160 watts to 210 watts for that improvement and stressing the already old silicon is a waste of effort. Undervolting may yield better results with decreased noise.
@@eatstuffanddie The card is undervolted. Otherwise it would try to draw 240W and upwards of that (stock 1.2V when unrestrained can exceed 300W ASIC!). The problem is that vSOC (Infinity Fabric) is fed by the vCore rail and needs around 1000mV minimum to be able to run high memory clocks. This automatically limits UV potential. Around 210W should already translate to
@Psychx_ Yes, I remember the Vega 56 needing high voltage memory overclocks for properly improved performance. Gamers Nexus did a lot of videos about this. Undervolting is only useful when total board power is artificially limited like we see with modern cards. That's not something these old cards were limited by. The GCN architecture was very good at random compute, but needed insane memory bandwidth in order to keep gaming performance somewhat decent.
I haven't got a Vega any more, but I've notice that other people's C2077 performance with the Vega 56 has fallen a lot in the last year. I wonder if Nimez drivers would help?
@@RandomGaminginHD the last possible gog version is quite recent, for a real rollback you’d need to get the files from someone who still has the older gog version.
@@RandomGaminginHD just checked my records, at 1080 Medium my Vega 56 got 71FPS stock, 78 overclocked. The drivers were 22.7.1, and I think the game was probably v1.5 or 1.6 (it was after FSR got added, but before FSR 2)
If you have Samsung HBM you can flash with a Vega 64 bios, overclock the HBM, raise the power limit, then undervolt the core. You will get significant gains over standard overclocking. The 64 bios while it does not unlock any shaders it does significantly raise the power limit on the mem and core allowing you to get MUCH higher clocks. Mine was able to do 1720mhz core 1020mhz mem (with tightened timings).
The Vega 56 held up pretty well, especially considering that it's a bit older than the 2060. Although the 2060 seems to be a bit less power hungry judging by the game results that you showed. Great video as always!
newer hardware tends to do that. either better performance at the same power, or the same performance at lower power. and in some cases even better performance at lower power.
I have indeed overclocked and undervolted my Vega 56 I have had it for several years now the triple fan Powercolor Red Dragon model, as mine shipped with a BIOS Switch on the side I decided to find a compatible VBIOS on Techpowerup a long time ago and I flashed the BIOS to use a Vega 64 BIOS so it runs stock clocks of the 64 being 1630 on the core clock and 945 on the memory. Still runs really well despite its age now.
And a 64LC bios you can push those numbers even higher. Thanks to the additional headroom given to you by higher HBM VOLTAGE. ~1100HBM really unlocks a lot of performance because Vega is memory bandwidth limited. You don't even need to do much to the core clocks. You can keep them in the 1600 range. But if you are feeling really brave and have the cooling to deal with it. The LC bios provides 1.25vcore instead of 1.2. So you can push the core beyond 1700MHz and 400w in most cases. It's only good for an additional ~2%-5%. But it's still extra. But the majority of the gains to be had is in HBM.
For me the best used cards rn are the 6600/XT. I have bought them from €90 to €140 and run on a 450w power supply. They are also quite energy-saving and not too hot.
That’s very cheap. Converted to euro the 6600 is 150 used as cheapest and 180 for the XT version and that’s the cheapest not the average selling price.
Very nice idea for a video, I hope to see similar comparisons in the future. The cyberpunk issue is worth investing. You can't go too wrong with a Vega GPU, especially if you spent a few minutes to at least undervolt the card, of not overclock it as well. My only real issue is power consumption as always because at ~200W it requires a good PSU for the Vega
The PSU is not a problem. People always say this for some reason as if they are using a 300watt PSU. All gamers have at least 450 watts, that 190 watts for the system then 260watts for the GPU. That's at full load with no GPU tuning so reality is likely to be less power than that. I had a mining rig with 4 VEGAs and although it would stress the 1000watt PSU at factory settings once the cards were tuned for lower power and faster hash rate it was fine.
I have my Vega56 Sapphire Pulse since 2019 and I'm still using it. I changed cooler fans for Noctua fans, set power limit to -50% and max Frequency/Voltage to 1312/1050, and it runs cool and quiet. It still handles games on 1080p/60Hz.
Got a vega 64 with a waterblock on it... It has been THE best overclocking experience i ever had after X58 cpu overclocking 😅 Highly rewarding to mess around with memory timings and stuff... Such a same that all recent GPUs are so locked...Never used it for gaming though... For that i'm sticking with nvidia, though for benchmarking i freaking love the vegas and i wish i could find a great deal on a Fury as it's basically the ancestor of vega cards...
I am in the midst of a build for my girlfriend, and I was looking on the used market for a nice little budget GPU to throw in it. Seems like in Turkey people do not understand where the Vega GPUs sit in terms of value, and most of them are ridiculously cheap at around 60-70£. I'm definitely gonna cop one of the silver reference Vega 64s as the 56 and 64 listings are only around 5£ apart from each other. This card still has so much value in it, and it is an offer you can not refuse when it is that cheap!
The card received poor reviews when it was launched because it was supposed to be a lot better than the GTX 1080 but was not. Most of the criticisms are now invalid; 1. uses a lot of power, not really and can be made to use less 2. does not beat the 1080, it can be tuned so it does 3. expensive, not any more, it's a bargain 4. driver problems, not any more If you have twice the money for a GPU there are better choices but at the current price you can't beat it. The RX 580 often costs more and that's only half a VEGA's performance.
You didn't tweak this one right. The Vega56 doesn't need +50% power limit. It needs the vega64 bios and to set the hbm to 1000+. Then you undervolt the cores so that they can maintain higher clocks for longer. With the right tweak you can get almost 40% more performance out of the Vega56 in some situations.
You should definitely try out the community drivers for the older AMD cards if you haven't. I think they're called nimez drivers? I heard they can help a lot with any newer games that don't get the best performance, or with new technologies that might not otherwise be supported.
Similar prices on the used GPU market certainly makes for some strange bedfellows. Even so, your comparison is totally valid from that perspective, and very interesting.
In the future when you do these comparisons - please show the stock clock speeds and other variables on screen for comparison sake - seems an easy fix and one that can better show what was and what is in the testing.
