Power Consumption — AMD Radeon VII 16GB Review: A Surprise Attack on GeForce RTX 2080
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AMD is first to market with a 7nm gaming GPU. The company complements its Vega 20 processor with 16GB of HBM2 on a 4,096-bit bus, packing it all into a 300W Radeon VII graphics card. Should those numbers impress you? Yeah, actually, they should.
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Power Consumption
Slowly but surely, we’re spinning up multiple Tom’s Hardware labs with Cybenetics’ Powenetics hardware/software solution for accurately measuring power consumption.
Powenetics, In Depth
For a closer look at our U.S. lab’s power consumption measurement platform, check out Powenetics: A Better Way To Measure Power Draw for CPUs, GPUs & Storage.
In brief, Powenetics utilizes Tinkerforge Master Bricks, to which Voltage/Current bricklets are attached. The bricklets are installed between the load and power supply, and they monitor consumption through each of the modified PSU’s auxiliary power connectors and through the PCIe slot by way of a PCIe riser. Custom software logs the readings, allowing us to dial in a sampling rate, pull that data into Excel, and very accurately chart everything from average power across a benchmark run to instantaneous spikes.
The software is set up to log the power consumption of graphics cards, storage devices, and CPUs. However, we’re only using the bricklets relevant to graphics card testing. AMD’s Radeon VII gets all of its power from the PCIe slot and a pair of eight-pin PCIe connectors. Should third-party Vega 20-based board materialize at some point in the future with three auxiliary power connectors, we can support them, too.
Gaming: Metro: Last Light
Three runs of the Metro: Last Light benchmark give us consistent, repeatable results, which makes it easier to compare the power consumption of graphics cards.
AMD extracts as much performance out of Radeon VII’s power budget as possible. Through our three-run recording, the card averages almost 298W with spikes that approach 322W.
Very little power is delivered over the PCI Express slot. Rather, it’s fairly evenly balanced between both eight-pin auxiliary connectors.
The blue overall power consumption line, representing the sum of all other lines, mostly obeys AMD’s 300W limit.
Less impressive is the fact that Radeon VII does battle against a card rated for 75W less, manufactured on a 12nm node. Even GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is significantly faster, uses quite a bit less power.
At least AMD isn’t in unprecedented territory. Despite a supposed 295W power limit, its Radeon RX Vega 64 demonstrated a similar power profile as Radeon VII.
Current over the PCIe slot stays just over 2A. Clearly, those eight-pin connectors do most of the heavy lifting here.
FurMark
FurMark is a steadier workload, resulting in less variation across our test run.
Average power does rise slightly to 309W with spikes as high as 330W.
The much more consistent workload makes it easier to compare draw over each rail. Again, AMD achieves good balance between its two eight-pin auxiliary connectors, while the PCIe slot averages 30W.
GeForce RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti are well-behaved. They operate within a tight power range and generally obey Nvidia’s limits.
Radeon RX Vega 64 has a harder time keeping up with the demands of FurMark. It starts off strong, quickly heats up, and then oscillates within a ~15W range to avoid violating one of AMD’s upper bounds.
Radeon VII doesn’t have the same issue. Its power consumption line chart isn’t as tightly grouped. But the card still maintains its performance under that full-length heat sink and trio of axial fans.
Current draw over the PCIe slot hovers between 2A and 3A, leaving lots of headroom under the 5.5A ceiling.
MORE: Best Graphics Cards
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AMD Radeon VII Achieves ~100MH/s Mining ETH
AMD has taken the performance crown for Ethereum mining once again with the Radeon VII. The Radeon VII manages to overtake Polaris, Fiji, the Titan V, and Turing all at once, but will it make mining profitable again?
Out of the box in stock configuration, the Radeon VII manages to pull off a whopping 90MH/s, nearly triple the performance of a stock RX Vega 64, is 29% faster than the Radeon Pro Duo, and beats the Titan V by a large margin. The RX Vega 64 is quite a bit behind the Radeon Pro Duo, and the Pro Duo trails slightly behind the Titan V in terms of the raw hash rate at stock configurations.
| GPU | Stock MH/s | Optimized MH/s |
|---|---|---|
| Radeon VII | 90 | ~100 |
| Titan V | 69 | 82 |
| Radeon Pro Duo (Fiji) | 64 | |
| RX Vega 64 | 32 | 44 |
After tweaking the Radeon VII, it is possible to achieve a hash rate between 90MH/s and 100MH/s.
According to VoskCoin over at BitcoinTalk, the following configuration brings in 91MH/s at 251 watts. This configuration provides an efficiency improvement of 21% over the stock 319-watt power consumption.
| Configuration | Core Voltage | Core Clock | Memory Clock | Power Limit | Power Consumption |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stock | 1136mV | 1801MHz | 1000MHz | +0% | 319W |
| Optimized | 950mV | 1750MHz | 1100MHz | +0% | 251W |
Compared to the Titan V, the Radeon VII is a much more compelling option. The Radeon VII is immensely cheaper, now available for $680 — $700, whereas the Titan V is within the $3000 range, and the Radeon VII achieves a higher hash rate per watt. Compared to Polaris, Radeon VII is a more efficient option. The Radeon VII draws less power than three RX 570s/580s and will occupy a single PCIe slot rather than three, enabling higher performance density in mining rigs, and less heat output.
