Radeon 7- closer look including the cooling solution

[Mira Yurizaki]

My only gripe is the heat sink fins go out to the side, making hot air hit either the motherboard or glass rather than at least having half an exit point out the backplate which has a lot more breathing room now.

 

But I don't have enough data to support if running the fins lengthwise is better or not.

[Stefan Payne]

17 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

But I don't have enough data to support if running the fins lengthwise is better or not.

No, its not as you have higher air resistance, higher air pressure, so higher noise and other shit.

This is really the optimal solution, there is no other way.with a multi fan setup...

 

There's a reason why yo don't see that layout with more modern, higher power Graphics cards at all (except for Blower style) -> because the front/back exhaust is worse.

And also you have to think about your drives.

If you have a front/back thingy - for example Sapphire HD5870 (IIRC it was the Vapor X), you grill your drives behind the Card.

I have another Card with that fin setup: HIS Radeon HD7870 IceQ, but that's also a lowe rpower Card.

IIRC the HIS 7970 also had it lenthwise (I had the Card for a couple of days. First one died, second one had coilwhine. Both had Motor/Bearing Noise with the fans. So I switched to Gigabyte 7970GHz wich is louder under load, way louder but quieter at Desktop).

 

 

The "blow on Motherboard" is only a Problem in the recent days, when some MoBo Manufacturers are putting M.2 SSDs below the GPU Heatsink and not on top of the GPU Slot...

 

For example this thing:

https://geizhals.de/gigabyte-x470-aorus-ultra-gaming-a1804451.html?hloc=de

 

The ASUS X470 has the M.2 Slot above the GPU Slot...

 

 

PS: the only beef I have with the Radeon 7 is the lack of Thermal Interface Material between the Backplate and the main PCB.

I modded my Power Color Red Devil with the blue Arctic Pads and put some between Backplate and PCB, where the main MOSFETs, Memory and GPU is. And it seems to be worth it...

 

Anyway, for a 3 Fan Card, you have to use this desing.

For a 2 Fan Card, it might be different.

For a 1 fan Card, the Lenthwise makes way more sense.

[suchamoneypit]

8 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Why do I get the suspicion that AMD is pulling out all the stops on the cooler because the chip won’t perform well like the Vega cards?

you think reviewers are going to overlook the actual performance of the card because it has a nice cooler?

[Papacheeks]

6 hours ago, Madgemade said:

Yep I also still have my 290 but I swapped out the stock cooler as it really was unusable. So loud even at stock, has to drop power by -30% to get noise and temps down.

 

Sadly it's just been announced that stock it insanely low for this GPU. Most people won't be able to buy at all I imagine.

 

Vapour chamber in a really nice feature to see. Great that they put so much effort into cooling this time.

 

That's for UK. First batch is 5000, second batch will come soon after. And from what I was reading that small allocation is for UK, a majority of stock is going to US.

[Madgemade]

50 minutes ago, Papacheeks said:

That's for UK. First batch is 5000, second batch will come soon after. And from what I was reading that small allocation is for UK, a majority of stock is going to US.

That makes sense. The problem is that 5000 is nothing. Prices will jump up to over 2080 Ti prices and then Nvidia fanboys will tear it apart. I'm going to try and get one at launch but if it's straight out of stock I'll just get one from the US instead (assuming not also out of stock).

 

At this point there is no reason (in the UK at least) to believe it will launch at RRP. The few stores with stock will price them as high as they can. A rubbish launch will taint this card forever, just like with the Vega 56/64 which had price problems for most of their life until the last 6 months or so.

[Bcat00]

1 hour ago, suchamoneypit said:

you think reviewers are going to overlook the actual performance of the card because it has a nice cooler?

No, but they would give it pity points if the cooler is nice. Just saying, plenty of people on this forum and reviewers are biased towards that company in a lot of way.

[Stefan Payne]

1 hour ago, suchamoneypit said:

you think reviewers are going to overlook the actual performance of the card because it has a nice cooler?

We're talking about AMD, so they will criticize that the card does't come with RGB Lighting.

And that the shroud is Silver, not black.

 

Or whatever else they can pull out their behind...