I will say this: I personally prefer the smoothest possible game play, not necessarily the absolute highest averages. That said, I am currently running a recently purchased, lightly used RTX 2080 Super, as an upgrade over my GTX 1070 I had. If I had not had access to this 2080 Super when I did upgrade, I would likely have been looking at buying a RTX 2060-2070 or an AMD equivalent. I just got really lucky with my roommate upgrading to his current RTX 4080, and I got his RTX 2080 Super after I replaced the AC compressor and condenser in his Chevy Cruze. Though, that GPU upgrade rabbit hole lead to me also buying a brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X to replace my Ryzen 5 1600X. And for anyone interested, if you have an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X or equivalent and wondered if something like a RTX 2080 Super, equivalent, or more powerful GPU would pair: I used Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor at 720p resolution as a test. RTX 2080 Super and Ryzen 5 1600X gave me a peak of 330 FPS, an average of about 150 FPS and lows of 98 FPS. When I upgraded to the Ryzen 5 5600X, I had a peak of 523 FPS, average of 315 FPS and a low of 110 FPS.
Yeah, smoothness is what makes it feel good, even if it's smooth at a lower framerate. And by these results, Hogwarts and CoD should feel pretty bad on both the Vega and the 2060
Clearly for Shadow of Mordor the RYZEN 5 1600X is fine but also shows the better CPU makes a big difference. In a game struggling to reach 60FPS the better CPU can get more out of your GPU and you would feel it.
AC work is not cheap. I think you kinda got shafted. Especially thinking how much engine bay room is in my dad cruise. I feel for you man. I mean, yea it's a "good deal" but I bet repairing that AC was a pain in the arsehole. Also I can confirm the statement above. I had a micon card (RTX 3060 TI) and the memory failed in less than 2 years.
I had the same vega card for a couple of years,it has since made its way to my girlfriends and very soon will be moving to my brother-in-law‘s computer. A couple of extra tips for keeping them cool in my experience is taking off the back plate using a high end thermal compound like IC diamond or thermal grizzly and ensuring that the card slot dividers on the back of the case aren’t obstructing the vents of the graphics cards exhaust especially if your case is not perforated for airflow in the back
I've been messing with a Vega 56 for the last week and I actually found that the pro drivers perform better than AMD's main ones for the Vega 56. Sure, they're a tad bit outdated, but I'd take performance and stability over immediately up-to-date drivers considering the age of the GPU.
I will always say it, you would get much more perf for your money by buying 2nd hand rx 5700 xt it's the budget king atm, 90fps on avr in RE4R at high settings/1080p (demo has about -6fps less and a bit worse graphics since it's missing few options)
imagine your vega56 runs at 1700mhz all the time. i have one of those :) removed the fans and added two 120mm it runs around 60c in games. this fan mod is amazing !
RTX 2060 could be also OC'ed and you get DLSS & RTX with that extra money that you pay, though 6GB vram is a bit iffy and if it was up to me i'd get 2060 Super instead.
@@jamezxh nah the 6gb was good enough for 1080p until now, and the 3gig Version of the 1060 was also "ok" but was also in generall weaker than the 6gb version. However the 2060 was still far better than the 1060 3gb in future usage terms. Dlss also reduces vram usage
Driver Maturation and Overclocking truly has proven to be a major gamechanger for Vega, regardless of the product that is used for this practice: Local testing during its opening months presented the astounding revelation that a properly tuned Radeon VII can get within striking distance of and even supersede a Stock 2080 Ti, this is especially true of units that were updated to run on Water Cooling but it truly showed how much that this card was not looked at by the upper entities in the community and thus it proved that Vega was an ideal budget option for the High End at a time where both Pascal and Turing's offerings were too expensive for their own good. Now, knowing that the Radeon VII can already discharge north of 0400 Watts at Stock when not given any tuning, you are heavily encouraged to Undervolt the card before doing any kind of OC'ing, it's already a beast in its own right today because of how well it has matured but it'll be nice to see more of what it can do at its peak; whether or not this'll also benefit Video Encoding, Model Rendering, and AI projects substantially is beyond me, Vega 020 already runs hot when doing renders of the latter and I can only imagine what an OC would do to it, it'll probably be more likely to reach Temperature Junction (0II0º Celsius) even on an Undervolt due to how underdeveloped its iteration of TSMC N07 is but it would be nice to see if it can be tamed better and give this generation of AMD's most important generation of the 20IX decade some more life incredibly deep into Generation IX of Gaming's run.
i have a question, does that vega card crashes, and what is the driver version you used? I have got a Vega64 Ref and it was working fine for like 2weeks, and it started crashing. With the 2023 drivers it crashes when i start loading the card, but with 18.6.1driver, like it can do half a hour. I have some clue about gpu's and i will take a look in the hardware, im just interested that is yours crashing and on which driver verison. If you dont mind :D
Aw man if I had the money for it I would prob go for one, wallet bent out of shape by picking up a grail of grails Russian watch last week lol Just added you as a saved seller so will check back from time to time when wallet comes off life support hehehe
Hello ! how can you obtain those free tweaks with the Vega 56 card, using the latest drivers? I have the same msi airboost model. I think you can export the overclock setting, is there a way you can share it? THanks !
On vega 56 and 64, 900 MHz memory speed sounds slow , but the memory is spdered directly to the graphic processor , right next to it , wich makes it to don't matter that much in comparation with a GDDR6 or GDDR5 where the memory modules are like 2 cm away from the cipset
Isn't it more fair - considering they're both the same price now - to show the OC of both cards? Since if you're considering buying one, you're probably going to be overclocking them both.
The point is they are not the same price. The VEGA is cheaper and the 2060 is more powerful. RandomGaming is seeing if you can make up the performance difference without spending more money. It turns out you can get the same performance and save money as long as you're prepared to do a bit of tuning. If you've got the money would you bother tuning? No you'd spend the money top buy the performance you want.
Did you mention how loud the cards get? Maybe I missed it. The $50 might be worth it not sounding like a jet engine. Definitely get a dual fan if you can unless you have a good pair of headphones.
