AMD RX Vega might use lots of power

[Taf the Ghost]

What's the limit of the power draw between the slot and 2x 8-pin? Isn't it 375w? Unless we're getting 3x 8-pin for the top SKU.

 

Another point, Polaris undervolts really, really well. (It's part of the reason for it being so nutty for Mining). If they could have put 2 RX580s on a board with Infinity Fabric, they'd have been able to top a 1080 Ti without too much issue, though at a bit higher power draw. 

[Lays]

3 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

What's the limit of the power draw between the slot and 2x 8-pin? Isn't it 375w? Unless we're getting 3x 8-pin for the top SKU.

 

Another point, Polaris undervolts really, really well. (It's part of the reason for it being so nutty for Mining). If they could have put 2 RX580s on a board with Infinity Fabric, they'd have been able to top a 1080 Ti without too much issue, though at a bit higher power draw. 

That's not a limit, it's a guideline.  Proper PSU's have no problem going above that spec without exploding, for some reason everyone and their dog thinks if you draw more power through an 8 pin the whole earth explodes.

[LooneyJuice]

Honestly, I can't really see how TDP is so big of an issue. Granted, it looks hot and wasteful, sure, and possibly a step back in the overall trend. I love efficient electrical engineering as much as the next guy, but I'm waiting for actual performance. And funnily enough, all this crazy TDP talk kind of makes me look forward to what Sapphire come up with for cooling. Look what they did with the Fury (Air), mmmmmm...

[laminutederire]

10 minutes ago, LooneyJuice said:

Honestly, I can't really see how TDP is so big of an issue. Granted, it looks hot and wasteful, sure, and possibly a step back in the overall trend. I love efficient electrical engineering as much as the next guy, but I'm waiting for actual performance. And funnily enough, all this crazy TDP talk kind of makes me look forward to what Sapphire come up with for cooling. Look what they did with the Fury (Air), mmmmmm...

That and besides, OC'd 1080 ti are well into that consumption territory anyway, but no one is actually complaining about that and Temps.

[LooneyJuice]

2 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

That and besides, OC'd 1080 ti are well into that consumption territory anyway, but no one is actually complaining about that and Temps.

Yeah, TDP is completely symbolic when it comes to overclocking, especially if there's any kind of meaningful overvoltage allowed. That being said, the 1080ti is being held back a bit on account of GPU Boost, but the point still stands AFAIK.

 

Additionally, there's a massive elephant in the room when it comes to these discussions. Unless you're mining, most of the time, GPUs are either idling or are under partial load, so if it's your power bill you're concerned about, I doubt that's a massive issue. I can understand that maybe it reduces the lower wattage PSU options for some people, but I think we can fairly confidently say that people who are in the market for multi-hundred dollar GPUs tend to go a bit ape-doodoo when it comes to PSUs, so I don't think there's anything to be alarmed about.

[mach]

Finally my humble 600W psu in my tiny itx case has a use!

[Nena Trinity]

A lot? That can by anything from 250w to 350w! o3o

[MoonSpot]

4 hours ago, Notional said:

Overclocked 1080ti's are usually around the 300w mark, so Vega being the same should not be a problem if the performance is greater (or just similar).

Except that everything we've seen thus far to my knowledge plants Vega at around 1080 performance, not so much the 1080ti.  And that's a fairly wide delta.  Don't see any justification to anticipate 1080ti perf, let alone entertaining the notion that it could be greater.

That said...Fuck Gsync manacles and everything it represents.  Nvidia needs to at least buy me dinner and a case of beer before I consider letting them tie me up like that. 

I ain't that EZ a skank.  Live as free as ya can, fer as long as ya can.

 

2 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Oh lord someone pair 2 of them with a 7980XE and max out a 1600W power supply.   I haven't seen > 1200W usage in a while since the last few years have been efficiency.

Yea, but having to give notice to the foreman at the nuclear plant so they can prepare for the load on the grid every time I want to boot up gets to be a pain in the rump after a while.

[TheKDub]

Inb4 AMD pops out a card that requires 3x8-pin PCIe power connectors and comes with a 360mm radiator attached

[mr moose]

Don't AMD and Nvidia report their TDP differently or something like that?  Anyway, 1. the people who buy the latest and greatest GPU also happen to be the people who don't skimp on a PSU/ or it's rating, nor really care about a few watts her or there.  And 2. why speculate? once the dust has settled and the benchmarks/reviews are in we'll have something to discuss. 

 

 

[mach]

24 minutes ago, MoonSpot said:

Except that everything we've seen thus far

That said...Fuck Gsync manacles and everything it represents.  Nvidia needs to at least buy me dinner and a case of beer before I consider letting them tie me up like that. 

I ain't that EZ a skank.  Live as free as ya can, fer as long as ya can.

I use my nvidia card on a free sync monitor because no fuck was given to gsync.

 

 

(Although I'd admit I secretly looks forward to vega)

[Valentyn]

7 hours ago, TheRandomness said:

I like the amount of people who assumed TDP directly meant power draw. Sure, the card might run hot, but a 300W TDP doesn't necessarily mean that it'll draw 300W.

This also stemming from the one site that listed 'total board power'; since you know two 8 pins plus the pcie slot = 375w on the liquid cooled one

It never listed that as TDP, just the boards max power.

 

We also have the same MSI employee responding to the negative comment about power draw saying "that depends on the performance".

 

The 27th is a few days away, and we'll get to know all the juicy details on Vega's Frontier Edition anyway, so we might as well wait.

 

[WereCat]

My 1080ti uses 280W-330W, depends on load.

8 hours ago, Bcat00 said:

Sheesh, AMD might as well turn their company logo into a burning flame, always with the overheating chips.

