higher capacity unit soon just to make sure. I'm also wondering if I was setting the overall power limit too high...

 

[EXCellR8]

Well, turns out my 4TB game drive on the Ryzen 7 machine has failed outright, thus leading me to believe that the graphics card was to blame for the sudden loss of video, sound glitches, and fan spinning down--all just secondary symptoms. Bummer that all of my games need to be reinstalled now but it looks like the card will live to fight another day. I feel somewhat idiotic but this is the first drive that I've had fail in quite some time. Typical Monday...

 

[krumme]

Good to hear ..
Still

 

[Mr Evil]

I bought a Vega 64 LC back when they were released. Sadly it failed and had to be returned. Even more sadly, they aren't available anymore, so I will never see one again

To make up for it, I was sent one of the new Sapphire cards instead:

It's a gargantuan card, even bigger than my old Fury. I only just managed to fit it into my case. The RGB lighting is nice.

I didn't record any numbers from the LC, so I can't compare them exactly, but if the reviews are to be believed then the Sapphire card is a hair slower than the LC. It's quieter at idle due to the fans turning off, and no pump noise. It also uses a few watts less power at idle, presumably also because of the fans and lack of pump. Noise under load is acceptable, as expected from the monumental heatsink. It benefits a lot from case airflow, with all that heat dumped straight into the case. It has two 4-pin fan headers on it, which is very useful for this.

It notably has three 8-pin power connectors, but that seems excessive as I measured only about 400W AC power used by my system when gaming, which is similar to what my old Fury used. Cursory undervolting tests suggest that there might be a lot of power to be saved.

 

[IRobot23]

Nice,
you don't need numbers. Core clock is more than enought to compare.

 

[Mr Evil]

Nice,
you don't need numbers. Core clock is more than enought to compare.

The cooler, power limit and power consumption all affect whether it can reach the maximum core clock. That's why undervolting actually makes them faster.

 

[estarkey7]

Just bought a Vega FE for $750 to drop into my Ryzen 1700X build for video editing and mechanical design. Also grabbed a Seasonic Prime Ultra 750W power supply which should do it justice.

Christmas will be a little late this year as they won't arrive until the 27th.

 

[EXCellR8]

Still having issues... and I also checked my PSU; it is the X-850 and not the X-750 like I thought. Turns out I moved the 750 to the Skylake machine downstairs.

Anyway, 3D is still crashing this Vega 64 on the Ryzen 1700 rig; I'm starting to think it's a Windows OS bug or something. I might try the latest beta drivers but I highly doubt that would make a difference at all.

 

[meson2000]

Still no stock of Vega 64 at newegg or MC or amazon. Amazon might have a couple for insane markup. same on ebay. Is AMD just having issues manufacturing them? I put a notification on newegg to let me know when the asus strixx vega 64 was in stock. i got the email at 1:04pm while i was away from my phone in a work meeting. i checked it at 2:56 and immediately jumped in newegg and they were already sold out. I think AMD must be having yield issues...

 

[estarkey7]

Still no stock of Vega 64 at newegg or MC or amazon. Amazon might have a couple for insane markup. same on ebay. Is AMD just having issues manufacturing them? I put a notification on newegg to let me know when the asus strixx vega 64 was in stock. i got the email at 1:04pm while i was away from my phone in a work meeting. i checked it at 2:56 and immediately jumped in newegg and they were already sold out. I think AMD must be having yield issues...

I just grabbed a Vega FE from Newegg the other day for $750. Might as well go ahead and get it!

 

[Mr Evil]

Here are my findings after spending today testing undervolting my Sapphire Vega 64. First, a few things I learnt while fiddling with the settings:

1. Core voltage settings in WattMan will only take effect if they are equal to or above the memory voltage, so you should set memory voltage to no more than the lowest core voltage. This doesn't affect the actual memory voltage at all, so it is presumably a bug. Fortunately I had read about this before, otherwise I may not have worked it out myself.
   
2. Using the render test in GPU-Z as an easy way to kick the GPU into the highest power state, I could see that reducing core voltage from the default "Custom" 1200mV initially increases the actual core speed. As it is reduced further, the core speed starts to fall. This doesn't seem to be affected by the current temparature, or increasing the power limit, so I'm not sure what's limiting it.

To obtain the following numbers, I used the game Elex, as it happens to be what I am playing at the moment. After changing settings in WattMan, I left the game paused for a few minutes to let the temperature stabilize, then used HWiNFO64 to record the averages while I walked along the main road from Sandy Pines to Old Windfarm. The AC power figures are from my basic plug-in power meter. It can't average over time, so I just recorded a single figure when standing still at a particular spot.

