Impulse buy. I mostly justified buying it by making a few bucks off OMG this week. Grabbed the liquid cooled Sapphire edition. Paid using PayPal to take $25.00 off + GCR rebates brought it down another $18.00. Still stupid expensive but about the same price as what it costs in the US after factoring in conversion. I really liked my Fury X water cooled cards so I splurged. Yes, for this price you should probably buy a 1080 Ti (or a spend bit more for a water cooled edition) but I already have an MG279Q, (IPS Freesync 1440P 144Hz) and I don't want to replace it with a costly Gsync monitor. Although this is kind of getting into sunk cost fallacy territory
Yes, the Vega is a power hog and for mining, it's a bust (I knew that before buying) so this mostly to replace my Geforce 1070 for actual gaming. I'll toss the 1070 in my HTPC as they seem to be much better at 1080P. I mostly play BF1 and Doom / Quake and the Vega 64 is pretty far ahead of the 1070 here, so I should see a nice boost. Plus it just feels right to match up a water cooled 1700X with a water cooled Vega card. AyyMD!
The biggest disappointment to me is the encrypted BIOS so no BIOS modding will be possible like on Geforce cards which is a real shame. Unless someone figures out how to successfully run with an unsigned BIOS, I fear there's no way around this issue. At least the card has dual-bios so it won't be that scary to play with.
Also, NewEgg didn't give me any free games or those discounts to stuff I won't buy anyway (I should have gotten the "Aqua Pack" according to AMD). Normally I sell off the pack-in games to bring down the price a little more. I've pinged NewEgg about this as they advertised the card as coming with those games, so they'll have to do something for us. Maybe it's a Canadian thing. Trying to get this sucker to under $900 CAD after all discounts applied to remove some of the buyer's remorse that's starting to set in haha.
Anyway, I'll likely undervolt it to save some power (these cards are always way overvolted) and just enjoy the card for gaming. If I can undervolt it enough and it's still profitable, I'll of course mine on for a few months, but I bought it mostly for gaming. With the current state of the drivers, I'm sure this card will receive more fine wine than the average Radeon which should bring up performance, but I don't recommend anyone actually buy one of these cards at these prices
The card is being shipped from the US so I probably won't get it for a while ( 5 - 7 business days if it's anything like the Polaris launch) but If you want me to do any specific tests let me know.