AMD's Ryzen CPUs (Ryzen/TR/Epyc) & Vega/Polaris/Navi GPUs

I'm learning now that TR4 requires a lot more finesse than X99. With TR4, it doesn't like to follow the voltage I set whereas on X99, it doesn't go over the voltage I enter.

 

I've heard people complain about that on Asus Zenith. I set the voltage and LLC on my board to level 1, not a single waiver. 1.2V is 1.2V!

 

Hopefully, Asus comes with a fix. I can set my voltages to 1.2 and it will jump to 1.25 or even higher. I am also looking into better RAM exclusively for this platform. It doesn't like the Corsair I have.

Great job though bro. That SL chip is binned very well.

https://www.3dmark.com/fs/13543530 - 21,132. Slowly climbing. My 1080's must hate me. I could only imagine how they would perform under water.

 

Threadripper & other 1700 type chips are not the best for gaming, but that graphics score is well off, definitely something up with that platform!

 

I do not think that looks to cover enough of the IHS, could be me.
https://www.eteknix.com/swiftech-introduces-amd-tr4-version-skf-waterblock/

 

Ryzen 2, Raven Ridge & Optimization | AMD Q&A Pt I

AMD RX Vega Pricing "NOT JUST FOR LAUNCH"

 

And this is a notebookcheck.net article on Ryzen 2:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-s...ario-reveals-details-on-Ryzen-2.246354.0.html

The AMD Marketing manager says about Ryzen 2 which is releasing in 2018: “We’ve got clock speed headroom to take advantage of and we’ve got tweaks to make sure performance for each clock is better,”. So, we can see IPC is gonna increase as well as frequency - good stuff AMD, hope it delivers and pushes Intel even harder, praps Ryzen 2 will be as good or better than Intel when it comes to gaming next year.

 

I think amd has been very smart with the apus in the ps4 and xbox one and now the new xbox one x and the cheaper end of laptops .I use to have a a-10 4600 don't not sure what the so called video card was but it did ok for some light gaming .def not a real discrete gfx

 

That literally kept them afloat while working on Ryzen. Now, the game has changed. As soon as I can, I'll put up numbers of a fully optimized build by the end of the month, hopefully.

 

Thought I would update. I just got off a chat with a rep at Ibuypowerpc about the TR. I asked if they were going to a full coverage AIO such as the Enermax TR4. Their response was that they were considering it but no decision has been made. I let them know if not I would have to end up building myself as I can not have a system with inadequate cooling.

 

Threadripper X399 Mobo Showdown! - Zenith vs Aorus vs Carbon

 

Links;


Not the TR4 version though.

 

Undervolt & Overclock, Radeon RX Vega 56 vs. GeForce GTX 1070

 

Damn nice
ASUS Radeon RX 64 Review taken offline-Guru3d.com

 

Newegg had the Enermax TR4 aio listed as eta 9/8 but now the page claims out of stock with no plan to restock.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835214080

 

I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often

"Yesterday we published the ASUS Radeon RX 64 STRIX review. As shown, it performs awfully similar towards the reference Radeon RX 64. This morning I received a phone call from ASUS, asking us if we’d be willing to take down the article for a few days as they have made a mistake.

The sample we received did not get a final BIOS for its final clock frequencies and fan tweaking. Ergo, the sample we received carries a default reference BIOS.

It’s a colossal mistake, but as such the end-results in the review are not representative enough for the final product. ASUS will get the finalized BIOS over once they have finished (likely a day or two) after which we will re-test the card with that final BIOS and thus republish the review. All this explains why the STRIX card was so incredibly close to Vega 64 performance.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but this mistake was not one coming from us."

 

It looks like newegg is the only place listing it right now. I've had to call in to newegg and escalate to the buyer's before, very rare but this kind of situation qualifies, and ask what's up. Rather than sit there wondering.

You could also call Enermax.

One of the tricks to use to find these right when they list is to contact the places that carry other Enermax product, so I search on another common part and see what places come up, here are 49 places that carry other Enermax product:
https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...X&ved=0ahUKEwijk5TXhJTWAhXpg1QKHV5QB-8Q6SQIZg

 

People are calling him out on the undervolt not sticking (hence the large power draw).
I don't understand why people keep upping the power limit to 50% while undervolting.
It's utterly senseless and not representative of what happens if you simply undervolt the STOCK clocks and overclock the HBM to say 940 MhZ on Vega 56 (HBM oc shouldn't produce large power draw).

 

Yeah, the end results due Amd had to rush out the new graphics. Still bad QC from Asus And this showing that AMD bragged too soon. Loosy workmanship!! From both!!

 

Yup, I think he "didn't do it right" too, as he got such poor results compared to others.

It's a learning process for everyone with the new AMD hardware, so I'm looking forward to his follow-up video

 

That's way too harsh.

There is a rush these days from all vendors to get their stuff reviewed before it ships, so even if this is a "production" sample, it's probably being handled through a PR group working with the reviewers, so that board probably had to get a firmware update from the development / engineering group before it went out - somehow it was given to the wrong person first

AMD said the GPU's would compete with 1070 / 1080, never said it was going to exceed a 1080ti, so bragging would be that it's well and above the RX 580 series, which it is all of those things.

