Allgemein GPUs Hardware Reviews

Sapphire RX Vega 56 Pulse in test – Hot battle dwarf with thick refrigerated tank

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. After all, Gigabyte has already had to follow AMD's guidelines for GPU clock speeds in terms of power limit and voltages. And that is where this implementation reaches its limits. Sure, it would be louder and then cool enough – only who really wants that?

In our articles "Overclocked and boiled: AMD Radeon RX Vega64 water-cooled" and "AMD Radeon RX Vega64 without temperature limit with interesting findings" has already been explained extensively. Thus, this path is a dead end anyway.

On the other hand, a healthy sub-voltage can achieve much better results. Especially the use of the program OverdriveNTool can produce real miracles here. More or less, because as always it depends on the respective chip quality (and the driver version). However, since these very individual results cannot be flattened, each user would have to test it for himself. Whether the effort is worth it, however, is up to everyone. A good guide for this can be found, e.g. in this tutorial.

Temperatures and clock rates

Why we limit ourselves to the output of the values reported as GPU temperature is because the telemetry of our test sample also uses this value. What it is all about with the sometimes significantly higher hotspot temperature, you can read here again: ""AMD Radeon RX Vega64 without temperature limit with interesting findings". We were able to log values up to 15 degrees higher on the map, but they seemed a bit borderline in their height if you take advantage of all the possibilities of the map.

We now tabulate the achieved start and end values for temperatures and GPU clock (boost):

Initial
Final value
Open Benchtable
GPU Temperatures
38 °C 60/61 °C
GPU clock 1360 MHz 1328 MHz
Ambient temperature 22 °C 22 °C
Closed Case
GPU Temperatures
40 °C 65 °C
GPU clock 1360 MHz 1325 MHz
Air temperature in the housing 23°C 44°C

Overview Graphs: Temperatures vs. Clock

For better illustrations now again the respective courses considering our timeline of a total of 15 minutes each for the warm-up time.

We see that the clock in the gaming loop is around approx. 50 MHz higher than the reference. This increase of an average of just under 8 percent in this very demanding game is bought with a 10 watt higher power consumption, which is surprisingly little and suggests a good chip. However, gaming performance only increases by a maximum of 5-7%, which is still noticeable, but also does not make a galactic difference. The Torture Loop looks similar:

Thermal analysis of the back of the board

Finally, we consider the thermal analysis of the respective load states. In order to remain as practical as possible, we have removed the backplate for the IR measurements, as this has no cooling function, this does not change the performance.

Gaming

We see that the map is far from reaching its limits in the gaming loop. Especially the voltage converters and the GPU are cold as the Siberian forecourt to hell. Who needs the Vapor-Chamber? How Sapphire solved this, we'll see in a while.

When used in closed housings, we then measure higher temperatures for the voltage converters by up to 6°C. Even this final value of a plentiful 73°C is not something to think about. The package is beyond doubt anyway. Fits.

Stress

The stress test is slightly higher in power consumption compared to normal gaming, but the GPU stays even cooler as the fans rotate slightly higher.

Even in the closed housing, the whole thing is beyond doubt and one wonders why no one has ever had such a cooling solution on the radar.

Warm-up phase and cooling

The two following pictures show once again where the hotspots develop first and where the best cooling is.

Danke für die Spende



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About the author

Igor Wallossek

Editor-in-chief and name-giver of igor'sLAB as the content successor of Tom's Hardware Germany, whose license was returned in June 2019 in order to better meet the qualitative demands of web content and challenges of new media such as YouTube with its own channel.

Computer nerd since 1983, audio freak since 1979 and pretty much open to anything with a plug or battery for over 50 years.

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