vega 56 Vega 56 with Morpheus II & modifications

SMGJohn · October 23, 2019

Its no denying Vega 56 is a very hot card both in performance and in temperature.
After all it will easily do 300W and even 400W with mods.
I was one of the few morons who bought this card brand new at MSRP on release day with the infamous blower fan that AMD likes to use.
As expected, the card had horrendous cooling, reaching easily 95 degrees and throttling, and its VRM doing 110 at times with core hot spots up in 120s.
This kind of cooling is unacceptable, so 4 months ago I decided that I should get a Morpheus II because I had enough with the fan spinning at deafening 7000RPM which yes for those of you its LOUDER than the R9 290 reference card.

When I got the Morpheus II, I had good core temps but I noticed one major problem, the VRM was not getting cooled properly, infuriated by the poor design choice from the manufacturer of this heatsink to exclude PROPER VRM cooling, (this may offend some) I cut apart the reference shroud because I hated it with passion, seeing how its aluminium I did it all with a hand saw and some files.

As one would expect, I not only got superior VRM temps of 70 to 90 degrees vastly better than the 135 it would do with the ****ty heatsinks provided in the package.

According to 3DMark, a regular stock Vega 56 should do 20 528 FireStrike score.
Mine however does 23 124 its of course no ground breaker but what is interesting are the temperatures allowing me to do 1705MHz stable on the core and 1100MHz on the memory with acceptable temperatures that will reach 80 in high demanding tasks, however its noted that in 3DMarks own tests the RTX 2070 in FireStrike does 22 593 which is very good obviously either GPU's will differ and because Vega are off a different design school the 2070 will perform better in most games.

With a bit time on hand and some really basic cavement tool skills, its possible for anyone to do this, manual tools is all needed, no machine tools yes I am a bit sceptical wielding power tools with no protection, nothing to fasten what I am cutting properly better to do it manually in this case its also more economical.

Because early Vega 56 do not have have the mold on the chip I was forced to use a thermal pad in this case the Carbonaut, I heard better stuff with the IC diamond pad but Carbonaut should perform superior with good mounting pressure.