The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End
by Nate Oh on February 7, 2019 9:00 AM ESTPower, Temperature, and Noise
As always, we'll take a look at power, temperature, and noise of the Radeon VII. While it is customary to look at voltages and clockspeeds, given the SMU changes that was not possible this first time around.
The noise levels of the card look surprising at first blush. Ultimately, what's happening here is the consequence of a very aggressive fan curve, one that invests all potential acoustic improvements of an open-air triple fan card for cooling capability. Going this route makes the fan noise comparable to RX Vega 64's blower.
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just4U - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Really? I see the pre-order pricing here in Canada as 50-100 less then the 2080.Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
I think you missed the noise-to-performance metric.This GPU isn't even close to competitive with the 2080 because of that.
just4U - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Sure it is.. a mild undervolt (which the cards support in wattman) is all that's needed. Lower temps lower fan noise. (..shrug)Also since many own blower style cards these 3 fan designs are usually less noise (unless maybe coil whine comes into play..)
Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
1) Undervolting is a crap shoot due to binning and other factors, not a solution that you can simply apply as a fix for every one of these cards.2) Saying that some other cards are even louder is a complete avoidance of the issue. The issue is that Nvidia is crushing the noise-to-performance metric with the 2080, according to the presented data in this article. AMD is not, at all, competitive.
eva02langley - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Results are there and Vega is greatly improved with undervolting. It is like this since it launch. It is related to the uarch.D. Lister - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
Which is why I can never recommend AMD GPUs. I mean how competent can they really be if they don't even know how to set proper voltages on their GPUs?Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
It's also possible that a GPU will run at a lower voltage that what is optimal without artifacting and yet perform more slowly. Chips are typically able to do some compensation with error correction to handle inadequate voltage but the result is reduced speed.Oxford Guy - Friday, February 8, 2019 - link
You're avoiding the point.eddman - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
It's performing better than I expected. It doesn't fully match a 2080 but still performs good enough as a stopgap solution.A bit lower price would've been nice but I suppose it can be justified by the 16GB memory to some extent.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
"It doesn't fully match a 2080 but still performs good enough as a stopgap solution."No. It sucks unless you can use the areas of compute it excels at.
There is zero reason to buy a product for gaming that is so much louder for equivalent gaming performance. None.