Review: Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G – Good For Gaming | BIOS | Test

Обзор и тестирование видеокарты Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition - Статьи

Review and testing of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition video card – Spring 2018 brought all gamers not only new game hits, such as, for example, Far Cry 5, but also a dawning hope on the horizon for the long-awaited reduction in the cost of gaming video cards and the gradual filling of the market with them.

The latter is to blame for a noticeable decline in cryptocurrency rates and, as a result, a decrease in the profitability of this entire campaign.

Now many are eagerly awaiting the approach of prices for video cards to those recommended by AMD and NVIDIA and are paying attention to the announcements of new products without irritation.
Samples for reviews and tests are gradually becoming more available, and the first of these video cards today will be one of the best AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 models released today – Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition .

It can be immediately noted that in this model Sapphire has surpassed itself, releasing far from just an original video card on its own printed circuit board and with an efficient cooler. Everything here is much deeper and wider. However, first things first.

Review of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition video card


Technical Specifications and Recommended Prices The technical specifications and prices of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition graphics card are shown in the table in comparison with the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 reference model.

Packaging and packaging The large cardboard box in which the video card is supplied may well advertise the new blockbuster Pacific Rim 2, which continues to fail at the box office, since its front side depicts a giant robot, somewhat reminiscent of the gamekeepers from the movie.

The reverse side of the box is more informative and contains the technical characteristics of the device, system requirements and a brief description of the features. An additional box made of thick cardboard is inserted into the colored shell, in the center of which a video card is fixed in a shell made of foamed polyethylene. This type of packaging is one of the most reliable for computer components, and we give Sapphire a well-deserved plus for this. From the end of the box is glued a sticker with the serial numbers of the product, which we always recommend to verify with the numbers glued directly to the video card.

The Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition bundle is surprisingly modest both for the company itself and for the video card class. Together with the latter, only instructions, screws and an L-shaped rod-holder can be found in the box.

No cables, no booklets or coupons for games, no other bonuses, not even a CD with drivers and utilities. But we are talking about a top-end video card based on an AMD graphics processor. Is it you, Sapphire? The video card is manufactured in China and comes with a three-year warranty. If at the end of March the cost of Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition in Russian stores exceeded a mind-boggling 65 thousand rubles, then at the end of the preparation of this article (April 6) it could already be purchased for less than 54 thousand rubles. If it continues at such a pace, then we can hope that by the beginning of May these video cards will cost no more than 40 thousand rubles. PCB design and features





Just to say that the video card is big and heavy is to say nothing. Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition – without exaggeration, grandiose and deadly heavy, weighing 1.6 kg, a bar of plastic, metal and textolite, which, taking into account the cost, is even scary to take with one hand, as well as to install it into the case of the system unit without support bar.

The design of the video card is interesting, but still more serious than gaming. In the structure of the materials used, there are no bright details and pretentious inserts, everything is done very neatly and harmoniously, whether it be fans of different diameters, translucent plastic rings around them or a reverse metal plate with a pattern. Above and below the cooler casing does not cover the heatsink, which is correct from the point of view of cooling efficiency.

Let’s add here that the length of the video card is 316 mm, the height is 125 mm, and the thickness is 54 mm.
From the end of the video card opposite to the video outputs, you can see the aluminum fins of the radiator and the four ends of the heat pipes.

The video outputs, combined with a patterned perforated plate, are divided in pairs: two HDMI 2.0b and two DisplayPort 1.4.

With power connectors, Sapphire’s engineers seemed to be unstoppable. There are three of them, all of them are eight-pin and are oriented with latches outward.

Combined with the PCI Express bus power, the power reserve of the video card can reach an impressive 525 watts. At the same time, the manufacturer’s recommended power supply capacity for a system with one such video card should be at least 850 watts, which is 100 watts more than AMD specifications for the reference Radeon RX Vega 64. Since we were strictly forbidden to disassemble the video card, then we will use a photo from Sapphire … Let’s take a look at the PCB, which is really impressive.

The power supply system here is fifteen-phase, of which fourteen are allocated directly to the graphics processor and one more to the HBM2 memory. The power circuit uses Black Diamond Chokes 4 energy efficient chokes with a claimed 15 degree Celsius temperature drop compared to reference graphics card chokes. On the right side of the board you can see two BIOS chips, one of which has an increased power reserve. You can switch BIOS using a small “flag” at the top of the PCB. On the reverse side of the PCB, the power circuits are additionally reinforced with solid-state capacitors.