 

Not all, but some will do such shit.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

Plus, damn is it ever pretty. Vega 64 Limited Edition is the prettiest video card of all time IMO, but RVII is pretty close

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, Madgemade said:

That makes sense. The problem is that 5000 is nothing. Prices will jump up to over 2080 Ti prices and then Nvidia fanboys will tear it apart. I'm going to try and get one at launch but if it's straight out of stock I'll just get one from the US instead (assuming not also out of stock).

 

At this point there is no reason (in the UK at least) to believe it will launch at RRP. The few stores with stock will price them as high as they can. A rubbish launch will taint this card forever, just like with the Vega 56/64 which had price problems for most of their life until the last 6 months or so.

that had nothing to do with the launch and everything to do with how much money they made mining coins it launched during a pretty good time in coin mining so it was to be expected that they would sell quickly

[Trixanity]

13 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

No, but they would give it pity points if the cooler is nice. Just saying, plenty of people on this forum and reviewers are biased towards that company in a lot of way.

Of course. The nice cooler will make it so people will disregard the performance. And if it was gold-plated, they would say buy it instead of a 2080 Ti because why not?

 

Seriously where did you come up with that? It's a graphics card, not a phone or a laptop. The looks will only determine whether you pick up one AIB implementation over the other (if all else are the same), not whether you'll pick up an Nvidia or AMD card and even then those so called pity points are non-existent.

[Taf the Ghost]

15 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

My only gripe is the heat sink fins go out to the side, making hot air hit either the motherboard or glass rather than at least having half an exit point out the backplate which has a lot more breathing room now.

 

But I don't have enough data to support if running the fins lengthwise is better or not.

 

15 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

No, its not as you have higher air resistance, higher air pressure, so higher noise and other shit.

This is really the optimal solution, there is no other way.with a multi fan setup...

 

There's a reason why yo don't see that layout with more modern, higher power Graphics cards at all (except for Blower style) -> because the front/back exhaust is worse.

And also you have to think about your drives.

If you have a front/back thingy - for example Sapphire HD5870 (IIRC it was the Vapor X), you grill your drives behind the Card.

I have another Card with that fin setup: HIS Radeon HD7870 IceQ, but that's also a lowe rpower Card.

IIRC the HIS 7970 also had it lenthwise (I had the Card for a couple of days. First one died, second one had coilwhine. Both had Motor/Bearing Noise with the fans. So I switched to Gigabyte 7970GHz wich is louder under load, way louder but quieter at Desktop).

 

 

The "blow on Motherboard" is only a Problem in the recent days, when some MoBo Manufacturers are putting M.2 SSDs below the GPU Heatsink and not on top of the GPU Slot...

 

For example this thing:

https://geizhals.de/gigabyte-x470-aorus-ultra-gaming-a1804451.html?hloc=de

 

The ASUS X470 has the M.2 Slot above the GPU Slot...

 

 

PS: the only beef I have with the Radeon 7 is the lack of Thermal Interface Material between the Backplate and the main PCB.

I modded my Power Color Red Devil with the blue Arctic Pads and put some between Backplate and PCB, where the main MOSFETs, Memory and GPU is. And it seems to be worth it...

 

Anyway, for a 3 Fan Card, you have to use this desing.

For a 2 Fan Card, it might be different.

For a 1 fan Card, the Lenthwise makes way more sense.

I think the Layout of the Card is actually for Vertical mounting to not choke the card. They top isn't RGB, so it's a viable card to mount vertically in a lot of cases. The top/bottom air-out channels are far more useful for that. For a high-end card, you expect users to either: 1) use it as a Compute Card, so it's not going to be at fmax much, 2) put it in a nice card and vertically mount it or 3) put a water block on it. An extra long, normal 2-slot design with a clean look and semi-optimized for vertical mounting is actually pretty clever by AMD.

 

It doesn't hurt it's one of the best looking reference design in a while, but it help that basically made an air-cooler version of the RX Vega 64 Liquid. That was good looking as well.

[Taf the Ghost]

13 hours ago, Madgemade said:

That makes sense. The problem is that 5000 is nothing. Prices will jump up to over 2080 Ti prices and then Nvidia fanboys will tear it apart. I'm going to try and get one at launch but if it's straight out of stock I'll just get one from the US instead (assuming not also out of stock).

