Vega FE

[WhoWhat]

Found a Vega FE card for $400 in my area, is it worth it? Will be playing games at 1440p.

[bellabichon]

56 or 64? Either way, the Vega FE cards have awful cooling and power management. I wouldn't recommend it. 

[Jurrunio]

in the US?

[Fasauceome]

21 minutes ago, bellabichon said:

56 or 64? Either way, the Vega FE cards have awful cooling and power management. I wouldn't recommend it. 

They don't make a 56 version of the FE, according to their site. Also, waterblock on that bad boy with some undervolting in wattman is pretty killer

[Zando_]

Yep. I got my Vega FE for $405, things a beast and it lets ROTTR eat the full 9.5GB of VRAM it wants to without getting close to the limit, stomps blender renders too. Didn't have that much luck undervolting though, IDK if it's a loss on the silicon lottery, me being overambitious or just an all around doofus. At stock it will throttle since it hits 85C with the fan curve, but if you can handle the noise then ramp it up and let it run, do some minor undervolting too. If you don't like the noise:

9 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

waterblock on that bad boy

Threw a Heatkiller IV block on mine and a monoblock on my R7 2700X/CH7 combo, rest of my fittings and such should get here by Wednesday and I'll finish up my loop then, barring any last minute parts I need (first hardline loop, only other loop I've ever done was soft tubing). Should perform damn well though, liquid cooling is usually excellent on GPUs. 

[WhoWhat]

3 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

Yep. I got my Vega FE for $405, things a beast and it lets ROTTR eat the full 9.5GB of VRAM it wants to without getting close to the limit, stomps blender renders too. Didn't have that much luck undervolting though, IDK if it's a loss on the silicon lottery, me being overambitious or just an all around doofus. At stock it will throttle since it hits 85C with the fan curve, but if you can handle the noise then ramp it up and let it run, do some minor undervolting too. If you don't like the noise:

Threw a Heatkiller IV block on mine and a monoblock on my R7 2700X/CH7 combo, rest of my fittings and such should get here by Wednesday and I'll finish up my loop then, barring any last minute parts I need (first hardline loop, only other loop I've ever done was soft tubing). Should perform damn well though, liquid cooling is usually excellent on GPUs. 

Hey zando, another helpful answer again. What would the performance look like compared to a gtx 1080 or 1080 ti? Am i missing much? 

[Zando_]

24 minutes ago, WhoWhat said:

Hey zando, another helpful answer again. What would the performance look like compared to a gtx 1080 or 1080 ti? Am i missing much? 

I don't think so. Haven't compared it directly to a 1080s (I had two in SLI but now they're pulled from my 8600K rig, ready to be sold to a friend and I have a 1080 Ti now). Once I finish my loop I can bench it though. At 1080p you won't really notice a difference, I keep about 115-144fps with my R7 2700X, same fps I kept with a 1080, but less than that same 1080 with a 5Ghz 8600K(pretty much 144fps solid all the time, same with the 1080 Ti). I imagine at 1440p the 1080 Ti would easily beat it, but compared to the 1080 it's either or. From all the benchmarks I've seen it really depends on whether or not the game is optimized for AMD or Nvidia. Games like Fortnite and PUBG and anything else made with UE4 run better on AMD, others are a toss up. Vega cards are usually much better with DX12 though, and if there's proper Vulkan support, such as in DOOM 2016 and the new Wolfenstein game, they eat Nvidia cards for breakfast. From what I was seeing with Vulkan enabled even an RX590 was  beating a 1070 in Wolfenstein.

 

TL;DR: About equal to the 1080 in games once averaged, varies by game depending on which side they're optimized for. A 1080 Ti will still beat it by a pretty large margin in games, but in RAW compute performance it wins out. Especially in Blender rendering and such, it beats a 1080 Ti by about 20% and IIRC even challenged a Titan in some workloads.

[WhoWhat]

6 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

I don't think so. Haven't compared it directly to a 1080s (I had two in SLI but now they're pulled from my 8600K rig, ready to be sold to a friend and I have a 1080 Ti now). Once I finish my loop I can bench it though. At 1080p you won't really notice a difference, I keep about 115-144fps with my R7 2700X, same fps I kept with a 1080, but less than that same 1080 with a 5Ghz 8600K(pretty much 144fps solid all the time, same with the 1080 Ti). I imagine at 1440p the 1080 Ti would easily beat it, but compared to the 1080 it's either or. From all the benchmarks I've seen it really depends on whether or not the game is optimized for AMD or Nvidia. Games like Fortnite and PUBG and anything else made with UE4 run better on AMD, others are a toss up. Vega cards are usually much better with DX12 though, and if there's proper Vulkan support, such as in DOOM 2016 and the new Wolfenstein game, they eat Nvidia cards for breakfast. From what I was seeing with Vulkan enabled even an RX590 was  beating a 1070 in Wolfenstein.

