Reviews are out for AMD's Radeon RX Vega64 and Vega56, or at least reference designs of these two models. Given the heat output and power requirements of both cards - especially Vega64 - attention is swiftly switching to partner variants to keep temperatures and noise as low as possible. These cards from the likes of GIGABYTE, ASUS, MSI and Powercolour, are enhanced through custom cooler and PCB designs, and have in the past absolutely trounced reference cooled models.
Late Saturday TooliusTech released images of a prototype design for a Vega-based card, complete with triple-fan cooler. This model eschews the traditional blower design of reference videocards, and instead packs in what looks like three 80 or 92mm fans on top of an extremely dense and long heatsink. A trade-off would be that most heat is dumped back into the PC chassis, but adequate internal air flow should make that a relatively minor worry.
A glimpse at the underside shows how the cooling requirements of Vega compromise the card's form factor. The heatsink increases the card's overall length by around one third, whilst the PCB alone would be compact enough for an mini-ITX system. It is likely that this is a symptom of AMD running the GPU at the ragged edge in order to maintain performance close to NVIDIA's GTX 1080, even as their new architecture is unable to supplant the GTX 1080Ti in gaming.
Judging by the 8-pin + 6-pin power delivery, the card in question appears to be a Vega56 rather than top-end Vega64. Retail variants of this design might have higher overclocking potential, or benefit from reduced throttling due to lower temps at similar performance levels.
The approach is similar to air-cooled R9 Fury models released in summer 2015. Whilst the R9 Fury X were extremely compact and liquid-cooled as a rule (in a more compact form factor than Vega64's liquid cooled Limited Edition models), the R9 Fury relied on existing premium cooling solutions despite potentially using the same compact PCB. It wasn't until the R9 Nano, a tiny air-cooled design that undervolted the chip and put aggressive power gating in place, that the Fiji chip took full advantage of one of the core benefits of the transition to HBM - PCB real-estate.
It has been noticeable that AMD have made no pretensions towards Vega as a space-saving design, unlike Fury X. Clearly performance is not just more important, but so close to the limit that ancillary benefits of continuing with HBM2 are difficult to realise.
More images are available at Videocardz.net, and well worth checking out.
SOURCE: TooliusTech, via Videocardz.net