The GPU contains 4096 universal shaders, 256 texture units, and 64 ROPs. In the most productive BIOS, the maximum GPU frequency can be increased to 1630 MHz, and the lower limit should not be less than 1423 MHz, while in the reference Radeon RX Vega 64 it can drop to 1247 MHz. With the frequency of Samsung HBM2 memory chips, everything is standard: 1890 effective megahertz with a 2048-bit memory bus width gives a peak of 483.8 GB / s. All this data will be supplemented with information from the GPU-Z utility.


We add that the most productive of the two BIOSes of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition video card can be downloaded from the file archive .

Cooling system The cooling
system of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition graphics card is the pride of the company, as it has absorbed all the best that has been created by Sapphire engineers in this area in recent years. It is based on a massive heatsink consisting of two sections on heat pipes, and a metal plate covers the back side.

The radiator is really great here. Two high-quality soldered sections made of thin aluminum plates are based on six heat pipes, three of which have a diameter of 8 mm and another three have a diameter of 6 mm. All the tubes are soldered to a copper vapor chamber, which is the only reason why developers claim to lower the temperature of the GPU and memory by 5 degrees Celsius.

Read This Now:   Top 10 best laptop batteries Review: Specs |Pros | Cons

Cooling of power circuit elements is also well organized. In addition to the most massive 2 mm thick metal plate, there are two 6 mm heat pipes with small aluminum radiators in the areas of direct contact with the VRM. They are additionally cooled by the air flow from the fans.

Naturally, such a massive structure could not but affect the weight of the video card, so for its additional fixing in the case, Sapphire provided a bracket with screws.

The video card is cooled by three fans. The two outer fans have a diameter of 94 mm impellers and rotate counterclockwise, and the central one with a diameter of 86 mm rotates clockwise. Such multidirectional fans should generate additional turbulence in the air flow inside the heatsink and cool the video card even more efficiently. Sapphire called this feature NITRO Free Flow.

All three impellers support the NITRO Quick Connect function – that is, they can be quickly removed from their stators and cleaned of dust.

The developers have endowed the video card with an intelligent fan speed control system NITRO CoolTech. It consists in the fact that if the temperature of the GPU does not exceed 52 degrees Celsius, then the fans completely stop and the video card becomes silent. Moreover, this mode is not regulated by any third-party utilities, even when we manually set the fan speed to maximum, they begin to rotate only when the temperature exceeds 52 degrees Celsius. We add that the fans are based on rolling bearings and are equipped with the Fan IC Control function for precise speed synchronization. In addition to the standard cooler fans, the video card supports the Turbine-X system. It is implemented by two additional four-pin connectors in the front and rear video cards.

You can connect two more fans of any diameter to them, and their speed will be automatically regulated by the video card depending on the temperatures controlled by Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition using five built-in thermal sensors. Finally, a nice bonus of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition cooler is the NITRO Glow lighting system. The backlight is configured using the SAPPHIRE TriXX utility.

The graphics card illuminates two acrylic shrouds around the outer fans, a logo at the top and the back of the shroud. The video card looks really amazing with such a backlight.

To check the temperature regime of the video card as a load, we used 25-30 cycles of the Fire Strike Extreme stress test from the 3DMark graphics package.

MSI Afterburner, which we traditionally use to monitor temperatures and all other parameters, refused to work with this video card, so we had to resort to HWiNFO64. The tests were carried out in a closed case of the system unit, the configuration of which you can see in the next section of the article, at a room temperature of about 24 degrees Celsius. So, first of all, we tested the cooling efficiency of Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition in the automatic mode of its cooler fans. Let’s add that the balanced mode of the video card (by default) was set in the AMD WattMan control panel.



Automatic mode (0-1490 rpm)

The GPU temperature of the video card has increased to 72 degrees Celsius, and the HBM2 memory to 80 degrees Celsius. Considering the hot temper of the Radeon RX Vega 64 and the fact that the fan speed of the Sapphire cooler did not exceed the 1490 rpm mark, we consider such a temperature mode of the video card to be an outstanding indicator for this model.
If the fan speed is forced to the maximum, then the peak temperature of the GPU and HBM2 will immediately drop by 14 degrees Celsius.

Maximum speed (3460 rpm)

Please note that with such cooling, the GPU frequency was not only higher than with automatic fan speed control, but also more stable, which, however, is quite natural for AMD Radeon RX Vega. Of course, the noise level at such a fan speed went off scale, but, on the other hand, with such a high efficiency of the Sapphire cooler, there is no need to manually increase the fan speed at all. By the way, in today’s article we have to give up measuring the noise level of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition cooler, since it was impossible to disassemble the video card, and there is simply no other way to get to the fan connector.