Do you work for Nvidia? What's all this hate for AMD anyway from you? We are talking about a different division, GPU's, not CPU's. Intel is the big looser here, but Nvidia is losing their share too (pun intended).

 

I'm sure you know me and what I want The best out there. Names ain't important. Only the products. Nothing would be better than if AMD could push Nvidia outside the cliff Too the better for us all!!

 

If you look at his results, with OC (I know you look at that), against the 1070, the 56 is a no brainer as to power. But this is a world with the 1080 and Ti, so...

 

To add insult to injury, the enermax came up in my email as available and of course they are not (already gone?).

One thing learned, apparently a 280mm version is coming too.
http://www.enermax.co.uk/cpu-coolers/liqtech-tr4/?L=2 ' onfostyle=

 

I think deep down a lot of us want AMD to bring out a GPU that mops the floor with Nvidia. Brother Paps resentment is mainly that they're incapable of doing so.

 

If Vega were here when promised things would be different. After two years this is what you get.

 

We wish the best for our friends, honor their accomplishments, and encourage them to continue to do better.

 

$3700 THREADRIPPER PC...! Ft. The Cougar Conquer

$7,000 Threadripper Monster PC build Vlog 1

X399 & AMD Threadripper....The Ultimate PC Build?

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x Build Update #1

RX Vega 64 and Threadripper Power Draw Testing

 

Watch us build an AMD Threadripper 1920X-Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti PC, part 1: Picking the parts


Watch us build an AMD Threadripper 1920X-Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti PC, part 2: Building it live

 

I may not have a system yet, but the Enermax TR4 360 is on order.

 

An excellent AIO and it should actually compete with my custom loop in terms of temps at clocks 4.0 and below. Have you decided what mobo you are going to get?

 

I am shopping that out now, I wanted the AIO first as it is the hens tooth, that is other than a Vega 56.

 

This might be useful for you Threadripper folks!
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/09/08/amd_ryzen_threadripper_waterblock_comparison_1/1

 

The 360 I ordered again went out of stock. That is ok I was clicking every 15 minutes or so, this made it available 4 hours before the notification made it too me. Once the notification was here it was out fo stock in a heart beat. I am so stoked to finally get mine.

I really would like 3.6 GHz memory, I have seen 3.33 in reviews for a kit but not 3.6 yet. Newegg has all my stuff at 3,621 plus 160 for the AIO. May add a M.2 as well

 

AMD Threadripper Gooseberry HEDT World Record
https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/09/03/amd_threadripper_gooseberry_hedt_world_record

"This was a Blender benchmark that I was not familiar with till yesterday, but after running it a few times and looking around the Net, I came away very impressed with our rendering time with Threadripper overclocked to 4GHz across all 16 cores."

Spoiler: Details

" Overclocking Threadripper to 4GHz
So this weekend I have been working on testing our new XSPC RayStorm and Bykski waterblocks. (You can see the articles we have written in the last couple of week here, and see a bunch of the videos on the HardOCP TV Youtube channel.)

In a discussion last night, a commenter asked about the Threadripper score at 4GHz using Gooseberry Production Benchmark File. Looking up information on it, this is what I found.

It's about time to share a benchmark for production quality renders - something nice and heavy, taking 8-12 GB memory and requiring an hour to render in a minimal quality!

Blender also links this benchmark on its Demo Files page, so this seems legit, and has this to say about it.

File from the Gooseberry open movie project, heavy render test for big systems.

So after finishing up testing on our XSPC and Bykski waterblocks, I thought I would give our Threadripper a dose of Gooseberry.

Gooseberry Production Benchmark Result
I have screenshotted our results below, but what I think we have is a "world record" for a desktop system. The Cosmos Laundromat does note one render time that is faster, but it is attributed to a 28-core/56-thread Xeon system (1,133 seconds). I look forward to seeing other scores noted in our HardForum discussion thread linked below. (I know we have some Threadripper owners in the ranks.)

Worth noting on the power and temperatures shown below is that this Threadripper system has been dialed in to be stable with running Prime95, using Small FFTs, for over an hour. During those runs CPU Package Wattage exceeds 360W. Given that Blender at the power usage shown below with Gooseberry is about 18% lower than Prime95, I would suggest that we could certainly decrease the vCore and vSOC for the Gooseberry test, which of course is a real-world usage scenario. However, many of us enthusiasts still like to dial in around Prime95 for stability testing, as we like to think that it gives us a "bulletproof" profile that is hard to crash in daily driver usages.

Our Gooseberry render time was 22 minutes 53.09 seconds, or 1,373.09 seconds.
Update: Already bested my score to 22 minutes 27.49 seconds.
Update 2: 22 minutes 18.24 seconds (1,338.24 seconds)"

 

AMD’s Threadripper Was Designed By Engineers In Their Spare Time
"What if I told you that the world’s fastest desktop processor available today was never originally planned? That’s right, in a revealing interview with Forbes, AMD’ers Sarah Youngbauer and James Prior revealed that the company’s pride and joy, Ryzen Threadripper, was developed by engineers in their spare time."

