Vega 56 BIOS Flash?

[WMGroomAK]

I saw this little blurb over at HardOCP and thought it was kind of interesting, but basically someone over at ChipHell has successfully flashed the Vega 64 BIOS onto a Vega 56 card and while it doesn't unlock the extra stream processors, it does provide a bit of a bump in performance...

https://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/08/30/chip_hell_flashes_vega_56_bios_64

Quote

Long story short is that kdtree over at ChipHell as successfully BIOS flashed a Vega 56 card with the Vega 64 BIOS, however it did NOT allow him to get access to the stream processors in order to "unlock" those. However it did give him enough room to run the Vega 56 at Vega 64 clocks.

Not that I think anyone will be able to find a Vega Card for a reasonable price, however, it does make the Vega 56 a bit better of a deal if you get a dual BIOS card at MSRP and just flash the 64 BIOS onto it... 

[Swealteek]

1 minute ago, WMGroomAK said:

I saw this little blurb over at HardOCP and thought it was kind of interesting, but basically someone over at ChipHell has successfully flashed the Vega 64 BIOS onto a Vega 56 card and while it doesn't unlock the extra stream processors, it does provide a bit of a bump in performance...

https://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/08/30/chip_hell_flashes_vega_56_bios_64

Not that I think anyone will be able to find a Vega Card for a reasonable price, however, it does make the Vega 56 a bit better of a deal if you get a dual BIOS card at MSRP and just flash the 64 BIOS onto it... 

Need to find a bios for your gpu maker first.

[Ezio Auditore]

Why not just oc then?

[WMGroomAK]

1 minute ago, Ezio Auditore said:

Why not just oc then?

If I remember correctly from the Gamer's Nexus video on OC-ing Vega, one of the big issues with OC-ing is that 56 has an upper limit on the amount of power draw that is lower than 64 and less than what the VRM can handle (my speculation is that the Vega 64 BIOS helps to adjust this limit).  What this does is get's you to within a percent or two of Vega 64 performance without manually OC-ing the card.  If the graph that is on Videocardz/Hexus is correct (which I think it's a cleaned up version of the one above), then it looks like you can further overclock the Vega 56 to outperform a stock Vega 64 using the Vega 64 driver.

 

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/109544-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-makes-100-loss-msrp-says-report/

 

[TetraSky]

So basically, it overclock the card in a semi permanent way through the bios of it instead of doing it through software like most people do.

[Bananasplit_00]

well i already have a 1080, i dont really care about this anymore tbh. cant but Vega 56 here atleast anyway

[ZackBarletto]

With AMD... it seems like if there is a will there is a way.

 

Is it slower? do you like to overclock like a bat out of hell? no? well if you do.......power bill over 9000

 

Is it slower? do you flash BIOS often? no? well if you do....... you can now be faster! lol

 

Like the more risks you are willing to take the more you get out of it.

 

I understand you can do this with both manufacturers, but with Nvidia you don't really have too..

[YoloSwag]

3 hours ago, ZackBarletto said:

With AMD... it seems like if there is a will there is a way.

 

Is it slower? do you like to overclock like a bat out of hell? no? well if you do.......power bill over 9000

 

Is it slower? do you flash BIOS often? no? well if you do....... you can now be faster! lol

 

Like the more risks you are willing to take the more you get out of it.

 

I understand you can do this with both manufacturers, but with Nvidia you don't really have too..

First of all, VEGA 56 is already faster than a GTX 1070 which it was supposed to compete with if MSRP was to be followed.

 

Pascal is definitely more power efficient but the  VEGA 56 power draw isn't that horrible as fanboys tend to over exaggerate things.

 

Secondly, the BIOS flashing is not mandatory and would actually benefit custom cards with dual BIOS since you'd be getting near-VEGA 64 performance for less money.

 

And about your last part indicating this could be possible - it's impossible to think Nvidia would allow customers to "win" since they always punch them in the gut somehow (looks at Titan X Pascal, then GTX 1080Ti, then Titan Xp).

[2FA]

12 minutes ago, YoloSwag said:

First of all, VEGA 56 is already faster than a GTX 1070 which it was supposed to compete with if MSRP was to be followed.

 

Pascal is definitely more power efficient but the  VEGA 56 power draw isn't that horrible as fanboys tend to over exaggerate things.

 

Secondly, the BIOS flashing is not mandatory and would actually benefit custom cards with dual BIOS since you'd be getting near-VEGA 64 performance for less money.