@RandomGaminginHD The power consumption numbers provided by the V56 to RTSS and shown in this video are extremely misleading. At stock under full load, V56 is a 225W card, as physically measured at the PCIe power connectors and motherboard PCIe slot by TechPowerUp and noted in its V56 launch review. RTSS reports it at about 65W lower than its actual power consumption, for reasons explained by Igor's Lab in the article titled "Total Board Power (TBP) vs. real power consumption and the inadequacy of software tools vs. real measurements." If I may quote a section of the article: "The [Radeon] TGP is sometimes even more than 100 watts below the actual total power consumption of such a card in large graphics cards! Unfortunately, anyone who then takes this from the software at face value is deceiving themselves." The same misleading, inaccurate reporting does not apply to Geforce cards: "The good side of NVIDIA’s control and limitation mania is the fact that you can read the [...] monitoring values quite easily and accurately via software."
Please do some tests with hbcc on the vega card, apparently it gives some interesting results in specific games. You can do (emulated) ray tracing on the vega cards in linux though the performance won't be particularly good
Another thing that's more advanced that could perhaps be done with (some?) Vega 56 cards would be to flash a Vega 64 VBIOS onto it, similar to the HD 6950 being flashed to a HD 6970 or something?
I can't believe you could get 2060 performance out of a card all the way back in 2017. I've had my 2060 since 2019, but I could have had a Vega 56 an extra two years! Madness.
very interesting all in all ..mayhaps drop voltage with a slightly less memory oc for higher core clock and lower temp ..just a tick lower voltage on vega does wonders
One detail, your gpu model has a TDP limited to 165w, I have a Sapphire model that is 180w, and has better performance, there are bios that solve this and increase performance.
mine is undervolted and overclocked to 1620mhz on gpu and 925mhz on memory. it is prety stable and has lots of juice in it. and with the undervolt i manage to run below 250W of consumption vs +300w on stock values at lower speeds
It is curious how the cpu usage get lower than the RTX 2060 when tweaking the Vega 56 but still getting pretty close results. I think it only do that in RDR2, Forza and COD.
Flashed Vega 64 BIOS on my old Vega 56 and after overclocking the memory to 1100MHz and undervolting by 180mV, it outperformed a stock Vega 64 while drawing less power.
I got this rx vega 56 for $60 in my country (secondhand - i think its used for mining), as an also 2060 user, that grapich card are really solid if you can get in cheap price
@@theplayerofus319Lower power usage, much better Open GL performance, much better emulation performance, third party shaders run much better on Nvidia.
@@theplayerofus319 I saw slightly lesser power usage in most games even compared to stock, not considering the fact it’s still slower at stock. Vega has bad driver support on top of HBM memory being finicky in some games, but it’s ok obviously you made up your mind and need to reinsure yourself. I too had buyers remorse when I bought a fury X. The rTX 2060 still has better resale value on top of all that, great trade bb.
I just bought a full system for £285 ( Including monitor ) 170hz MBR montior Vega 56 Ryzen 2600 + 480gb + 1tb SSD + Windows 11 ( Even came with a gpu to sell or trade in ) Uk Tech is so affordable, if you know what you're buying you can basically get away with daylight robbery.
No experience with the 56, but I used a 64 for a long time, and I have a Radeon Instinct MI25 that's had the bios flash done so it outputs video on the single mini DP. I eventually ended up shelving it when my old 1080p high refresh rate monitor died and I made the switch to 1440p high refresh rate, the sum of my experience was more or less that it's starting to show its age in modern titles with a lot of detail it wasn't well suited to the higher resolution, but in 1080 it was fine being able to balance settings to get the refresh rate desired for the game. I forgot what my results were with the MI25, I gave it a test in 3DMark, but I never really used it as much more than an experiment to see what's possible if the bios flashing worked. It scored a bit less than a 64 and a bit more than a 56 right where Techpowerup basically said it should, and for the $85 price I paid it wasn't a bad idea (provided of course you can do the dual bios flash, and cool the thing since it doesn't have any active cooling by default. I've recently seen them as low as $70, plus about $10 for a cheap usb eeprom flash tool, and as far as cooling goes people make little 3D printed brackets for fans, I've seen one with a hole cut in it and a radial fan added, basically you can probably find a way to get airflow for little to nothing. If your budget is super tight and you're willing to dig in a little bit it's not the worst thing.
I keep looking at those MI25 but with all the work needed to turn it into a VEGA they are never cheap enough. If someone were to sell them already converted I'd check them out.
@@wayland7150 yeah, like if I was the one who had my hands on the stockpile I'd spend the few minutes to flash em, put coolers on in bulk and sell em ready to go, but there's be no money in buying them at their regular used price doing that and then trying to sell them at a mark up. Sure the used price on a real WX 9100 is fairly high, but nobody is gonna pay half that for my jerry rigged MI25, they're gonna want it at roughly vega 64 price if the extra 8gb of HBM matters to them.
@@AmaraTheBarbarian I've bought 10gb network cards that some enterprising person has taken a server only part and converted it to fit in PCIe. Someone like that could do as you suggest but they'd need to get the cards really cheap.
@@wayland7150 Well I assume the guys selling them on ebay for $70-85 are getting them at roughly $25-$35 each as scrap maybe less if they're just buying decommissioned electronics by the pound, which is what you'd have to get them at to sell them for profit with the 13.25% ebay cut. Like I said in their shoes I'd be flashing them all to WX 9100s doing a cooling mod and trying to sell at $100. At that price I think it's a valid argument to look at them and go "well double the VRAM but only 1 monitor and marginally slower" and make your decision from there. At the current price though you'd be in for about $115 to make it work on an individual level plus your time and it becomes more mediocre, unless you see the tweaking as half the fun like I do.
The Vega56 should run in 4K... It's where it shines relatively to its age. I am still playing FFVII Intergrade on it in 4K and it's handling it so much better than i'd have thought.
Card in PC number 2 is a cheap MSI Ventus OC 2060Super. Runs 1440p widescreen very nicely when asked too, Just wish it was low profile though so I couldd put it in my HTPC for my 4K display. It's a great card - was replaced by an EVGA -2080 SC- 3080 SC.
