AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition review: Hiking between the worlds

This means that it is already in the approximate, where AMD actually wants to go. While Nvidia has to be careful not to cannibalize its own sister card, the Quadro P6000, AMD does not (currently) have an in-house sister, which can be used with it. With Vega, AMD is now offering a new generation of GPUs that will have received over 200 changes and improvements in the redesign of the architecture. Even if in the end it probably boils down to a kind of new GCN generation: AMD emphasizes that the... Disassembly and radiator details Removing the upper hee cover requires some suitable tools. With a small Torx screwdriver (T5), the six small swivels that hold this cover can be turned out.... Board layout AMD has definitely thought a little bit about the division of the board, especially since the elimination of the external memory modules opens up new possibilities. Exactly in their place you now place the individual power supplies. We... Foreword to the application benchmarks Why we use the Quadro P6000 as a counterpart and not the Titan XP or GeForce GTX 1080 Ti certainly has several reasons, which we have already partially mentioned on the first page. In addition, there is nat... Cheat as you cheat can? It's easy to explain why we've changed our benchmark selection slightly compared to the recently released CPU tests. Since we have to compare several graphics cards from different manufacturers, it falls... Gaming with a "Prosumer" card? Yes, but... AMD itself says that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is not an explicitly gaming graphics card, but you can still do so with it. Another problem arises ... Even with DrectX12, we probably can't expect any miracles after the results we have just seen. Should a driver bang give a real boost, then the difference between DirectX11 and Directx12 performance could still be ... DirectX12 and Doom in the window The game Volcano vs. OpenGL 4.5 has been interesting for a long time when it comes to testing Doom. Annoyingly, the Creators Update of Windows again presented us with problems when it comes to the perfor... Power consumption at a glance We measure a value of 14 watts for the card in the idle, which is so okay in view of the scope of performance, even if we had hoped for a little less. But you can really live with that. For the multi-monitor... Temperature curve and clock rate The fan control is quite conservative, so that the maximum temperature of 84°C (short-term also up to 85°C) is reached relatively quickly. But then the card already has approx. 10% of their performance from the cold... Summary There was once a film called "The Great Bluff" - a classic in which you didn't really know who died in whose arms and who gets whom in the end. So either AMD has all enjoyed over a year on the nose ring...

Power consumption at a glance

We measure a value of 14 watts for the card in the idle, which is so okay in view of the scope of performance, even if we had hoped for a little less. But you can really live with that. We were a little irritated when it comes to multi-monitor operation, as this result can vary more clearly when using a wide variety of combinations. That ranged from approx. 24 watts at two equal to more than 40 watts when operating with three very different output devices. We'll look at the values for gaming and the stress test right away.

The power consumption in normal productive everyday life ranges from approx. 140 watts (2D drawings, 3D wireframe) up to just under 250 watts (OpenGL) and final 265 to 275 watts when rendering (depending on GPU temperature).

Gaming Loop – Cold and Hot

Depending on the temperature of the GPU (and thus also the clock), the power consumption is higher or lower. If the card is still cold, it can hold up to almost 300 watts and reaches very short-term peaks up to just under 380 watts. The latter is not dramatic and is safely intercepted by any reasonably current power supply on the secondary side.

The flowing currents look analogous:

Once the card has reached the target temperature of 84°C, the power consumption decreases significantly due to the back-controlled clock speed of the GPU. The measured 266 watts then produce a slightly more moderate picture:

Logically, the measured currents are then also a tick lower:

Stress test and hard throttling

Now let's look at what Power Tune does when the predicted load gets too high! On the next graphic we can see very nicely how the intervals of the clock control turn out and what effect this throttling has on the power consumption. The periodic ups and downs create a completely different image from the full load that was initially tolerated.

In this case, too, the measured current flows correspond to this:

Loading of the motherboard slot

This point has been requested by readers since the launch of the Radeon RX 480 (also for Nvidia cards), so we will now include this measurement with every test. With the card tested today, however, the concern is completely unfounded, because the slot is used very moderately with a maximum of 2.7 amps and is thus even just below half of what is allowed.