As for the overclocking of our Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition, we squeezed out an additional 60 MHz without increasing the voltage from the GPU, and we were able to increase the video memory frequency to 2000 MHz. To do this, it was necessary to increase the limits on the power supply of the video card to 50%, but there was no need to resort to manual adjustment of the fan speed – its temperature regime did not change after such a modest overclocking. We overclocked, by the way, using the OverdriveNTool 0.2.5 program .

The weak overclocking of AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 hardly surprises anyone, but something else is more interesting: after another lengthy testing, we managed to determine that at the nominal frequencies of the GPU, its voltage in 3D mode can be limited to 1050 mV. And at the same time, the video card did not lose at all in stability or performance.

Moreover, in 3D mode, the GPU frequency was kept at more stable values ​​than before, and the speed of the video card fans in the automatic adjustment mode decreased by more than 100 rpm. As for the level of power consumption, surprisingly, the lowering of the core voltage did not affect it. However, there is probably a type of 3D load here, since the stability test from 3DMark, which we used for the temperature tests, warms up the video card perfectly, but in terms of maximum power consumption it loses a little to the same Grand Theft Auto V or, for example, Call of Duty: WWII. We’ll come back to this at the end of the article.

Test configuration, tools and testing methodology

The video cards were tested in a closed system case on the following hardware configuration:
motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X299-E Gaming (Intel X299 Express, LGA2066, BIOS 1102 dated 01/17/2018);
central processor: Intel Core i9-7900X (14 ++ nm, Skylake-X, U0, 3.3-4.5 GHz, 1.1 V, 10 H 1 MB L2, 13.75 MB L3);
CPU cooling system: Phanteks PH-TC14PЕ (2H Corsair AF140, 780 ~ 1090 rpm);
thermal interface: ARCTIC MX-4 (8.5 W / (m * K);
RAM: DDR4 4 × 4 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2800 MHz (CMK16GX4M4A2800C16) (XMP 2800 MHz / 16-18-18-36_2T / 1.2 V or 3000 MHz / 16-18-18-36_2T / 1.35 V);
video cards:
Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition 8 GB / 2048 bit 1423-1630 / 1890 MHz;
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming 8 GB / 256 bit 1696-1835 (1936) / 10008 MHz;
Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 1070 Ti X3 8 GB / 256 bit 1607-1683 (1823) / 8008 MHz and overclocked to 1737-1813 (1936) / 8940 MHz;
disk for system and games: Intel SSD 730 480 GB (SATA III, BIOS vL2010400);
benchmark disk: Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB (SATA II, 10,000 rpm, 16 MB, NCQ);
archive disk: Samsung Ecogreen F4 HD204UI 2 TB (SATA II, 5400 rpm, 32 MB, NCQ);
sound card: Auzen X-Fi HomeTheater HD;
case: Thermaltake Core X71 (five be quiet! Silent Wings 2 (BL063) at 900 rpm);
control and monitoring panel: Zalman ZM-MFC3;

PSU: Corsair AX1500i Digital ATX (1500 W, 80 Plus Titanium), 140 mm fan;
monitor: 27-inch Samsung S27A850D (DisplayPort, 2560×1440, 60 Hz). The performance of the Sapphire graphics card is comparable to the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming and the Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 1070 Ti X3. The latter was tested both at nominal frequencies and when overclocked to 1737-1813 (1936) / 8940 MHz.

The power and temperature limits on video cards were increased to the maximum possible, and the GeForce drivers were prioritized for maximum performance. To reduce the dependence of the performance of video cards on the platform speed, a 14-nm ten-core processor with a multiplier of 44, a reference frequency of 100 MHz and the Load-Line Calibration function activated to the fourth level was overclocked to 4.4 GHz when the voltage in the motherboard BIOS was increased to 1.120 V.

Read This Now:   Review: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER FE - Test 10 Popular Game | Benchmark

At the same time, 16 gigabytes of RAM functioned in four-channel mode at a frequency of 2.933 GHz with timings 14-14-14-26 CR1 at a voltage of 1.35 V. Testing, which began on March 18, 2018, was carried out under the control of the Microsoft Windows 10 Pro operating system ( 1709 16299.19) with all updates on the specified date and with the installation of the following drivers: motherboard chipset Intel Chipset Drivers – 10.1.17541.8066 WHQL dated 01/10/2018 ; Intel Management Engine Interface (MEI) – 11.7.0.1065 WHQL from 01/08/2018; video card drivers on an AMD graphics processor – AMD Radeon Adrenalin Edition 18.3.2 dated 03/12/2018; video card drivers on NVIDIA GPUs –

GeForce 390.77 WHQL from January 29, 2018 .

