Pure minimalism: Gigabyte RX Vega56 Gaming OC in review

1 - Einführung, Unboxing und technischen Daten 2 - Spannungsversorgung und detaillierte Platinenanalyse 3 - Gaming-Benchmarks 4 - Leistungsaufnahme im Detail 5 - Temperaturen, Taktraten, OC und Wärmebildanalyse 6 - Kühlerdetails und Geräuschentwicklung 7 - Zusammenfassung und Fazit

Unlike Sapphire's heavyweight RX Vega64 Nitro+, the Gigabyte RX Vega56 Gaming OC is more of a grey mouse with a fairly healthy body measure index. Just don't stand out at all costs. And it almost seems as if it was even deliberately designed to arouse as few desires as possible, so as not to trigger any demand (which one could never have satisfied anyway).

To spoil it in advance: this card also has its good sides and it will also show us what a normal "butter-and-bread card" with Vega10 could have looked like, or perhaps even should have looked like. It is thus the exact opposite of the Sapphire card and yet also has its own personal touch. Since it is likely to be even rarer than the big sister, gigabytes RX Vega56 Gaming OC is now starting.

Market and availability

From internal sources, we know that the AIB received only a few chips in amD's mid-four-digit range, most of them Vega64. The general scarcity of packages thus prevents real mass production at the moment, because one cannot constantly drive and shut down a production line or even have it paused for longer. Costs and effort would simply be too high.

The fact that we were still able to get a copy is not due to the above-average capabilities of German importers, especially since, according to internal information, only cards in the double-digit range were available here, but on a certain Self-initiative in self-importing (including taxes).

Unboxing, optics and haptics

Weighing just over a kilogram, the Gigabyte card is an astonishing 600 grams lighter than Sapphire's monstrous battleship. Gigabyte has also saved more significantly in dimensions and offers a relatively short map with only 27.8 cm installation length (outer surface slot panel until the end of the radiator cover). With a height of 13 cm (from the top of the motherboard slot to the top of the radiator cover, as well as a thickness of 4.7 cm from the board to the front of the radiator cover, the picture is a rather compact map.

The two counter-rotating fans with a rotor blade diameter of 9.5 cm each sit in an opening with a diameter of 10 cm. A total of 11 rotor blades per fan, with their special shape, mainly provide airflow and turbulence and less static pressure. This should be helpful to the cooling concept.

The backplate dispenses with the Aorus logo, which still featured on the pre-production model. The copper insert, which sits above the back of the package, thermally separates the backplate used for cooling from this area and also cools – a little. The integrated heatpipe is not (yet) seen here on these pictures. More on that later.

After all, one should plan at least 5 mm for the rear body, which can already lead to problems with some motherboards if heat sinks are sitting too close to the slot or the CPU cooler is extremely large.

It is already clear at the bottom of the card that Gigabyte has also worked a little on the shape of the vertically arranged slats. Due to the inclination and the waveform, the airflow should cool more efficiently. We will be questioning this at a later stage.

The top also clearly shows that Gigabyte has deliberately set the red pencil. No RGB effects and other LED playstuffs, but a somewhat jagged plastic desert of injection molding and printed orange color accents. The white gigabyte logo is also only printed. In addition, gigabytes of two 8-pin sockets are sufficient for external power supply.

The closed end of the card shows not much except the end of the two 8 mm and three 6 mm heatpipes, but only the connection cable of the fans. Other possible sockets were provided on the board (e.g. RGB output), which has been omitted in the course of development.

The slot panel is very interesting in that it has six instead of the five connectors of the reference card. Three HDMI 2.0 ports and three DisplayPorts 1.4 are available to the user. This makes the card suitable for connecting up to six monitors in eyefinity mode.

Finally, let us take a first look at the technical data. Gigabyte, following AMD's guidelines for clock frequencies, has both increased the maximum turbo clock by more than 100 MHz, as well as the power limit by 55 watts in conjunction with it. We will see what this really yields in reality.

Compared to the relevant reference cards, this looks like this (we deliberately did not use the GeForce GTX 1070, as the overclocked RX Vega56 often acts much faster):

Test system and measurement methods

The new test system and the methodology have already been described in great detail in the basic article "How We Test Graphics Cards" (English: "How We Test Graphics Cards") and therefore, for the sake of simplicity, we now only refer to this detailed Description. So if you want to read everything again, you are welcome to do so. However, we have again improved CPU and cooling to largely exclude possible CPU bottlenecks for this fast card.

If you are interested, the summary in table form quickly provides a brief overview: