The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTMeet The Radeon VII
First things first is the design and build, and for the AMD Radeon VII, we've already noticed the biggest change: an open air cooler. Keeping the sleek brushed metal look of the previous RX Vega 64 Limited Edition and Liquid variants, they've forgone the blower for a triple axial fan setup, the standard custom AIB configuration for high-end cards.
While NVIDIA's GeForce RTX series went this way with open-air dual-fan coolers, AMD is no stranger to changing things up themselves. Aside from the RX Vega 64 Liquid, the R9 Fury X's AIO CLC was also quite impressive for a reference design. But as we mentioned with the Founders Edition cards, moving away from blowers for open-air means adopting a cooling configuration that can no longer guarantee complete self-cooling. That is, cooling effectiveness won't be independent of chassis airflow, or lack thereof. This is usually an issue for large OEMs that configure machines assuming blower-style cards, but this is less the case for the highest-end cards, which for pre-builts tend to come from boutique system integrators.
The move to open-air does benefit higher TDP, and at 300W TBP the Radeon VII is indeed one for higher power consumption. While 5W more than the RX Vega 64, there's presumably more localized heat with two more HBM2 stacks, plus the fact that the same amount of power is being consumed but on a smaller die area. And at 300W TBP, this would mean that all power-savings from the smaller process were re-invested into performance. If higher clockspeeds are where the Radeon VII is bringing the majority of its speedup over RX Vega 64, then there would be little alternative to abandoning the blower.
Returning to the Radeon VII build, then, the card naturally has dual 8-pin PCIe connectors, but lacks the BIOS switch of the RX Vega cards that toggled a lower-power BIOS. And with the customary LEDs, the 'Radeon' on the side lights up, as does the 'R' cube in the corner.
In terms of display outputs, there are no surprises here with 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI.
A few teardowns of the card elsewhere revealed a vapor chamber configuration with a thermal pad for the TIM, rather than the usual paste. While lower-performing in terms of heat transfer, we know that the RX Vega cards ended up having molded and unmolded package variants, requiring specific instructions to manufacturers on the matter. So this might be a way to head off potential ASIC height difference issues.
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just4U - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
It's not a turkey at all.. it beats a Vega64 for around 30% ads 2x the ram (which is not really utilized yet) has a 3 fan design with Amd's top end shroud/block takes less power, runs cooler, and has the same characteristics which means Amd was generous on power so undervolting it without appreciable performance losses will be easy enough to do as will overclocking.For me that's a winner. I have blower 1080s and their very loud if I let them or run things at stock (i undervolt there to..) and I've seen how loud the Vega56/64 blowers can be.. this with the 3 fans? pfft.. way quieter.
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
I think you should look at the data in this review because your analysis is way off.ballsystemlord - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
They are sold out! All the online retailers I checked have no Radeon VIIs! Unless you go to ebay and pay way too much.Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Overpriced underbaked vaporware? Never-coulda-happen.It's an ugly time to be a "serious" PC gamer.
ballsystemlord - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Well, it's been a week. They came into stock for about 5min.LogitechFan - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
amdumb defense force in full denial mode, sorry, we can't hear you over the 55db noise level of the radeon VII ;)))))))))rukufe - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
If you want to play with AI, you need tensorflow, and for a "server" card, at this price, it doesn't not makes sense to not support tensorflow. AI is everywhere today. this card is obsolete.gsalkin - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
So is this too little too late? I'm bewildered that even at 7nm this card is pulling 300W of power and generating insane noise.It's also unfortunate that the rumor of 128 ROPs was bunk. These cards definitely have an imbalance in the CU to ROP ratio. Nvidia Titan Xp had 96 ROPs strapped to 3840 SPs but AMD is shipping a max of 64?
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
"It's also unfortunate that the rumor of 128 ROPs was bunk."That rumor typifies the irrational thinking that plagues the gaming community. AMD isn't going to make the effort of changing the Instinct GPU to better suit gamers. It isn't and it hasn't.
dr.denton - Saturday, February 9, 2019 - link
I wonder, do people actually read and comprehend these articles? By now it should be obvious to everyone, that VII is not and was never supposed to be AMD's next generation of GPU. In fact, they always denied that Vega 7nm would make it into the consumer market - and for very good reason: they had Navi for that. Now that Navi is delayed, they need something for people to talk about - and talk about it we do.