In today’s testing, we used only 2560×1440 pixels, which is the most optimal for video cards of this class. Two graphics quality modes were used for the tests: Quality + AF16x – texture quality in the drivers by default with anisotropic filtering at 16x and Quality + AF16x + MSAA 4x / 8x with anisotropic filtering at 16x and full-screen anti-aliasing at 4x or 8x. In some games, due to the specifics of their game engines, other anti-aliasing algorithms were used, which will be indicated later in the methodology and directly on the diagrams with the results. Anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing was enabled in the game settings. If these settings were absent in games, then the parameters were changed in the control panels of AMD and GeForce drivers. V-Sync was also forcibly disabled there. Apart from the above, no additional changes were made to the driver settings.

The video cards have been tested in two graphics tests and fifteen games, updated to the latest versions as of the date of the start of this article. The list of test applications is as follows (games and further test results in them are arranged in the order of their official release):

3DMark (DirectX 9/11/12) – version 2.4.4264, testing in the scenes of Fire Strike, Fire Strike Extreme, Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy (the graph shows a graphical score);

Unigine Superposition (DirectX 11) – version 1.0, tested in 1080P High, 1080P Extreme and 4K Optimized settings;
Metro: Last Light (DirectX 11) – version 1.0.0.15, the built-in game test was used, graphics quality settings and tessellation at the Very High level, Advanced PhysX technology was disabled, tests with SSAA and without anti-aliasing, double sequential run of the D6 scene;

Grand Theft Auto V (DirectX 11) – build 1365.0, quality settings at Very High, ignoring suggested restrictions enabled, V-Sync disabled, FXAA enabled, NVIDIA TXAA disabled, MSAA for reflections disabled, NVIDIA soft shadows;
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege (DirectX 11) – version 2.2.2, texture quality settings at the Very High level, Texture Filtering – Anisotropic 16X and other maximum quality settings, tests with MSAA 4x and without anti-aliasing, double sequential run of the test built into the game ;

Rise of the Tomb Raider (DirectX 12) – version 1.0 build 813.4_64, all parameters at the Very High level, Dynamic Foliage – High, Ambient Occlusion – HBAO +, tessellation and other quality improvement techniques are activated, two test cycles of the built-in benchmark (Geothermal scene Valley) without anti-aliasing and with SSAA 4.0 activation;
Far Cry Primal (DirectX 11) – version 1.3.3, maximum quality level, high-resolution textures, volumetric fog and shadows to maximum, built-in performance test without anti-aliasing and with SMAA Ultra enabled;
Hitman (DirectX 12) – version 1.13.2, built-in test with graphics quality settings at the “Ultra” level, SSAO enabled, shadow quality “Ultra”, memory protection disabled;

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (DirectX 12) – version 1.19 build 801.0, all quality settings are manually set to the maximum level, tessellation and depth of field are activated, at least two consecutive runs of the benchmark built into the game;
For Honor (DirectX 11) – version 32.231, maximum graphics quality settings, volumetric lighting – MHBAO, dynamic reflections and blur effect enabled, anti-aliasing oversampling disabled, tests without anti-aliasing and with TAA, double sequential run of the benchmark built into the game;

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands (DirectX 12) – version 1.6.0, graphics quality settings to maximum or Ultra-level, all options are activated, tests without anti-aliasing and with SMAA + FXAA, double sequential run of the benchmark built into the game;

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III (DirectX 11) – version 4.321.3939.18334, all graphics quality settings to the maximum level, anti-aliasing is activated, but in AA mode, resolution scaling up to 150% was used, a double sequential run of the benchmark built into the game;

F1 2017 (DirectX 11) – version 1.7, the built-in game test was used on the Marina Bay track in Singapore during a rainstorm, graphics quality settings were set to the maximum level for all points, SSRT shadows were activated, tests with TAA and without anti-aliasing;

Middle-earth: Shadow of War (DirectX 11.1) – version 1.12, all graphics quality settings to Ultra, depth of field and tessellation are activated, double sequential run of the test built into the game without anti-aliasing and with TAA;

Assassin’s Creed: Origins (DirectX 11) – version 1.21, the built-in game benchmark was used with the Ultra High settings profile and dynamic resolution disabled, double test run without anti-aliasing and with anti-aliasing at the High level;

Call of Duty: WWII (DirectX 11) – version 1.11, all graphics quality settings are at the extra level, shadows are enabled, testing without anti-aliasing and when the SMAA T2X option is activated, a double run of the opening scene of the first stage of D-Day was used, FRAPS 105 seconds;

World of Tanks enCore (DirectX 11) – version 0.1, profile of graphics quality settings – Ultra, resolution 2560×1440 pixels, double sequential run of the test built into the game without anti-aliasing and with activation of TSSAA HQ.