As for the Radeon Pro Duo, for miners interested in mining multiple coins, the dual-GPU design may be desirable. With a dual-GPU, miners have the ability to dedicate one GPU to, say, ETH, and the other to XMR, making it a dynamic card.
The Radeon VII’s increased hash rate is largely due to the massive improvement of memory bandwidth over Vega 10. The RX Vega 64 has a memory bandwidth of 484GB/s and 8GB of HBM2, whereas the Radeon VII boasts a memory bandwidth of 1TB/s and 16GB of HBM2. The RX Vega 64 has a TDP of 295W, compared to the Radeon VII’s 300W TDP, making the Radeon VII a much more efficient card at the same power consumption. The Radeon VII also has a higher maximum temperature.
The Radeon VII typically trades blows with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080, but in some cases, such as in World War Z, the Radeon VII, let alone the RX Vega 64, manages to beat the RTX 2080 Ti. TweakTown had also reported the Radeon VII surpassing the RX 2080 Ti, and the RX Vega 64 surpassing the GTX 1080 Ti in the Division 2 at 1080p and 1440p.
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AMD Radeon VII
TDP Really Hits 300W
Revision
Hardware News Alexey Sychev
The new flagship will support overclocking.
recommendations
In an interview with HardOCP, AMD’s representative Scott Herkelman made too many important statements to be limited to one piece of news based on his revelations. First, he confirmed that the Navi architecture is on the agenda for the coming months, and we will hear more about it this year.
Secondly, he explained that the reference Radeon VII graphics card has a TDP value of no more than 300 W, it is equipped with a pair of eight-pin auxiliary power connectors.
Image source: HardOCP
And although Radeon VII will exist only in the reference version, a proprietary utility will allow you to overclock this video card. Scott added that configurations of several video cards gradually lost their relevance in games, since the developers of the latter had to spend too much effort on optimizing the operation of such systems, and they were in demand by only a few percent of buyers. In general, Herkelman himself personally believes that the buyer should always choose the most productive single video card from those that he can afford.
recommendations
The above table, among other things, makes it clear that the Radeon VII is equipped with 64 ROPs, and instead of PCI Express 4.0, it supports only PCI Express 3.0. Over the past day, some sources still managed to tell that Radeon VII does not support double precision (FP64) in floating point calculations.
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#radeon vii
#vega 20
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AMD Radeon VII graphics card details: 1450-1750 MHz GPU clocks, 300W TDP and no USB-C (VirtualLink)
News
Volodymyr Skripin
Volodymyr Skripin
Specs details and live shots of yesterday’s AMD Radeon VII graphics card, the first consumer gaming model with a 7nm GPU, have surfaced online.
Recall that AMD Radeon VII will go on sale on February 7 with a recommended price of $700.
Helping
At the presentation, AMD indicated for the GPU Vega II, which underlies the new flagship of the Reds, a frequency of 1.8 GHz. But this value is the «peak frequency». That is, the adapter will work at such a high frequency only in some isolated cases and individual applications. Typical operating frequencies for AMD Radeon VII GPUs range from 1450 MHz to 1750 MHz. AMD Radeon VII single precision (FP32) performance is 13.8 TFLOPS. For the Radeon RX Vega 64, released a year and a half ago, with a 14nm Vega 10 GPU, this parameter is 12.7 TFLOPS.
The AMD Radeon VII GPU features 16 GB of HBM2 layered memory running on a 4096-bit bus at an effective frequency of 2000 MHz for a high bandwidth of 1 TB/s.
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AMD Radeon VII requires two eight-pin power connectors to operate, which can deliver up to 375W of power.
The nominal TDP of the novelty, despite the 7-nm process technology, is the same as that of the predecessor Radeon RX Vega 64 — 300 watts. But the cooling system for AMD Radeon VII was completely redesigned — the liquid CO and the evaporation chamber with a radial fan (Radeon RX Vega 64 was offered in two versions — with air and water cooling) were replaced by a classic massive radiator with three traditional ~90mm fans. We also note a metal casing, a heat-distributing plate on the back with slots that form an original pattern and an illuminated logo on the side.
The AMD Radeon VII mounting plate has a total of four video outputs: three DisplayPort and one HDMI. That is, the USB Type-C connector, which is present in the current generation of NVIDIA gaming video cards and provides easy connection of next-generation VR headsets using the VirtualLink standard, was not received by the new Radeon VII video card. And this is very strange, given that AMD is part of the VirtualLink consortium.