@@imnoexpert1926 In my HTPC I run a 1650 Super which does OK for most things and I use HTPC as both Plex Server and client. Have had friends from San Diego use it at the same time as me in UK, without any drops it was great. 1650 Super is a great little workhorse if a little loud if I am honest. btw it my 2060 Super gave way to a 3080 not 2080, I'll edit comment.
Find an MSI Vega 64 bios. I've got an XFX Vega56 with the blower same style. I flashed the XFX Vega64 bios onto it and was able to overclock the ram to 1100 (up from 800) and slightly undervolt it, the 56 bios stops at 950, the 64 goes much higher. I got similar GPU clocks though. Definitely worth considering for any memory sensitive games.
The vega 56 has bottlenecked memory timings. You can flash the card with the Vega 64 bios to correct this and bump memory speed to 1100mHz. It will largely perform the same as the 64.
To be contrarian: Grab another Vega56 model if used market prices are the same. You'll get almost the same tweaked performance out of the box and without the noise of a blower fan: #1: PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 OC / ASUS ROG STRIX RX Vega 56 GAMING OC #2: Sapphire NITRO+ RX Vega 56 I own a Sapphire Pulse RX Vega 56. Power limit and mem clock are left to factory defaults of 180W and 800 MHz, core clock is OC'd to 1640 MHz @ 1005 mV. That can still run into the power limit in synthetic load tests, but typically not in games at 1080p. Memory OC gets me like +1% perf for a 18% OC, so it wasn't worth stressing the components over it for me.
flasher avec un bios Vega 64 sur une 56 alors faite une prière car cela fonctionnera et puis un jour la carte est HS sans préavis ca peut arrivé au bout d une semaine de 6 mois 1 ans cela est aléatoire et dépend de bcp de facteurs de la qualité du GPU si oc si l augmentation de voltage ne lui convient pas etc. etc. bonne chances au kamikaze vous en aurez besoins
Why does the 2060 look so washed out compared to the VEGA card? The only game where it looked slightly as vibrant as the VEGA card was The Last of Us. Honestly, I think I'd rather have the more vibrant (without using ReShade or ENB) VEGA card. FPS only matters if you're into competitive multiplayer or a serious speedrunner, IMO.....¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@RandomGaminginHD Air Boost cards are locked, as they aren't reference designs - they're reference clones and were sold during the ETH mining craze. If those could be flashed, they wouldn't have found their way into regular consumers' hands. If you override ATIflash you'll be greeted by a blackscreen after rebooting the system - the card won't initialize. It can still be restored to the original bios from that condition though (by installing a 2nd GPU and using that to drive the display, then booting into FreeDOS/MSDOS and flashing from there), so there's nothing to lose.
Damn, the Vega 56 did really well when tweaked.
Yeah just needs a little love haha
160 watts to 210 watts for that improvement and stressing the already old silicon is a waste of effort. Undervolting may yield better results with decreased noise.
@@eatstuffanddie The card is undervolted. Otherwise it would try to draw 240W and upwards of that (stock 1.2V when unrestrained can exceed 300W ASIC!).
The problem is that vSOC (Infinity Fabric) is fed by the vCore rail and needs around 1000mV minimum to be able to run high memory clocks. This automatically limits UV potential.
Around 210W should already translate to
yes for sure.. even slightly better than untweaked 😋
@Psychx_ Yes, I remember the Vega 56 needing high voltage memory overclocks for properly improved performance. Gamers Nexus did a lot of videos about this. Undervolting is only useful when total board power is artificially limited like we see with modern cards. That's not something these old cards were limited by. The GCN architecture was very good at random compute, but needed insane memory bandwidth in order to keep gaming performance somewhat decent.
I haven't got a Vega any more, but I've notice that other people's C2077 performance with the Vega 56 has fallen a lot in the last year. I wonder if Nimez drivers would help?
Yeah might do, a few people have suggested it was a game update so might revert the version on GOG and see
@@RandomGaminginHD the last possible gog version is quite recent, for a real rollback you’d need to get the files from someone who still has the older gog version.
@@RandomGaminginHD just checked my records, at 1080 Medium my Vega 56 got 71FPS stock, 78 overclocked. The drivers were 22.7.1, and I think the game was probably v1.5 or 1.6 (it was after FSR got added, but before FSR 2)
@@RandomGaminginHD Can you test those old gpus on Atlas OS? In some games like Gta V you can see nice fps boost 6fps on average.
It's iceberg tech! My 2 favourite tech youtubers in one place.
If you have Samsung HBM you can flash with a Vega 64 bios, overclock the HBM, raise the power limit, then undervolt the core. You will get significant gains over standard overclocking. The 64 bios while it does not unlock any shaders it does significantly raise the power limit on the mem and core allowing you to get MUCH higher clocks. Mine was able to do 1720mhz core 1020mhz mem (with tightened timings).
Those are phenomenal numbers.
Most sane vega user
Silicone lottery jackpot right there my guy no matter flashed bios and memory boost.
@@themightylordofgoblins6880LMAO
@@themightylordofgoblins6880 sold mine during the mining bubble and got a free upgrade to RX 6600 XT and a 2tb ssd
The Vega 56 held up pretty well, especially considering that it's a bit older than the 2060. Although the 2060 seems to be a bit less power hungry judging by the game results that you showed. Great video as always!
newer hardware tends to do that. either better performance at the same power, or the same performance at lower power. and in some cases even better performance at lower power.
I have indeed overclocked and undervolted my Vega 56 I have had it for several years now the triple fan Powercolor Red Dragon model, as mine shipped with a BIOS Switch on the side I decided to find a compatible VBIOS on Techpowerup a long time ago and I flashed the BIOS to use a Vega 64 BIOS so it runs stock clocks of the 64 being 1630 on the core clock and 945 on the memory. Still runs really well despite its age now.
Those red dragon cards are so cool
And a 64LC bios you can push those numbers even higher. Thanks to the additional headroom given to you by higher HBM VOLTAGE. ~1100HBM really unlocks a lot of performance because Vega is memory bandwidth limited. You don't even need to do much to the core clocks. You can keep them in the 1600 range. But if you are feeling really brave and have the cooling to deal with it. The LC bios provides 1.25vcore instead of 1.2. So you can push the core beyond 1700MHz and 400w in most cases. It's only good for an additional ~2%-5%. But it's still extra. But the majority of the gains to be had is in HBM.