Let’s add that if the games have implemented the ability to fix the minimum number of frames per second, then it was also shown in the diagrams. Each test was carried out twice, the best of the two obtained values ​​was taken as the final result, but only if the difference between them did not exceed 1%. If the deviations of the benchmark runs exceeded 1%, then the testing was repeated at least one more time to get a reliable result.

Performance test results


3DMark


Unigine Superposition


Metro: Last Light


Grand Theft Auto V


Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege


Rise of the Tomb Raider


Far Cry Primal


Hitman


Deus Ex: Mankind Divided


For Honor


Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands


Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III


F1 2017


Middle-earth: Shadow of War


Assassin’s Creed: Origins


Call of Duty: WWII


World of Tanks enCore

Let’s supplement the constructed diagrams with a summary table with test results with the displayed average and minimum value of the number of frames per second for each video card.

Read This Now:   Honor View 20: Specs and Quick Review: Test | Hashrate | Specs | CPU | Config

We will analyze the results using summary diagrams.

Pivot charts and analysis of results

First of all, we propose to compare the performance of Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming at the nominal frequencies of both video cards. Here, the results of the Gigabyte video card are taken as the zero axis, and the Sapphire values ​​are deferred as a percentage of it.

As you can see, not a single video card has a total advantage. If Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming won victories in old Metro: Last Light, Grand Theft Auto V, Rainbow Six: Siege and new Assassin’s Creed: Origins with World of Tanks enCore, then Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition remained victories in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, and F1 2017. In other games, the difference between video cards does not exceed 5-7%.

In general, we can say that the performance of these video cards is the same, but in terms of cost, the GeForce GTX 1080 still outperforms the Radeon RX Vega 64. The GeForce GTX 1070 Ti model, which in today’s testing is represented by the original version of Inno3D iChill GeForce, wins even more. GTX 1070 Ti X3 and which we additionally overclocked.

Nevertheless, the overclocked GeForce GTX 1070 Ti compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64 showed the same balance of power as the GeForce GTX 1080, albeit with slightly different percentages.

Energy consumption

The energy consumption was measured using a Corsair AX1500i power supply via the Corsair Link interface and the HWiNFO64 monitoring utility version 5.79-3395. The energy consumption of the entire system as a whole was measured, excluding the monitor.

Testing was carried out in 2D mode with normal work in Microsoft Word or Internet surfing, as well as in 3D mode. In the latter case, the load was created using two consecutive cycles of the Grand Theft Auto V game benchmark at 2560×1440 pixels at maximum graphics quality settings using MSAA 4X. CPU power saving technologies are disabled in the motherboard BIOS. Let’s compare the level of power consumption of systems with the video cards tested today according to the results in the diagram.

The power consumption of the system with the default Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition is strikingly higher than the configurations with other video cards and even higher than with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti we previously tested (there were about 550 watts at the peak).

However, AMD itself does not deny such high requirements for the power supply of the Radeon RX Vega video cards. However, you can significantly reduce this level by manually reducing the voltage on the GPU. In our case, the decrease was 100 watts, and this, as you know, is not a joke. That is, after such a setting, the video card will be not only more stable in GPU frequency and quieter in noise level, but also more economical. Another question is why AMD itself did not provide such a super-economical mode at least in the drivers, because the Power Save profile in WattMan definitely does not give such an effect.

Conclusion

Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition is an outstanding video card, because the company’s engineers managed not only to pacify the very hot temper of the Vega 10 XT GPU and its environment, but also to do it without unnecessary noise, since subjectively the video card is not heard against the background of a quiet system unit even in long 3D modes.

However, you will have to pay for this, both in the literal sense, because the cost of a video card is quite affordable, and in a portable one – with its large dimensions, weight and high level of power consumption.

True, the latter, if desired and with a little skill, can be significantly reduced by manually adjusting the voltage on the GPU, plus this will make the video card even quieter and somewhat colder. Separately, it is worth noting the delightful backlighting system of the Sapphire Nitro + Radeon RX VEGA 64 8G Limited Edition cooler, which can be flexibly adjusted and tied to temperatures. But what I didn’t like was the meager package bundle of the video card. In our opinion, products of this level should be accompanied by a much more attractive set of useful bonuses.

We are grateful to Sapphire for the
video card provided for testing.


Notice: ob_end_flush(): failed to send buffer of zlib output compression (1) in /home/gamefeve/bitcoinminershashrate.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5373

Notice: ob_end_flush(): failed to send buffer of zlib output compression (1) in /home/gamefeve/bitcoinminershashrate.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5373