 

TL;DR: About equal to the 1080 in games once averaged, varies by game depending on which side they're optimized for. A 1080 Ti will still beat it by a pretty large margin in games, but in RAW compute performance it wins out. Especially in Blender rendering and such, it beats a 1080 Ti by about 20% and IIRC even challenged a Titan in some workloads.

Interesting, i believe most games i play are AMD optimized anyways plus i heard new AMD drivers are coming so maybe the performance will improve more. But is $400 U.S. a good deal? 

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, WhoWhat said:

Interesting, i believe most games i play are AMD optimized anyways plus i heard new AMD drivers are coming so maybe the performance will improve more. But is $400 U.S. a good deal? 

Considering if you can find them the MSRP is around $1000, yes. A brand new Vega 64 will run you $400 rn if you get the Sapphire one, but you lose the really high quality brushed aluminum blower cooler, it only has 8GB HBM2 vs an excessively awesome 16GB on the FE, the option of signed pro drivers if you use software that needs those, and the cool factor of saying you have a Frontier Edition. If you get the box too it includes a cool little booklet thing, and the box itself is pretty plain EXCEPT for the foam it's packed in, that stuff is the most heavy duty and safe feeling foam I've ever seen in any box for PC parts, no fear of it getting damaged unless postage literally throws it out of a plane or something. If you don't mind the yellow LEDs they're gorgeous as well, and ofc if you pop a waterblock on them it's even better.

[WhoWhat]

30 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Considering if you can find them the MSRP is around $1000, yes. A brand new Vega 64 will run you $400 rn if you get the Sapphire one, but you lose the really high quality brushed aluminum blower cooler, it only has 8GB HBM2 vs an excessively awesome 16GB on the FE, the option of signed pro drivers if you use software that needs those, and the cool factor of saying you have a Frontier Edition. If you get the box too it includes a cool little booklet thing, and the box itself is pretty plain EXCEPT for the foam it's packed in, that stuff is the most heavy duty and safe feeling foam I've ever seen in any box for PC parts, no fear of it getting damaged unless postage literally throws it out of a plane or something. If you don't mind the yellow LEDs they're gorgeous as well, and ofc if you pop a waterblock on them it's even better.

Maybe dumb question but any real difference between the pro and normal drivers?

[Zando_]

Just now, WhoWhat said:

Maybe dumb question but any real difference between the pro and normal drivers?

In my experience no, I'd just install the gaming drivers or you can even just use the normal Vega 64 ones. The pro drivers are only really needed for professional software that wants signed drivers similar to the ones on Quadros and such.

[Guest]

1070ti

[WhoWhat]

8 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

In my experience no, I'd just install the gaming drivers or you can even just use the normal Vega 64 ones. The pro drivers are only really needed for professional software that wants signed drivers similar to the ones on Quadros and such.

Alright and why undervolt the card? And do I also have to undervolt the vega 64?

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, WhoWhat said:

Alright and why undervolt the card? And do I also have to undervolt the vega 64?

You really want to undervolt all the vega cards, they run faster because lower temps = no throttling and thus higher sustained clocks. Otherwise it bounces around like crazy trying to remain below whatever temp target you give it. Newest drivers have basic undervolting profiles built in though, but apparently it's really buggy. They should fix it ASAP though so it's not that big of a worry, just run older drivers and manually do it in the meantime.

 

11 minutes ago, ears_ears said:

1070ti

The Vega FE outperforms the 1070 Ti in everything but titles that favor Nvidia a lot, so I wouldn't advise that.

[WhoWhat]

1 minute ago, Zando Bob said:

You really want to undervolt all the vega cards, they run faster because lower temps = no throttling and thus higher sustained clocks. Otherwise it bounces around like crazy trying to remain below whatever temp target you give it. Newest drivers have basic undervolting profiles built in though, but apparently it's really buggy. They should fix it ASAP though so it's not that big of a worry, just run older drivers and manually do it in the meantime.

 

The Vega FE outperforms the 1070 Ti in everything but titles that favor Nvidia a lot, so I wouldn't advise that.

