AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition With 16GB HBM2 Available For Preorder

SaberPC has an air-cooled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition (100-506061) and the liquid-cooled version (100-506062) available to preorder. Both graphics cards include 16GB of HBM2 memory, 483GB/sec of memory bandwidth, 4096 stream processors 13.1 TFLOPS single precision compute performance and 26.2 TFLOPS double precision compute performance. TDP for the air-cooled and liquid-cooled cards are reportedly listed at 300W and 375W respectively. Each card comes with three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and a single HDMI port.

Interestingly, the method of cooling and TDP seem to be the only differences between the two SKUs, with the air-cooled card selling for $1,199 while the liquid version is priced $600 higher. Likewise, UK retailer SCAN lists the air-cooled and liquid-cooled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards at $1,139.99 and $1,656.49 respectively.

AMD says that the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is suitable for the following workloads:

• Machine Learning: Together with AMD’s ROCm open software platform, Radeon Vega Frontier Edition enables developers to tap into the power of Vega for machine learning algorithm development. Frontier Edition delivers more than 50 percent more performance than today’s most powerful machine learning GPUs.
• Advanced Visualization: Radon Vega Frontier Edition provides the performance required to drive increasingly large and complex models for real-time visualization, physically-based rendering and virtual reality through the design phase as well as rendering phase of product development.
• VR Workloads: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is ideal for VR content creation supporting AMD’s LiquidVR technology to deliver the gripping content, advanced visual comfort and compatibility needed for next-generation VR experiences.
• Revolutionized Game Design Workflows: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition simplifies and accelerates game creation by providing a single GPU optimized for every stage of a game developer’s workflow, from asset production to playtesting and performance optimization.

For those that are looking for the cheaper, gaming-oriented version of Vega, AMD hasn’t forgotten about you. The Radeon RX Vega will be even faster than the Frontier Edition and will of course be more competitively priced with NVIDIA’s current Pascal-based GeForce GTX 10-Series cards.

“We know how eager you are to get your hands on Radeon RX Vega, and we’re working extremely hard to bring you a graphics card that you’ll be incredibly proud to own. Developing products with billions of transistors and forward-thinking architecture is extremely difficult -- but extremely rewarding -- work,” said AMD’s Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect for Radeon Technologies Group last month. “Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version!”

There is no word on when the Radeon RX Vega will be available for purchase.