For me the best used cards rn are the 6600/XT. I have bought them from €90 to €140 and run on a 450w power supply. They are also quite energy-saving and not too hot.
where do you live where a 6600xt is 90€?
@@xxxmass He said 6600/XT at 90 to 140. not 6600xt at 90.
So why are you cherry picking words lol
I have a 6600xt, very pleased with the performance.
@narkomancers5262u also seem to missed "used"
That’s very cheap. Converted to euro the 6600 is 150 used as cheapest and 180 for the XT version and that’s the cheapest not the average selling price.
Very nice idea for a video, I hope to see similar comparisons in the future.
The cyberpunk issue is worth investing.
You can't go too wrong with a Vega GPU, especially if you spent a few minutes to at least undervolt the card, of not overclock it as well.
My only real issue is power consumption as always because at ~200W it requires a good PSU for the Vega
The PSU is not a problem. People always say this for some reason as if they are using a 300watt PSU. All gamers have at least 450 watts, that 190 watts for the system then 260watts for the GPU. That's at full load with no GPU tuning so reality is likely to be less power than that. I had a mining rig with 4 VEGAs and although it would stress the 1000watt PSU at factory settings once the cards were tuned for lower power and faster hash rate it was fine.
I have my Vega56 Sapphire Pulse since 2019 and I'm still using it. I changed cooler fans for Noctua fans, set power limit to -50% and max Frequency/Voltage to 1312/1050, and it runs cool and quiet. It still handles games on 1080p/60Hz.
You're one of the most consistent youtubers and i very much enjoy your content. Thanks for brightening up my mood.😁😁😁
I second this motion!!
Thanks!
I've always loved your overclocking videos. Not sure why, just satisfying!
Got a vega 64 with a waterblock on it... It has been THE best overclocking experience i ever had after X58 cpu overclocking 😅 Highly rewarding to mess around with memory timings and stuff... Such a same that all recent GPUs are so locked...Never used it for gaming though... For that i'm sticking with nvidia, though for benchmarking i freaking love the vegas and i wish i could find a great deal on a Fury as it's basically the ancestor of vega cards...
This is why I love this channel. Brand new cards I can't afford don't interest me much, I love digging into old tech.
I am in the midst of a build for my girlfriend, and I was looking on the used market for a nice little budget GPU to throw in it. Seems like in Turkey people do not understand where the Vega GPUs sit in terms of value, and most of them are ridiculously cheap at around 60-70£. I'm definitely gonna cop one of the silver reference Vega 64s as the 56 and 64 listings are only around 5£ apart from each other.
This card still has so much value in it, and it is an offer you can not refuse when it is that cheap!
The card received poor reviews when it was launched because it was supposed to be a lot better than the GTX 1080 but was not. Most of the criticisms are now invalid;
1. uses a lot of power, not really and can be made to use less
2. does not beat the 1080, it can be tuned so it does
3. expensive, not any more, it's a bargain
4. driver problems, not any more
If you have twice the money for a GPU there are better choices but at the current price you can't beat it. The RX 580 often costs more and that's only half a VEGA's performance.
You didn't tweak this one right. The Vega56 doesn't need +50% power limit. It needs the vega64 bios and to set the hbm to 1000+. Then you undervolt the cores so that they can maintain higher clocks for longer.
With the right tweak you can get almost 40% more performance out of the Vega56 in some situations.
You should definitely try out the community drivers for the older AMD cards if you haven't. I think they're called nimez drivers? I heard they can help a lot with any newer games that don't get the best performance, or with new technologies that might not otherwise be supported.
I had this exact version of the 56, modded with a Morpheus2 cooler, and used it for a couple years, until it started artifacting.
Similar prices on the used GPU market certainly makes for some strange bedfellows. Even so, your comparison is totally valid from that perspective, and very interesting.
In the future when you do these comparisons - please show the stock clock speeds and other variables on screen for comparison sake - seems an easy fix and one that can better show what was and what is in the testing.
I will say this: I personally prefer the smoothest possible game play, not necessarily the absolute highest averages. That said, I am currently running a recently purchased, lightly used RTX 2080 Super, as an upgrade over my GTX 1070 I had. If I had not had access to this 2080 Super when I did upgrade, I would likely have been looking at buying a RTX 2060-2070 or an AMD equivalent. I just got really lucky with my roommate upgrading to his current RTX 4080, and I got his RTX 2080 Super after I replaced the AC compressor and condenser in his Chevy Cruze. Though, that GPU upgrade rabbit hole lead to me also buying a brand new AMD Ryzen 5 5600X to replace my Ryzen 5 1600X. And for anyone interested, if you have an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X or equivalent and wondered if something like a RTX 2080 Super, equivalent, or more powerful GPU would pair: I used Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor at 720p resolution as a test. RTX 2080 Super and Ryzen 5 1600X gave me a peak of 330 FPS, an average of about 150 FPS and lows of 98 FPS. When I upgraded to the Ryzen 5 5600X, I had a peak of 523 FPS, average of 315 FPS and a low of 110 FPS.
Yeah, smoothness is what makes it feel good, even if it's smooth at a lower framerate.
And by these results, Hogwarts and CoD should feel pretty bad on both the Vega and the 2060
Clearly for Shadow of Mordor the RYZEN 5 1600X is fine but also shows the better CPU makes a big difference. In a game struggling to reach 60FPS the better CPU can get more out of your GPU and you would feel it.
Better check that 2080 for the type of RAM chips used. Micron and Hynix chips were garbage and prone to premature failure.
AC work is not cheap. I think you kinda got shafted. Especially thinking how much engine bay room is in my dad cruise. I feel for you man. I mean, yea it's a "good deal" but I bet repairing that AC was a pain in the arsehole. Also I can confirm the statement above. I had a micon card (RTX 3060 TI) and the memory failed in less than 2 years.
