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...

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. After that, the interior with the actual cooler and the large mounting or Cooling frame free.

AMD is again relying on the Direct Heat Exhaust (DHE) principle for this card, which does not have to be a disadvantage. We see the radial fan in the suction chamber and the path of the air, longitudinally through the block of the chamber cooler up to the slot panel.

The backplate made of blue anodized aluminium, which is fastened with six T6 screws, has only an optical function, because it does not contribute to cooling. Attempts to dissipate additional heat using thermal lyre pads yielded hardly measurable results except for slightly cooler doubler chips.

On the top of the board sits the massive mounting or Cooling frame, which on the one hand holds the entire structure together and on the other hand also represents an important cooling element. The design has learned, because similar to Gigabyte (Aorus) on the GTX 1080 Ti Xtreme Edition, you also rely on relatively well thermally conductive coil housings, which are also cooled by thermal lyre pads, similar to the VRM of the voltage converters. even the appropriate recesses. We will see later that this works well.

The actual chamber heat sink as a thin aluminium fin sits on a large vapor chamber made of copper. One sees the soldered outlet of the one-piece hybrid vapor-chamber (One Piece), which one must not bend down. The moulded heat sink is adapted to the package in size

For the 7cm radial fan, AMD is relying for the first time on a single ball-bearing model from Delta and not one of the snarling and far too loud examples of the reference predecessor models. Compared to the previously up to 10,000 rpm, the extra-strong fan of the BVB1012 series only rotates up to a maximum of 5,000 rpm. AMD sets the fan target to approx. 40% to 41%, which is then equivalent to about 2,000 rpm. We'll see that the sound characteristics are now more like what Nvidia can offer on their Founders Edition.

The completely exposed board shows on the front as the dominant element the package with the large interposer, which we will talk about in a while. The exact board analysis can then be found in the next chapter

The package: GPU and memory on the interposer

Since the GPU (and in this case also the interposer with GPU and memory) cannot be soldered so easily onto the PCB, these components are first used by one of the specialized finishers (e.g. ASE) on a so-called package ("packaging process"), which can later be processed much more easily in the factories. To do this, it is important to know that these packages are fed by machine from a roll on a transfer tape in the SMT process and then positioned on the PCB

First, let's compare the package as it was initially used on AMD's internal slides and demonstrations. We can see that there are deeper gaps between the GPU and the two memory modules, as in Fiji, respectively. these components are relatively high. The interposer, on the other hand, is extremely thin and, above all, fragile. Hence the warning to the internal lyre to take care of the removal of old thermal paste during the development phase.

For a machine production, such a thing is of course quite risky, especially since one can also encounter so-called "underfill" problems, since in packaging also pressure-sensitive cavities can always form between the interposer and the intermediate board. However, if you look at the package currently used at the Vega FE, you can clearly see that AMD is relying on the so-called molding. The area around GPU and memory has been poured over a large area with a suitable material, which significantly increases stability.

This should not be a carte blanche for eager cleaning devils and pushers, but the adrenaline level is likely to be significantly lower when changing the radiator.

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