What's a target undervolt if I do buy either of them?

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, WhoWhat said:

What's a target undervolt if I do buy either of them?

IDK, like I said I didn't have that much luck on mine but IDK if I was being too ambitious or not. Stock it pushes a full 1.2v or 1200mv, you want to get it down to 1100 or lower IIRC. As per the usual with overclocking and such you just tinker with it until it's unstable (I run unigine valley on a loop at 1440p ultra to stress the card while I mess with it, it crashes as soon as I hit an unstable setting, and if you go too far and have to restart it just resets the settings to default so it won't crash again), then go back to the last stable setting and let it run for a bit to make sure it's stable.

[WhoWhat]

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

IDK, like I said I didn't have that much luck on mine but IDK if I was being too ambitious or not. Stock it pushes a full 1.2v or 1200mv, you want to get it down to 1100 or lower IIRC. As per the usual with overclocking and such you just tinker with it until it's unstable (I run unigine valley on a loop at 1440p ultra to stress the card while I mess with it, it crashes as soon as I hit an unstable setting, and if you go too far and have to restart it just resets the settings to default so it won't crash again), then go back to the last stable setting and let it run for a bit to make sure it's stable.

Alright thanks for the help! I might get a brand new 64 just because it comes with games. And i won't feel so bad when i get rid of the stock cooler.

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, WhoWhat said:

Alright thanks for the help! I might get a brand new 64 just because it comes with games. And i won't feel so bad when i get rid of the stock cooler.

Does kinda feel bad getting rid of the stock cooler, but if you go with a waterblock it's totally worth it. Highly recommend the Heatkiller IV if you do, that's the one I have. It's gorgeous, well built, and install wasn't hard at all. Is apparently one of if not the best performing block, but I haven't tested it yet and don't have any to compare it to so I'm just going off some quick research and recommendations. And the free games are pretty cool, IIRC it's the Division 2 and some others (I got to pick 2/3 with an RX570 I picked up on sale).

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Zando Bob said:

 

The Vega FE outperforms the 1070 Ti in everything but titles that favor Nvidia a lot, so I wouldn't advise that.

waterblocks are expensive and it's not that big of a performance jump from the 1070ti to the 64 

[Zando_]

2 hours ago, ears_ears said:

waterblocks are expensive and it's not that big of a performance jump from the 1070ti to the 64 

In gaming only, there it's equal to a 1080 or so, or in anything with Vulkan or properly done DX12 support it should have an edge. In most other stuff the Vega FE/64 is much faster AFAIK, especially in render applications where it can compete with/beat a 1080 Ti. Vega cards are pretty darn good at raw compute performance. And judging by this quote "And i won't feel so bad when i get rid of the stock cooler." I assume the OP is fine with running a waterblock or AIO on it at some point so it should be no biggie. Not to mention (especially with the new 2019 edition drivers), AMD seems to be adding more useful stuff to their drivers, and in the Radeon app they let you switch install up to 3 versions back, whereas I don't really see the option for that in GeForce experience or Nvidia control panel. The Radeon software is pretty darn nice as well, solid UI, pretty simple to find everything. You can manage everything from ReLive (their version of shadowplay) to actual overclocking and fan profiles to displays and everything from pretty much just the radeon app, and it doesn't require yet another login like GeForce Experience does (I think it does to claim the free games though, but that makes sense). To be fair though, I have had some bugs and stuff but then I was randomly mucking around with my card and drivers so IDK if that's why it acted up. Didn't really have any of those issues with my RX480 unless I was actively tweaking the settings (push too hard on the OC or undervolting and it crashes the radeon app itself, usually a right click on the desktop and selecting radeon control panel brings it back though). Overall their software seems to have more useful stuff in it than Nvidia's options without third party apps.

TL;DR: It's about equal with a 1080 in most games, in render applications much better, sometimes beats a 1080 Ti and IIRC it competes with a titan in a few things. And then IMO the software is a lot better and seems to be actively updated with useful stuff. I think the last thing Nvidia added that's actually useful is Ansel?

 

(also disclaimer if you think I'm fanboying too hard, I really just like Vega a lot and think AMD did a good job on it other than the pricing, though now it's come down they're awesome. I am currently using my 1080 Ti rig though, and before that had SLI 1080s, one 1080, a 980 Ti, and before all those a 1050 Ti, my first actual dGPU other than some random one from an XP era prebuilt, so I do use a heck of a lot of Nvidia stuff too)