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...

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 see an almost classic 6+1 phase design for GPU and memory, as well as other voltage converters for the respective partial voltages. We will go into all these things in more detail, because it is really interesting.

The two 8-pin connectors are each connected via a coil, which helps to smooth certain voltage peaks. However, we could not find larger capacitors here.

On the back, besides the very tightly equipped base of the package, we see the PWM controller as the most obvious part, as well as other components whose positioning we should remember, because we want to show a video right away.

Power supply of the GPU

First of all, the focus is on the IR3521 from International Rectifier, a dual output digital multi-phase controller that can provide both the 6 phases for the GPU and 2 other phases, which we will talk about in a moment. But back to the GPU. After all, we count twelve voltage transformer circuits, not six. However, since only six real phases can be created, you can double each of these phases in order to divide the load into two converter circles. We suspect that this effort will not be done later with the slightly simpler XL version. for this, you either simply owe away the space for the second circle or simplify the board as such.

A total of six IR3598s are used for this so-called doubling, which are located on the back of the board (we remember). The following video from idle mode shows very nicely how the PWM controller in the idle shifts the load back and forth between the individual phases in order to increase efficiency by using only one phase, but in return also a possible and one-sided overload of a permanently loaded single phase.

The actual voltage conversion of each of the twelve converter circuits is performed by an IRF6811 on the high side and an IRF6894 on the low-side, which also contains the required Schottky diode. Both are previously USED by AMD HEXFETs from International Rectifier. In the case of coils, AMD relies on encapsulated and front-soldered ferrite core coils. The inductance is slightly lower at 190 nH than the usual 220 nH for THE GPUs.

Power supply of the memory

As mentioned briefly, the IR35217 also provides one phase for storage. One phase is sufficient because the memory is much more adequate. The gate-driver CHL815 is back on the back of the board, while an NTMFD 4C85M from ON Semiconductor is used for voltage conversion. This dual N-Channel MOSFET realizes both the high and the low-side.

It is also interesting that AMD generally dispenses with all cup capacitors and only relies on flat SMD caps. The slightly lower capacity can be compensated by simply switching two of these caps in parallel and usually also using the back of the board. A sensible equalization of the thermal hotspots and a larger heat dissipation also have the nice side effect that you can also enter a temperature class lower and thus also save costs. The finance department is certainly equally pleased with this.

The coil is slightly larger this time with 220 nH. At 820 nH, on the other hand, the coils for the significantly slower clocking converters of the other partial voltages are even larger, which, however, also have to withstand significantly lower currents.

Other voltage converters

The production of VDDCI is not a big item in terms of performance, but it is important. It is used for GPU-internal level transition between the GPU and memory signals, something like the voltage between the memory and the GPU core on the I/O bus. In addition, two constant sources for 1.8V and 0.8 volts are shown.

Below the GPU you can also find the APL5620 from Anpec for the VPP. This ultra-low dropout chip generates the very low voltage for the Phase Locked Loop (PLL) range.

With the HC238A from ON Semiconductor as a de-multiplexer, the "mausekino" is realized for the LED bar, which shows the utilization of the power supply. Nice gimmick, but in intensity almost disturbing. Especially at night.