 

[TheRandomness]

3 hours ago, Vode said:

AMD rates it's Graphics cards with TBP (Typical Board Power), not TDP. So I would assume it actually consumes 300W-375W in this case.

 

And sometimes they specify the absolute maximum power draw, which for two 8pins means:

75W from PCIe and 2x 150W from dual 8pin = 375W

 

Although what you posted is technically correct. TDP =/= TBP or Power draw

27 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

This also stemming from the one site that listed 'total board power'; since you know two 8 pins plus the pcie slot = 375w on the liquid cooled one

It never listed that as TDP, just the boards max power.

 

We also have the same MSI employee responding to the negative comment about power draw saying "that depends on the performance".

 

The 27th is a few days away, and we'll get to know all the juicy details on Vega's Frontier Edition anyway, so we might as well wait.

As AMD have proven before, standards can be broken (though it's not ideal at all). I mean, a single 8 pin PCIe connector, when wired properly, has the ability to deliver 400W alone. So I'd say that what you've said is correct, though it really shouldn't draw that much unless Vega is AMD's Fermi.

[yian88]

Anything above 250 Watt = garbage.

[Valentyn]

54 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

As AMD have proven before, standards can be broken (though it's not ideal at all). I mean, a single 8 pin PCIe connector, when wired properly, has the ability to deliver 400W alone. So I'd say that what you've said is correct, though it really shouldn't draw that much unless Vega is AMD's Fermi.

 

Honestly power draw doesn't concern me, I have a 1000W PSU, and just want the performance for my needs.

The concern would be if it's a hot mess as well. So we'll need to see how the Frontier Edition Blower vs Water stacks up.

[TheRandomness]

11 minutes ago, Valentyn said:

 

Honestly power draw doesn't concern me, I have a 1000W PSU, and just want the performance for my needs.

The concern would be if it's a hot mess as well. So we'll need to see how the Frontier Edition Blower vs Water stacks up.

We don't really want to see a repeat of Hawaii now, do we? Though, I do think all that heat just comes from the redesigned stream processors and such, with all that extra capability to do many more calculations compared to previous architectures.

[Sauron]

That's not a lot actually, this is not the TDP. Hawaii and fiji drew more under full load.

[tom_w141]

10 hours ago, VagabondWraith said:

So...

 

Vega is coming in HOT?

 

 

Well as we learned in the other thread the thermals don't matter if the performance is there  

 

Though seriously I doubt its better than a 1080Ti  with so many delays there has to be an issue somewhere. Also this article isn't a review so at this point it is less newsworth/credible though I do expect it to be true.

 

Also drawing high power is different to high heat, X299 would be a lot cooler if the TIM was more thermally efficient. Lastly a gpu has moving parts so unlike a cpu not all power is wasted as heat.

 

 

[Valentyn]

12 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

We don't really want to see a repeat of Hawaii now, do we? Though, I do think all that heat just comes from the redesigned stream processors and such, with all that extra capability to do many more calculations compared to previous architectures.

Hawaii wasn't bad, AMD's reference cooler was atrocious though.

AMD's gaming and computer/learning GPUs have the issue with heat for that very reason( redesigned stream processors and extra features for compute/calculations). Look at the Tesla P100, it's 250w-300w depending on if it's the PCIe version or mezzanine one.
The 250W being slower in all regards.

 

Unlike NVIDIA, AMD's GCN doesn't cut compute/enterprise performance on it's consumer line. What you get on Instinct/Radeon Pro is what you get on Radeon RX hardware wise.

So they have all that extra compute on that's essentially useless for gaming/3D.
 

A gaming card doesn't "need" HBCC for extremely big data sets, or Rapid Packed Math for Double FP16 compute. They also don't Need* HBM2 for low Latency, ECC, and again HBC.
Yet due to the way their GCN architecture works, and their money issues they just separate the two segments via drivers.

 

It would be like Volta GeForce cards shipping with Tensor Cores, and double FP16. All useless for gaming, but increases die size, costs, and heat/power.

 

On the brightside, Vega looks great for the niché of people that want a card that'll do it all well without breaking the bank.

[tom_w141]

39 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Anything above 250 Watt = garbage.

So a 1080Ti or Titan X is garbage?

[tom_w141]

7 hours ago, Rangaman42 said:

So what? Users of top end GPUs will be able to afford beefy PSUs anyway. So long as they can manage to cool it well enough to keep it acceptable and not sound like a jet engine, who cares? I'm personally fine for high power use on the top end cards, provided they have the grunt to match.

Exactly high power is fine. High thermals is not. As long as they didn't cheap out on the thermal solution for this card like un named manufacturers do on their products then regardless of power draw temps should be at suitable levels.

[samcool55]

Come on, it's high-end stuff, what did we honestly expect?

An rx 580 uses 150-ish watts which is a solid mid-range card.

Adding only 50W TDP and expecting much more performance, not going to happen.

 

Honestly 250-300W is maybe not that great, but that's what you have to deal with when you use high-end hardware.

A good cooler is very important but as we seen before it's not impossible to keep gpu's with such high TDP cool.

 

[IntMD]

Pretty sure Raja said the frontier edition would work fine on 8+6pin but they put dual 8s on it instead to give some extra headroom for people on it, so it's not that bad really...

[Agosto]

There is NO official spec from AMD, except for the MI25 which is "<300W" 

The 300 and 375W figures could just be related to the number of PCIe power connectors (8+6 for 300, 8+8 for 375)

"A lot of power" is 200W or more for me, while it could be 250 or 300W for someone else. Let's wait for the 27th for some actual tests.