I had the same vega card for a couple of years,it has since made its way to my girlfriends and very soon will be moving to my brother-in-law‘s computer. A couple of extra tips for keeping them cool in my experience is taking off the back plate using a high end thermal compound like IC diamond or thermal grizzly and ensuring that the card slot dividers on the back of the case aren’t obstructing the vents of the graphics cards exhaust especially if your case is not perforated for airflow in the back
I've been messing with a Vega 56 for the last week and I actually found that the pro drivers perform better than AMD's main ones for the Vega 56. Sure, they're a tad bit outdated, but I'd take performance and stability over immediately up-to-date drivers considering the age of the GPU.
I'm running older drivers as well. Updating comes when the new driver brings a new feature I want or when some software complains about the old one.
Have you thought about looking at the 2080 super? I managed to get one for 200 shipped. I noticed quite a few 2080 supers hitting 200 in the US.
I will always say it, you would get much more perf for your money by buying 2nd hand rx 5700 xt it's the budget king atm, 90fps on avr in RE4R at high settings/1080p (demo has about -6fps less and a bit worse graphics since it's missing few options)
Heh, just put a Vega 56 up for sale today. Spooky timing man.
imagine your vega56 runs at 1700mhz all the time. i have one of those :) removed the fans and added two 120mm it runs around 60c in games. this fan mod is amazing !
Did you try HBCC? May help with memory hungry games.
RTX 2060 could be also OC'ed and you get DLSS & RTX with that extra money that you pay, though 6GB vram is a bit iffy and if it was up to me i'd get 2060 Super instead.
This is about saving £50 and getting more VRAM. If you want 2060 performance but can only pony up a pony.
he...he said that and the 2060 super is in a hole other price segment.
The 6gig 2060 sits next to the 3gig 1060 as the cards that should have never existed . Bit like what NVIDIA’s whole 8 gig stack is looking right now.
@@jamezxh nah the 6gb was good enough for 1080p until now, and the 3gig Version of the 1060 was also "ok" but was also in generall weaker than the 6gb version. However the 2060 was still far better than the 1060 3gb in future usage terms. Dlss also reduces vram usage
love the content
Driver Maturation and Overclocking truly has proven to be a major gamechanger for Vega, regardless of the product that is used for this practice: Local testing during its opening months presented the astounding revelation that a properly tuned Radeon VII can get within striking distance of and even supersede a Stock 2080 Ti, this is especially true of units that were updated to run on Water Cooling but it truly showed how much that this card was not looked at by the upper entities in the community and thus it proved that Vega was an ideal budget option for the High End at a time where both Pascal and Turing's offerings were too expensive for their own good.
Now, knowing that the Radeon VII can already discharge north of 0400 Watts at Stock when not given any tuning, you are heavily encouraged to Undervolt the card before doing any kind of OC'ing, it's already a beast in its own right today because of how well it has matured but it'll be nice to see more of what it can do at its peak; whether or not this'll also benefit Video Encoding, Model Rendering, and AI projects substantially is beyond me, Vega 020 already runs hot when doing renders of the latter and I can only imagine what an OC would do to it, it'll probably be more likely to reach Temperature Junction (0II0º Celsius) even on an Undervolt due to how underdeveloped its iteration of TSMC N07 is but it would be nice to see if it can be tamed better and give this generation of AMD's most important generation of the 20IX decade some more life incredibly deep into Generation IX of Gaming's run.
i have a question, does that vega card crashes, and what is the driver version you used?
I have got a Vega64 Ref and it was working fine for like 2weeks, and it started crashing.
With the 2023 drivers it crashes when i start loading the card, but with 18.6.1driver, like it can do half a hour.
I have some clue about gpu's and i will take a look in the hardware, im just interested that is yours crashing and on which driver verison. If you dont mind :D
What succulent is that @ 0:55 Looks like a scorpion or something. Looks cool.
2060 is pulling way less power for the same prf. Is electricity expensive in the UK?
Aw man if I had the money for it I would prob go for one, wallet bent out of shape by picking up a grail of grails Russian watch last week lol Just added you as a saved seller so will check back from time to time when wallet comes off life support hehehe
Hello ! how can you obtain those free tweaks with the Vega 56 card, using the latest drivers? I have the same msi airboost model.
I think you can export the overclock setting, is there a way you can share it? THanks !
What did you overclock with? What were the settings?
Vegas go around 80-120€ here, i just wondering how long more will it still drives, i have had for years.
On vega 56 and 64, 900 MHz memory speed sounds slow , but the memory is spdered directly to the graphic processor , right next to it , wich makes it to don't matter that much in comparation with a GDDR6 or GDDR5 where the memory modules are like 2 cm away from the cipset
Isn't it more fair - considering they're both the same price now - to show the OC of both cards? Since if you're considering buying one, you're probably going to be overclocking them both.
The point is they are not the same price. The VEGA is cheaper and the 2060 is more powerful. RandomGaming is seeing if you can make up the performance difference without spending more money. It turns out you can get the same performance and save money as long as you're prepared to do a bit of tuning. If you've got the money would you bother tuning? No you'd spend the money top buy the performance you want.
Did you mention how loud the cards get? Maybe I missed it. The $50 might be worth it not sounding like a jet engine. Definitely get a dual fan if you can unless you have a good pair of headphones.
@RandomGaminginHD The power consumption numbers provided by the V56 to RTSS and shown in this video are extremely misleading. At stock under full load, V56 is a 225W card, as physically measured at the PCIe power connectors and motherboard PCIe slot by TechPowerUp and noted in its V56 launch review. RTSS reports it at about 65W lower than its actual power consumption, for reasons explained by Igor's Lab in the article titled "Total Board Power (TBP) vs. real power consumption and the inadequacy of software tools vs. real measurements." If I may quote a section of the article: "The [Radeon] TGP is sometimes even more than 100 watts below the actual total power consumption of such a card in large graphics cards! Unfortunately, anyone who then takes this from the software at face value is deceiving themselves." The same misleading, inaccurate reporting does not apply to Geforce cards: "The good side of NVIDIA’s control and limitation mania is the fact that you can read the [...] monitoring values quite easily and accurately via software."
Please do some tests with hbcc on the vega card, apparently it gives some interesting results in specific games.