State 6/mV  State 7/mV  Power limit/%   GPU Clock/MHz   VDDC/V      Hot Spot/°C Fan Speed/RPM   Chip Power/W    AC Power/W
[Balanced]  [Balanced]  [Balanced]      1561            1.063       87          1691            261             392
1000        1100        0               1553            1.047       83          1564            244             370
1000        1080        0               1552            1.030       81          1497            233             360
1000        1080        50              1552            1.029       80          1554            233             359

I had a display driver crash when trying 1070mV for state 7, so the lowest setting I recorded was 1080mV. I won't know if that's completely stable until I have given it a few weeks of stress. It's hard to know what the optimum for state 6 is without a lot more benchmarking, but locking to state 6 as the maximum shows that going below 1000mV causes the actual core clock to go down fairly fast. I recorded an extra set of numbers with the power limit raised to demonstrate that power is not limiting core speed.

There is a nice reduction in chip power of nearly 30W as core voltage is reduced, which matches the measured change in AC power, allowing for PSU inefficiencies. As you would expect to follow on from that, both temperature and fan speed are reduced too. There is a very slight reduction in average clock speed, but small enough that it's almost lost in the noise.

In conclusion, it's well worth undervolting, but working out the best settings is difficult because they appear to be treated as suggestions rather than hard values.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Nice! That's an impressive amount of power reduction.

 

[meson2000]

I just grabbed a Vega FE from Newegg the other day for $750. Might as well go ahead and get it!

Ugghhh... Thanks for the heads up! I am looking at it my cart as we speak... how is the noise level on that card? Is it bearable? I was holding out for the 3rd party cards with better cooling... Does the Frontier Edition have better cooling than the RX Vega 64s? Thanks.

 

[estarkey7]

Ugghhh... Thanks for the heads up! I am looking at it my cart as we speak... how is the noise level on that card? Is it bearable? I was holding out for the 3rd party cards with better cooling... Does the Frontier Edition have better cooling than the RX Vega 64s? Thanks.

The cooling is the same, but the cooling profile with the pro drivers is waaay to conservative (tuned for noise, not cooling). I'm running Adobe Premiere Pro with the Pro drivers, and I see the maximum amount of lights on the card activity meter, but I don't hear much of anything over my AIO cooler and two 120mm case fans. Oh, and my case is open right now too. If I switch over to the gaming drivers, I feel things may be different.

 

[estarkey7]

Ugghhh... Thanks for the heads up! I am looking at it my cart as we speak... how is the noise level on that card? Is it bearable? I was holding out for the 3rd party cards with better cooling... Does the Frontier Edition have better cooling than the RX Vega 64s? Thanks.

I just switched to the gaming drivers using Titanfall 2 in 1080p all maxed out. Buy some earplugs, then put on your headphones!! It's LOUD, but no worse than the RX Vega. Just get Vega FE, the prices also are the same and you get 8GB more RAM, plus quarterly pro driver updates!

 

[estarkey7]

I will say one additional thing. I was using 11GB of VRAM in Titanfall2 at 1080p with everything maxed out, so looks like Vega FE is a necessary at these settings. I can't imagine how much VRAM would be needed at 4K gaming!

 

[EXCellR8]

sounds more like a memory leak issue... that's Source engine lol

 

[estarkey7]

Or another issue altogether. Now, everytime I try to start the Radeo Pro settings, it never comes up. After the first time I right click and select the driver settings, it won't even display the settings when I right click again until I reboot.

 

[meson2000]

Or another issue altogether. Now, everytime I try to start the Radeo Pro settings, it never comes up. After the first time I right click and select the driver settings, it won't even display the settings when I right click again until I reboot.

You're not inspiring me with a lot of confidence!

 

[estarkey7]

You're not inspiring me with a lot of confidence!

Well, when I loaded the driver, I didn't use the AMD driver uninstall utility. After using that and reinstalling, it works fine.

Been switching back and forth between pro drivers and gaming drivers, under-volting and boosting fans in Wattman without incident.

I had to get a beta Neat Video plugin, because Vega support has not been released yet, but other than that, I'm happy.

 

[EXCellR8]

Or another issue altogether. Now, everytime I try to start the Radeo Pro settings, it never comes up. After the first time I right click and select the driver settings, it won't even display the settings when I right click again until I reboot.

I've noted something similar... but my whole taskbar seems stuck and non-functional and Radeon Settings doesn't display. Signing out and then back in fixes it but wth? I'm thinking Windows 10 startup is more at fault with that though.

 

[Headfoot]

I will say one additional thing. I was using 11GB of VRAM in Titanfall2 at 1080p with everything maxed out, so looks like Vega FE is a necessary at these settings. I can't imagine how much VRAM would be needed at 4K gaming!

Just because it uses that much VRAM doesn't mean it needs that much VRAM. Before I got my 1080 ti I ran Titanfall 2 through the whole singleplayer campaign on a 290 crossfire (4GB VRAM) at 5760x1920 with no RAM stuttering. It was a solid 40-60 FPS. That was with max settings (& 2x aa, I believe)

 

[estarkey7]

Just because it uses that much VRAM doesn't mean it needs that much VRAM. Before I got my 1080 ti I ran Titanfall 2 through the whole singleplayer campaign on a 290 crossfire (4GB VRAM) at 5760x1920 with no RAM stuttering. It was a solid 40-60 FPS. That was with max settings (& 2x aa, I believe)

Hmmm . I wonder why ?