While AMD has revealed details of a couple of Vega GPU based products, like the professional-targeted Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, and the Radeon Instinct MI25 GPU accelerator card, we are still waiting patiently for a consumer hardware launch.
The official launch event for those enthusiasts and gamers anxious to hear more about the AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics cards is officially set for SIGGRAPH 2017 in LA, which kicks off at the end of July. Hopefully there won't be much of a delay between announcement and availability - but then we might have to contend with the cryptocurrency miner demand which could sap the market dry…
Power concerns?
The Radeon Vega Frontier Edition's TDP wasn't listed by AMD when it was launched last month. Various sources reckon it will be between 250W and 300W with its twin 8-pin power connectors. Last week a b2b retailer detailed the air cooled version of the Frontier Edition as having a TDP rated at 300W, while the liquid-cooled variant has its TDP rated as high as 375W. That's not so shocking, as the Nvidia Titan Xp has a rated TDP of 275W, and the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is said by the same source to have some significant performance advantages. Remember yesterday the Radeon Instinct MI25 is also said to offer "superior performance per watt" compared to the best Nvidia GPU accelerators available.
Yesterday the feelings of an MSI marketing director towards AMD RX Vega raised some concerns. As VideoCardz reports, the MSI exec wrote on Tweakers forums the following (translated from Dutch):
I've seen the specs of Vega RX. It needs a damn lot of power. We're working on it, which is a start so launch is coming closer :)
So admittedly, the AMD RX Vega cards might be heavy on the power consumption compared with many modern consumer cards from MSI. Nevertheless it sounds like there will be some interesting third party cooling solutions available from launch as MSI is "working on it". Of course other AiB partners will likely be adding their own special sauce too.