You can do (emulated) ray tracing on the vega cards in linux though the performance won't be particularly good
You can enable Resizable Bar through a registry hack and that'll nail the RTX 2060 for sure.
I have a vega 56 and I flashed a vega 64 bios on it the original tdp was 165w and now it’s 220w that was a significant boost
Another thing that's more advanced that could perhaps be done with (some?) Vega 56 cards would be to flash a Vega 64 VBIOS onto it, similar to the HD 6950 being flashed to a HD 6970 or something?
Quite good performance for both cards. Seems like, if you don't play on 1440p/4K and 120Hz, no need to buy new card, if have any of those.
I was really hoping some company would make a half height, single slot RTX 2060 for μSFF builds.
I can't believe you could get 2060 performance out of a card all the way back in 2017. I've had my 2060 since 2019, but I could have had a Vega 56 an extra two years! Madness.
can you do a 2024 updated version?
i like your content very good
Why does the RTX 2060 footage look washed out compared to the VEGA 56?
very interesting all in all ..mayhaps drop voltage with a slightly less memory oc for higher core clock and lower temp ..just a tick lower voltage on vega does wonders
One detail, your gpu model has a TDP limited to 165w, I have a Sapphire model that is 180w, and has better performance, there are bios that solve this and increase performance.
but now i wanna know what you could of got out of the rtx 2060 with a boost
mine is undervolted and overclocked to 1620mhz on gpu and 925mhz on memory. it is prety stable and has lots of juice in it.
and with the undervolt i manage to run below 250W of consumption vs +300w on stock values at lower speeds
the geforce got a blurry ass image, the vega looks more crisp.
Nice to see this older gpu peak performance❤
I need more Radeon VII content
About 87% the performance (90% without CP2077), pushed to 95% the performance (99% without CP2077), truly a well aged card.
These aren't the cards you're looking for...
What do u mean?
Lmfaooo he ain’t get the joke
@@kl1n235boomer missed the joke lmfao rofl
I still didn't understand
@@yoyosingh1088
You don't watch Star Wars much, do you?
It's a Star Wars joke, it just passed by your head.
It is curious how the cpu usage get lower than the RTX 2060 when tweaking the Vega 56 but still getting pretty close results. I think it only do that in RDR2, Forza and COD.
I think it means that the VEGA might be better than the 2060 on systems with weaker CPUs.
Flashed Vega 64 BIOS on my old Vega 56 and after overclocking the memory to 1100MHz and undervolting by 180mV, it outperformed a stock Vega 64 while drawing less power.
I got this rx vega 56 for $60 in my country (secondhand - i think its used for mining), as an also 2060 user, that grapich card are really solid if you can get in cheap price
Fyi, my full load TDP just only touching 160W, is it normal ?
And OLD PhysX games onna' AMD GPU?
gotta admit I love this design style of Vega 56 looks great
Now can you use a rtx 2070 vs Vega 64 tweaked
I traded my Vega 56 for a 2060 and don't regret doing so, but the Vega 56 was more fun to overclock
doesnt seem to make sense espacilly considering the 6gb vram.
@@theplayerofus319Lower power usage, much better Open GL performance, much better emulation performance, third party shaders run much better on Nvidia.
@@zar7511 he prop just games and with that it makes no sense + it clearly has stock the same power usage my guy. Not worth it
@@theplayerofus319 I saw slightly lesser power usage in most games even compared to stock, not considering the fact it’s still slower at stock. Vega has bad driver support on top of HBM memory being finicky in some games, but it’s ok obviously you made up your mind and need to reinsure yourself. I too had buyers remorse when I bought a fury X. The rTX 2060 still has better resale value on top of all that, great trade bb.
@@zar7511 10-15 watts do NOTHING 🤣 A 2060 is not a good upgrade. A rx 6600 would be
I just bought a full system for £285 ( Including monitor )
170hz MBR montior
Vega 56
Ryzen 2600 + 480gb + 1tb SSD + Windows 11 ( Even came with a gpu to sell or trade in )
Uk Tech is so affordable, if you know what you're buying you can basically get away with daylight robbery.
They dont feel like they were released only a year apart for spme reason to me.
Who knows if AFOX Turbo Fan RTX 3090 is worth anything?
Flash a V64 bios and undervolt it. It doesn't use much more power then a stock 56 but memory/core has so much more to work with.
Hello
Can you make a video on RX 590 GME version. If you ever get your hands on that card.
apparently you will be spending money in terms of electricity bill when overclocking the vega 56 so there's that to count too.
Should have done the rtx 2060 vs rx 5600 xt
One begs to wonder if such a hard overclock is sustainable in the long run...
No experience with the 56, but I used a 64 for a long time, and I have a Radeon Instinct MI25 that's had the bios flash done so it outputs video on the single mini DP. I eventually ended up shelving it when my old 1080p high refresh rate monitor died and I made the switch to 1440p high refresh rate, the sum of my experience was more or less that it's starting to show its age in modern titles with a lot of detail it wasn't well suited to the higher resolution, but in 1080 it was fine being able to balance settings to get the refresh rate desired for the game.
I forgot what my results were with the MI25, I gave it a test in 3DMark, but I never really used it as much more than an experiment to see what's possible if the bios flashing worked. It scored a bit less than a 64 and a bit more than a 56 right where Techpowerup basically said it should, and for the $85 price I paid it wasn't a bad idea (provided of course you can do the dual bios flash, and cool the thing since it doesn't have any active cooling by default. I've recently seen them as low as $70, plus about $10 for a cheap usb eeprom flash tool, and as far as cooling goes people make little 3D printed brackets for fans, I've seen one with a hole cut in it and a radial fan added, basically you can probably find a way to get airflow for little to nothing. If your budget is super tight and you're willing to dig in a little bit it's not the worst thing.
I keep looking at those MI25 but with all the work needed to turn it into a VEGA they are never cheap enough. If someone were to sell them already converted I'd check them out.
@@wayland7150 yeah, like if I was the one who had my hands on the stockpile I'd spend the few minutes to flash em, put coolers on in bulk and sell em ready to go, but there's be no money in buying them at their regular used price doing that and then trying to sell them at a mark up. Sure the used price on a real WX 9100 is fairly high, but nobody is gonna pay half that for my jerry rigged MI25, they're gonna want it at roughly vega 64 price if the extra 8gb of HBM matters to them.