 

At this point there is no reason (in the UK at least) to believe it will launch at RRP. The few stores with stock will price them as high as they can. A rubbish launch will taint this card forever, just like with the Vega 56/64 which had price problems for most of their life until the last 6 months or so.

High GPUs in the Consumer Space is actually a fairly small market. That's why AMD doesn't really made high-end GPUs but Workstation/Compute GPUs that still work for gaming. Nvidia does this as well, which is why the 2080 is >700USD and the 2080 Ti is >1200USD. That section of the market will pay the premium because it's already small to begin with.

[leadeater]

13 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

And that the shroud is Silver, not black.

It sucks because it's not gold like the Titan V and Titan RTX.

[Valentyn]

22 minutes ago, leadeater said:

It sucks because it's not gold like the Titan V and Titan RTX.

The main reason I shan't be getting one!

No peasant looking hardware in my system; only the finest "champagne", Beige, and Brown for my system!

[CarlBar]

Questions since someone criticized it earlier in the thread. Why is still using GCN, (it appears to be AMD's version of CUDA but maybe i'm misunderstanding that), bad? 

[Stefan Payne]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

It sucks because it's not gold like the Titan V and Titan RTX.

And there is no girly pink edition!!111

 

PS: maybe time for me to get a cordless drill as a Hardware Store here had a Pink Makita for like 90€ or so...

[Madgemade]

3 minutes ago, Stefan Payne said:

And there is no girly pink edition!!111

 

PS: maybe time for me to get a cordless drill as a Hardware Store here had a Pink Makita for like 90€ or so...

Should be easy to paint it. GamersNexus took it apart easily.

 

I imagine you could get the shroud and remove all the LED electronics and then Plasti Dip it. Being Aluminium will make it more difficult to paint properly though.

Another method could be to get a custom sticker made that could be applied to the whole thing?

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

1) use it as a Compute Card, so it's not going to be at fmax much, 2) put it in a nice card and vertically mount it or 3) put a water block on it. An extra long, normal 2-slot design with a clean look and semi-optimized for vertical mounting is actually pretty clever by AMD.

I'm only going to nitpick on point two. If by vertical mounting you mean this:

 

Assuming there's going to be a TG side panel, then this makes even less sense. This chokes the card of airflow and even having three fans wouldn't be enough to cover for it. As some measure of evidence of how sensitive this can be, when I was testing various fan settings for temperature and performance on my video card, removing the sound card, which is two slots down, showed the best results, with a drop in 5 degrees just by removing the card alone.

 

46 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Questions since someone criticized it earlier in the thread. Why is still using GCN, (it appears to be AMD's version of CUDA but maybe i'm misunderstanding that), bad? 

People think AMD continuing to iterate on GCN rather than engineer something different isn't doing AMD any favors. NVIDIA on the flip side, typically creates something that looks different enough every other generation.

[Stefan Payne]

10 minutes ago, Madgemade said:

Should be easy to paint it. GamersNexus took it apart easily.

True...

And its good that they kept it simple, stupid instead of going the nVidia route...

 

PS: wasn't kidding about the cordless PINK Makita Drill.

[Taf the Ghost]

1 hour ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

I'm only going to nitpick on point two. If by vertical mounting you mean this:

 

Assuming there's going to be a TG side panel, then this makes even less sense. This chokes the card of airflow and even having three fans wouldn't be enough to cover for it. As some measure of evidence of how sensitive this can be, when I was testing various fan settings for temperature and performance on my video card, removing the sound card, which is two slots down, showed the best results, with a drop in 5 degrees just by removing the card alone.

 

People think AMD continuing to iterate on GCN rather than engineer something different isn't doing AMD any favors. NVIDIA on the flip side, typically creates something that looks different enough every other generation.

I never said GPUs should be mounted that way, especially with the minimal clearance a lot of cases provide for a vertical mounting. My point only is that it should probably be less choked than most air-cool cards in that setup. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I never said GPUs should be mounted that way, especially with the minimal clearance a lot of cases provide for a vertical mounting. My point only is that it should probably be less choked than most air-cool cards in that setup. 

Most air cooled cards have the heat sink fins going width-wise, including the FE version of the RTX cards. AMD didn't do anything new or necessarily smart here.