Pure minimalism: Gigabyte RX Vega56 Gaming OC in review

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 you even have it consciously ... Board layout Gigabyte is extremely different from AMD's reference layout of the RX Vega, which should also make the use of existing full-cover water coolers impossible. Also at the popular Raijintek Morpheus, end terrain is, if you ... Sometimes you get the feeling that Nvidia's engineers also held one or the other PVT sample of a Custom RX Vega56 in their hands when the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti was launched. Or at least some spy infiltrated. Good, snare... Power consumption at different loads The power consumption in the gaming loop is at the measured approx. 264 watts in balanced mode far above what is still with approx. measured 223 watts in the default BIOS. You're even lying with it ... Overclocking and undervolting The conventional overclocking by means of an even higher power limit and more clock speed can be quickly forgotten. We will see why this is the case in the cooling section. So crowbar is not possible. Anyway... Cooling system and backplate Of course, the generated waste heat is directly related to the recorded power, for which the cooling solution is responsible for optimum dissipation. And this is precisely where we are faced with various compromises, which are... Summary The Gigabyte RX Vega56 Gaming OC leaves the impression in many respects of a rather reluctantly completed compulsory exercise, but in which one has concentrated on the most important things, so as not to smother anything. All...

Sometimes you get the feeling that Nvidia's engineers also held one or the other PVT sample of a Custom RX Vega56 in their hands when the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti was launched. Or at least some spy infiltrated. Well, you shouldn't have made this card faster because of the geforce 1080's self-cannibalization (which would have gone), but it fits in this form really nicely with the variations of the factory overclocked RX Vega56 of the respective board partners.

Benchmark results in 2560 x 1440 pixels (WQHD)

First, we test in the WQHD resolution, because we assume that with this card you will mainly use the medium high resolutions. At least AMD has these players firmly in mind as a target group. The lead in the real achieved clock compared to the reference map is between approx. 9 and 11 percent, of which about 6 to 8 percent of them still arrive at the FPS. This means that the card does not scale badly and would probably be able to do so even better with higher memory clock rates. But why we have deliberately refrained from such experiments, we will explain later when it comes to cooling.

Benchmark results in 3840 x 2160 pixels (Ultra-HD)

The overall picture does not change much, even if the Vega cards break in a little more in a few games. But then it almost doesn't matter if reference or board partner card. Shared suffering is half suffering, and there is never any real humiliation. A true Ultra HD card is not one of the cards, so for many of the benchmarks we have deliberately reduced the settings to such an extent that there are still playable frame rates.

Intermediate conclusion

The whole of this could not have been more precisely done. Sometimes the Gigabyte RX Vega56 Gaming OC is a tick faster than such a GeForce GTX 1070 Ti, sometimes up and sometimes a tick slower. But these cards never separate greater distances, so once again you have to regret the fact that some people can flood the market at will with products, while the others leave mostly only dripping teeth at the customer. The overclocked RX Vega56 is already quite fast for its conditions and even comes closer to the GeForce GTX 1080 from time to time than you might have guessed.

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