@@AmaraTheBarbarian I've bought 10gb network cards that some enterprising person has taken a server only part and converted it to fit in PCIe. Someone like that could do as you suggest but they'd need to get the cards really cheap.
@@wayland7150 Well I assume the guys selling them on ebay for $70-85 are getting them at roughly $25-$35 each as scrap maybe less if they're just buying decommissioned electronics by the pound, which is what you'd have to get them at to sell them for profit with the 13.25% ebay cut. Like I said in their shoes I'd be flashing them all to WX 9100s doing a cooling mod and trying to sell at $100. At that price I think it's a valid argument to look at them and go "well double the VRAM but only 1 monitor and marginally slower" and make your decision from there. At the current price though you'd be in for about $115 to make it work on an individual level plus your time and it becomes more mediocre, unless you see the tweaking as half the fun like I do.
make a comparison video of RX 550 vs GT 1030 OVERCLOCKED
I have no idea why you compare a Vega 56 to a 1070 when my Vega 56 currently beats my gtx 1080. But the 2060
Unless I already have a pretty powerful psu, I would get the 2060.
stock theyy draw the same power doe
The Vega56 should run in 4K... It's where it shines relatively to its age. I am still playing FFVII Intergrade on it in 4K and it's handling it so much better than i'd have thought.
Colours looked washout on the 2060 compared to the vega56.
Glad to see I am not the only one who noticed
just upgraded from a vega 56 to a 2060 super (it was a very cheap swap) and ive noticed a pretty reasonable performance bump!
Card in PC number 2 is a cheap MSI Ventus OC 2060Super. Runs 1440p widescreen very nicely when asked too, Just wish it was low profile though so I couldd put it in my HTPC for my 4K display. It's a great card - was replaced by an EVGA -2080 SC- 3080 SC.
@@clansome I have a SFF dell optiplex as my on the go rig so I totally feel you on that!! I'm stuck with a dinky 1050ti atm :c
@@imnoexpert1926 In my HTPC I run a 1650 Super which does OK for most things and I use HTPC as both Plex Server and client. Have had friends from San Diego use it at the same time as me in UK, without any drops it was great. 1650 Super is a great little workhorse if a little loud if I am honest. btw it my 2060 Super gave way to a 3080 not 2080, I'll edit comment.
I'm finding these things for 40-70 Dollars on ebay right now. That's a darn good deal for a cheap build.
I wonder if those Vega cards work better on Linux, because if they do, then you can find out if something is a driver problem.
VEGA work very well on Linux. 1% lows are a lot better. AMD drivers are still being developed that support the R9 series.
weird thing is in my state gtx 1080 is are cheaper than 1060 in the used market
Find an MSI Vega 64 bios.
I've got an XFX Vega56 with the blower same style.
I flashed the XFX Vega64 bios onto it and was able to overclock the ram to 1100 (up from 800) and slightly undervolt it, the 56 bios stops at 950, the 64 goes much higher. I got similar GPU clocks though.
Definitely worth considering for any memory sensitive games.
Can you do like vega 64 , 2060 s , 1070 , rx 6600 , 3060 pls
The vega 56 has bottlenecked memory timings. You can flash the card with the Vega 64 bios to correct this and bump memory speed to 1100mHz. It will largely perform the same as the 64.
all the vegas i've bought second hand here in the uk have issues, that's why they're being sold
I love my Vega 56, I often use it as an eGPU for my 2011 MacBook Pro using purge wrangler
Wait for Vega they said. Well, you have certainly waited! 🙃
you can flash the bios of a vega 64 and it will perform like one.
To be contrarian: Grab another Vega56 model if used market prices are the same. You'll get almost the same tweaked performance out of the box and without the noise of a blower fan:
#1: PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 OC / ASUS ROG STRIX RX Vega 56 GAMING OC
#2: Sapphire NITRO+ RX Vega 56
I own a Sapphire Pulse RX Vega 56. Power limit and mem clock are left to factory defaults of 180W and 800 MHz, core clock is OC'd to 1640 MHz @ 1005 mV. That can still run into the power limit in synthetic load tests, but typically not in games at 1080p. Memory OC gets me like +1% perf for a 18% OC, so it wasn't worth stressing the components over it for me.
"Not bad for spending no money whatsoever."
Proceeds to check the electricity bill after a month of gaming.
Why not compare the 2060 to the RX 5700
flasher avec un bios Vega 64 sur une 56 alors faite une prière car cela fonctionnera et puis un jour la carte est HS sans préavis ca peut arrivé au bout d une semaine de 6 mois 1 ans cela est aléatoire et dépend de bcp de facteurs de la qualité du GPU si oc si l augmentation de voltage ne lui convient pas etc. etc. bonne chances au kamikaze vous en aurez besoins
Why does the 2060 look so washed out compared to the VEGA card? The only game where it looked slightly as vibrant as the VEGA card was The Last of Us. Honestly, I think I'd rather have the more vibrant (without using ReShade or ENB) VEGA card. FPS only matters if you're into competitive multiplayer or a serious speedrunner, IMO.....¯\_(ツ)_/¯
even though vega cards heat, I always liked vega cards blower style more than fan style in terms of looks.
That rtx 2060 is literally the tweaked version of vega 56
Please retest it with vega64 air boost bios which will allow mem oc up to 1050-1100 mhz ;)
Yeah tried to flash yesterday with ati flash but wouldn’t work. Will try again manually
@@RandomGaminginHD Air Boost cards are locked, as they aren't reference designs - they're reference clones and were sold during the ETH mining craze.
If those could be flashed, they wouldn't have found their way into regular consumers' hands. If you override ATIflash you'll be greeted by a blackscreen after rebooting the system - the card won't initialize.
It can still be restored to the original bios from that condition though (by installing a 2nd GPU and using that to drive the display, then booting into FreeDOS/MSDOS and flashing from there), so there's nothing to lose.
@@Psychx_ i use vega 64 air boost msi bios on my sapphire pulse 56, works perfectly fine...
Does anyone else notice how washed out the 2060 is? Any explanation?