 

And about your last part indicating this could be possible - it's impossible to think Nvidia would allow customers to "win" since they always punch them in the gut somehow (looks at Titan X Pascal, then GTX 1080Ti, then Titan Xp).

Yeah Vega 56 is fine in terms of power consumption, 64 not so much.

[XenosTech]

15 minutes ago, YoloSwag said:

First of all, VEGA 56 is already faster than a GTX 1070 which it was supposed to compete with if MSRP was to be followed.

 

Pascal is definitely more power efficient but the  VEGA 56 power draw isn't that horrible as fanboys tend to over exaggerate things.

 

Secondly, the BIOS flashing is not mandatory and would actually benefit custom cards with dual BIOS since you'd be getting near-VEGA 64 performance for less money.

 

And about your last part indicating this could be possible - it's impossible to think Nvidia would allow customers to "win" since they always punch them in the gut somehow (looks at Titan X Pascal, then GTX 1080Ti, then Titan Xp).

Technically pascal is as power hungry as vega but you have to remove (mod the fuck out of it) the voltage limits off the card.

2 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

Yeah Vega 56 is fine in terms of power consumption, 64 not so much.

Yeah 56 is the best vega card to get hands down if you need one and the aftermarket cards should be a bit faster since those will have better cooling

[WMGroomAK]

36 minutes ago, XenosTech said:

Yeah 56 is the best vega card to get hands down if you need one and the aftermarket cards should be a bit faster since those will have better cooling

Thinking on this, a couple of things come to mind considering that the only physical difference between the reference Vega 56 & 64 appear to be the 8 compute cores that are disabled on 56...

• First I think it's interesting that Vega 56 is appearing to be a BIOS reigned in card so it'll be interesting to see how much tweaking AIB partners can make to their own custom BIOS cards...
• Second, at least where FireStrike Extreme is concerned, the number of CU units available appears to be a lot less of an issue as the Memory and CU speeds when you consider that this Vega 56 with the 64 BIOS is getting to within 2% of the 64 score while having 12.5% less Compute Units available and appears to be scoring 8% higher than a stock Vega 64 when the 56 is OC-ed on the 64 BIOS.

If you could get the Vega 56 at MSRP with dual BIOS settings and an EK waterblock (or some other water cooling solution), the BIOS flash, undervolting and OC-ing might make for an interesting setup...

[Ezio Auditore]

8 hours ago, WMGroomAK said:

If I remember correctly from the Gamer's Nexus video on OC-ing Vega, one of the big issues with OC-ing is that 56 has an upper limit on the amount of power draw that is lower than 64 and less than what the VRM can handle (my speculation is that the Vega 64 BIOS helps to adjust this limit).  What this does is get's you to within a percent or two of Vega 64 performance without manually OC-ing the card.  If the graph that is on Videocardz/Hexus is correct (which I think it's a cleaned up version of the one above), then it looks like you can further overclock the Vega 56 to outperform a stock Vega 64 using the Vega 64 driver.

 

http://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/109544-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-makes-100-loss-msrp-says-report/

 

Can't you overcome it with some software other than wattman?

[XenosTech]

1 hour ago, WMGroomAK said:

Thinking on this, a couple of things come to mind considering that the only physical difference between the reference Vega 56 & 64 appear to be the 8 compute cores that are disabled on 56...

• First I think it's interesting that Vega 56 is appearing to be a BIOS reigned in card so it'll be interesting to see how much tweaking AIB partners can make to their own custom BIOS cards...
• Second, at least where FireStrike Extreme is concerned, the number of CU units available appears to be a lot less of an issue as the Memory and CU speeds when you consider that this Vega 56 with the 64 BIOS is getting to within 2% of the 64 score while having 12.5% less Compute Units available and appears to be scoring 8% higher than a stock Vega 64 when the 56 is OC-ed on the 64 BIOS.

If you could get the Vega 56 at MSRP with dual BIOS settings and an EK waterblock (or some other water cooling solution), the BIOS flash, undervolting and OC-ing might make for an interesting setup...

It definitely would make for an interesting setup. As buildzoid said in one of this vids... If you can get a vega64 bios config on a vega56 you will basically have vega64 performance or better in gaming but raw computer wont be there because of the lacking 8 computes and the associated cores with them

[MeDownYou]

7 hours ago, ZackBarletto said:

 

 

Is it slower? do you like to overclock like a bat out of hell? no? well if you do.......power bill over 9000

 

..

undervolting does more than overvolting these days and further REDUCES your power bill...

