[TechPowerUp] Sapphire and AsRock reveal their Radeon VII models

Since no one's bothered (why?), thought i may as well make a post about it.

Baseline $699 for either one according to the official statements, available (who'd have guessed) February 7th.
Interestingly, the Sapphire's 'Peak' clock is listed at 1750 rather than the officially announced 1800MHz, while AsRock appears to have refrained from posting specifics altogether. Our understanding of the differences between 'Peak' and 'Boost' aside, it remains to be seen whether the GPU has been dialed back, or whether AMD has chosen to go the Nvidia route; will remind here that these will also be sold directly from AMD.







As can be found here: https://www.techpowerup.com/251798/s...r-direct-sales
And here: https://www.techpowerup.com/251826/a...-card-revealed


__ opinion, ie the part you can ignore __
+ Am personally interested in this, though i understand i'm probably a minority. The extra bandwidth could potentially improve/alleviate some issues the previous Vegas had, the extra performance makes it an upgrade over its siblings and once again (unexpectedly too) i continue to have zero reason to buy from Nvidia. Being aware of the prices for HBM (calculated at around $300-350 per unit), the cost doesn't annoy me either; though of course yes, cheaper will always be better. Except there is cheaper and with either company; choice.
A reasonable upgrade for someone unwilling to buy Nvidia or not aiming at top tier performance. Its being a 're-purposed' Instinct doesn't annoy or interest me in the slightest. I don't see why this needs be portrayed negatively.
Now the people that strive hard to blind themselves with 4/8/9000K setups mere centimeters away from their eyes and/or the people that need to post pics of their 8k rigs (next one will cost ten thousand guyz, hon3st!!!1) may not be interested in any of this, but am somehow hoping that reasonable people will see it differently.
I'd like to see it sell, not only because any AMD income is a welcome income, but also because it would validate the existence of, again, some semblance of reason within this hype-driven market. NuGreedia gimmicks are currently just that, gimmicks, and gimmicks that come at a cost; not just financial either, as the patch required to make some (non)use of them requires specific versions/builds of Windows; shoehorning you before you're even being shoehorned; some more that is.

- Lack of a dual BIOS is a bad move. It was a bad move in the Vega FE, it is even worse a move here as it precludes the FE from being the single exception to an adhered rule. This was an AMD staple, this was convenience and/or QoL, this was an affirmation of their sticking to their 'mentality'. It should not have been absent, am not liking this.

I would like to see the price of Vega 64 drop a bit more in Australia ($750 for the ROG Strix)... not sure if the release of this will have any affect on that.

I understand this card is expensive to produce but given the mindshare issue they already face and it equals at best a 2080 according to their own benchmarks do they think it will really sell that well? I feel like if they had launched at $500 it would sell like crazy. Or people would wait for Nvidia to lower prices.

I don't know what kind of driver optimizations are possible between the announcement earlier this month and release date. I think what we want to see at the least is the VII consistently outperforming the 2080, even if it's only by a few frames... that way it would be 'market-conform', however disappointing that market may be. If it fails to do that, it may still be suitable for those that for whatever content-creating reason need 16GiB HBM2 or die-hard AMD users/people who simply loathe Nvidia.

As for me, I don't know. I'm on a five years old 290 and at the moment there is nothing I'd want to play which I currently can't. Then again, the last time I upgraded a videocard because I couldn't play some video-game is quite some time ago. Getting something like this would be more of a hobby thing to me.

There is one thing I'm sure of though: no waterblock means no VII. On an unrelated note, it's a bit shorter than I expected it to be, which I do not dislike.

It's a weird product because the chip and card are designed for professional/business use, they only made this consumer version and likely at a loss per each unit sold due to their new RTG leader who has also been let go. There is a whole story about this you can find and read, what the plans were, how many they were producing and how they changed the production numbers and why this consumer card was created. It never should have existed for consumers really, not because it's bad but because it's expensive to make and it's target users are different. Considering the person responsible was let go/fired/what ever you want to call it, at least someone at AMD understood the implications of this product and did something about it, unfortunately a bit too late to stop the train so I think they will be selling these for a while at a loss and then stop altogether especially when Navi launches. Leaving people to buy the pro card if they want a 16GB HBM2 Vega on 7nm.

People at both AMD and Ngreedia get scared at times of competition and do stupid decisions when it comes to launching products, products that exist only to "fill in", to "have something", ... even if that product isn't profitable.

It's an impressive card, the HBM cards usually are, performance may be decent but it's a card that essentially is what Vega64 should have been years ago. Today... it's OK if it competes with 2080/1080Ti but it will likely not be a better value than those considering all features of all these cards.
They can't compete on price with HBM cards vs GDDR.

I like the look of these cards. I wish they came in black.

Nvidia is choosing to force RT cores on us and make us pay for it, while AMD is using the money to make us a faster card and not really profiting from it.. so I don't see any reason that AMD should get as much flak as Nvidia is. With this card nvidia now has competition at most price points below 1000 USD, I don't think it matters much that they have a 2080ti for titan++ money really.

Well you said it yourself, if this launched at $500 people would just wait for nVidia to drop prices, so AMD figured why bother.

Any word on when the customs are set to arrive? Likely several weeks after these ref models launch, so probably March if we're lucky.

Seeing as how they've ditched blower style coolers there's little disadvantage to just get the reference cards now. A custom AIB card would need a better PCB and stronger components to outperform these ref models and even then it won't be a huge difference.

I'm just wondering why we can't have a sexy sticker of ruby on the backplate seeing as how there are too many fans to put it on the front now, that was one fad i'd like to see come back