AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition 16GB HBM2 Card Unboxed, First Benchmarks Are In
Fortunately, one lucky enthusiast has already gotten his hands on the air-cooled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition today and it’s a beauty. Finished in the same rich blue that we saw with last year’s Radeon Pro professional graphics cards, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is accented with yellow Radeon Vega logos and a corner-mounted “R” that also lights up in yellow. There’s not much else to speak of with regards to its exterior appearance other than its dual eight-pin power connectors.
While the new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition owner, Kladius, doesn’t exactly have a modern (by gaming standards) rig for testing, beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to benchmarks. He used an Intel Core i7-4790K (Haswell) processor, ASUS Maximus VII motherboard, 16GB of DDR3 memory and a Samsung 850 EVO SSD for testing purposes. Of course, Windows 10 is the operating system of choice for testing, and Kladius was able to download AMD drivers that allow the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition to run in either Pro or Game mode.
We should stress again, however, that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is by no means a gaming card. For that, you’ll have to wait on the Radeon RX Vega, which AMD will detail in late July. With that being said, here are the numbers that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition laid down in the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark while running in Game Mode:
Kladius is quick to point out that the drivers are dated yesterday, and that it’s still very early with regards to any optimizations for the graphics card. And that’s not to mention that people won’t be using these cards for gaming anyway.
“Based on current result for frontier edition I think gaming version will be way more robust,” he writes. “Again remember that drivers are day old, VEGA frontier is for PRO market and my test rig is not the best in the world and for sure when VEGA will be tested later on we will see better results.
For those that need a refresher, here at the specs for the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition:
- Memory: 16GB HBM2
- Compute Units: 64
- Stream Processors: 4086
- Single Precision compute performance (FP32): 13.1 TFLOPS
- Half Precision compute performance (FP16): 26.2 TFLOPS
- Pixel Fillrate: ~90 Gpixels/sec
- Memory Capacity: 16 GBs of High Bandwidth Cache
- Memory Bandwidth: 483 GB/s
- TDP: 300W (air-cooled), 375W (liquid-cooled)
The dual-slot cards have three DisplayPort 1.4 ports and a single HDMI port.
Stay tuned for the HotHardware review of the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, where we’ll show you just how well it fares against NVIDIA’s Pascal-based Quadro family.
(Images Courtesy Klaudius/#define)