[ZackBarletto]

13 hours ago, YoloSwag said:

First of all, VEGA 56 is already faster than a GTX 1070 which it was supposed to compete with if MSRP was to be followed.

 

Pascal is definitely more power efficient but the  VEGA 56 power draw isn't that horrible as fanboys tend to over exaggerate things.

 

Secondly, the BIOS flashing is not mandatory and would actually benefit custom cards with dual BIOS since you'd be getting near-VEGA 64 performance for less money.

 

And about your last part indicating this could be possible - it's impossible to think Nvidia would allow customers to "win" since they always punch them in the gut somehow (looks at Titan X Pascal, then GTX 1080Ti, then Titan Xp).

Sry was only supposed to be a joke. I should do more research before trying to get a laugh or two from someone with a sense of humor.

 

I wasn't really trying to compare those two cards exactly. "it seems like with AMD" i was trying to make a general funny about how some of their products work. they are sometimes hotter and slower, but if you don't really care and you push it and push it, you might actually be able to pull ahead in some cases. but with the sacrifice of more power on top of the already higher than normal/expectation/competition power consumption. I should have been much more specific as to what i was talking about since this is a VEGA 56 thread. My apologies.

 

Yes, i agree that pascal is more efficient than VEGA. I wasn't trying to over exaggerate the power consumption except for the over 9000 part which I though indicated the joke. It is simply higher. I am a proud AMD fanboy, so I assume you would think I might try to argue for AMD and why they are superior. lol but i'm not living in a fantasy just because I love AMD so ill admit there are downfalls of sometimes being slower and draw more power (while still recognising their price to performance sweet spot they try to hit).... And i remember people talking about the FX series being a space heater Over clock it gets worse! and It was also of the slower chips. *it had its wins in very specific productivity environments

 

I hope the custom cards do it justice! way better cooling and sometimes better quality. Totally agree.

 

Im sort of confused about your last section. Me mentioning its possible with both, i meant that you can also OC nvidia.. and there was also a time when BIOS flash was also a thing with a specific gen. I forget the generation, but there used to be a bios flash that turned off nvidia greenlight i think it was called. basically to take the voltage limiter off and OC more. not to mention the K|ngp|n edition that had a "not very advertised" bios flash that could also take the Voltage limiter off so you could use that monstrosity of a card.

So somewhere in these two history you can OC and BIOS flash to get more performance.... thats it.

 

I promise non of this was to come back at you or to prove anything. I was only explaining myself and why i said what i said. Its my fault to not be more specific and explain my points better. its also my fault to post that in a manner that can be mis understood easily. Thanks for keeping me in check.

[ZackBarletto]

9 hours ago, MeDownYou said:

undervolting does more than overvolting these days and further REDUCES your power bill...

Yeah i saw one post on here about that for the vega 56. Was pretty cool how that works. I didnt know you could do that to other cards too and gain a little performance... shows how much i know.

 

But I was only trying to be funny, and it was kinda the overall sense i get from AMD. they used to run hotter and draw a little more power, and if you overclocked you got better performance for your money and can sometimes pull ahead of the stock competition slightly. but i thought it only got hotter and drew more power when you had to overclock. 8350 r9 290x i thought drew a lot of power and made a lot of heat? I don't know much about anything, like i said was only trying to crack a joke.

[Hellion]

Another day another "omg vega uses too much power lol" argument. This thread topic had absolutely nothing to do with vega power draw, yet predictably it was brought up at random anyway... Yawn...

 

Now I'm not advocating that AMD or any company for that matter build products without power consumption in mind but this go-to is so trivial that it's the gold standard of grasping at straws. I'm willing to bet that not a single person voicing this stance has actually ever factored power draw when building a PERSONAL machine into their purchase decision. If you want something, you buy it. Pretty damn simple. We aren't talking about those that run large scale mining operations containing dozens of cards here. Clearly vega is prohibitive by the initial cost in this segment to begin with.

 

I have no idea why this continues to be mindlessly regurgitated by pro-nvidia children at this point. It just screams ignorance as it's not a factor in real world practice. Regardless whether or not you care for AMD, having competition in the market place is beneficial for everyone. When a single company like intel or nvidia create a monopoly it stagnates advancement and/or increases pricing. Even if you despise AMD, now that their back and once prices stabilize, you'll be thankful that your next nvidia purchase will be cheaper.

[Doobeedoo]

It's a good thing, now maybe someone finds a way for better OC on 64.