 

"So in essence, Threadripper was genuinely designed for hardware enthusiasts by a bunch of passionate hardware enthusiasts, that happened to be engineers.

But, it wasn’t easy. This small team had to figure out how to go about designing this 16 core monster chip with very little resources. And that’s when it clicked, Infinity Fabric. The “glue” that connects AMD’s Zen dies together in its server based EPYC chips.

That’s when they realized they could use the existing technology and assets that the Zen design brings to the table with relative ease to create a high-end enthusiast product and bring it to market as quickly as they did."

 

Wow, that's very resourceful, I hope those engineers got a massive bonus or pay rise!

 

Much smaller company with far lower budget, and delays due to HBM production issues.
Vega was largely delayed due to HBM2...
However, in compute area, it's a beast and readily outpaces 1080ti and Titan.

Plus, Raja Koduri mentioned that Infinity Fabric in Vega was not optimized for gaming, but for servers.
This would explain why compute performance in pro software is so high and yet gaming is at least 30% slower - indicating that not only Vega will improve with newer drivers, but also that if devs start optimizing for Vega, it will probably be competitive with Tesla (which is nowhere to be seen as far as gaming versions are concerned - and if this ends up the case, Nvidia could hurt themselves expecting that Vega won't be much of a contender - much like Intel apparently did with Ryzen).
It seems like a scalable architecture - if only they got it fully operational right out the door.

Also, that TDP as you already might know is not representative of Vega's power draw due to overvolting to improve yields.
We know that manufacturers tend to produce GPu's with better silicon quality, hence the lower stock voltages on non-reference cards.
Plus, AMD doesn't have auto-voltage tuning to help them further and uses a manuf. process more suitable for lower clock speeds.
Undervolting brings vega power consumption down by quite a bit... which actually means that when properly undervolted, in pro software, Vega will likely consume less power than 1080ti while consistently outperforming it - gaming however (as I said) is a matter of time.

I guess that Vega as it is now is primarily focused to get AMD into server space (AI, etc.) and get gaming just to the 'right' level to get them in the door for high end products.

But seriously... Vega 56 is a pretty good GPU when undervolted. It can close down on 1080 with lower power draw, while easily outperforming 1070 stock and overclocked under games right now.

Whether Raja's statement on optimizing Infinity Fabric for games comes to fruition or not has to be seen, but considering the hardware inside Vega, it remains largely untapped.
RTG needs to get all the features properly up and running asap and then devs can release patches for games to support those features.

 

It does not matter why the delays or issues. The delays exist and the issues exist as well. The consumers and industry were expecting a 1080 TI killer or at least competition with the touted compute numbers and got a dud for gaming we were promised the drivers were going to fix it and did not and then that power draw!

Since the delays were 2 years they have known about the power for that period as well. They needed all the Ryzen win announcements before they could toss out Vega 64 to the public without facing massive ridicule. Picture if two years ago Vega 64 came out with these issues and more of a supply one too without anything good on the horizon?

 

When did AMD state that Vega will be a 1080ti killer? Or could this have been a hyped up assumption from the internet?
Also, it is 1080ti and Titan killer as far as pro software is concerned.

Saying that its' a 'dud' for gaming is really not accurate and more sounds like an excuse for bashing.
If anything the 1070 and 1080 are 'duds' because Vega 56 can reach 1080 performance with a lower power draw than 1080 when undervolted and HBM overclocked (this on a manuf. process that's not suitable for high clocks).
Or, saying Vega is a dud would imply that 1070 and 1080 are duds as well - and I don't see people saying that (ah but yes, they wouldn't be seen as 'duds' since Nvidia managed to get them out what, a year ago?).

Also, why the glorification of Nvidia's gpu's?
Pascal is nothing more than a die shrink of Maxwell with access to a manuf. process suited for higher clock speeds that AMD doesn't have.
Seriously, comparing the gpu's on efficiency is not really fair or accurate, because you'd need to have both on the same manuf. process with voltages similar to one another to do that - if the manuf. process was the same, and voltages as low as they would go for specific clocks, Vega might actually surpass Pascal easily enough with a similar or lower power draw right out the door.
Ignoring all those things is I see very easy when people are quick to point to AMD's weaknesses - but completely forgo mentioning that despite its weakness, manual tweaking fixes efficiency and really improves performance (which you can't really do with Nvidia since their GPU's cannot undervolt without downclocking as well and also, overclocking them past certain point throws out power efficiency for them as well).

So AMD was late with release of Vega due to HBM delays. That's not AMD's issue, it's Hynix issue. They couldn't predict it, it happened. And Vega (much like Fiji) were designed to work with HBM (not GDDR5 or GDDR5x).
Just like AMD cannot control what manufacturers decide to charge for AMD GPU's and which OEM's decide to use/sell their hardware.

 

Reality says that GPUs are judged on stock performance as bought by the consumer, not on "tweaked to the max" by enthusiasts with time on their hands! Truth is that AMD are releasing GPUs to compete with NVidia over one year after introduction of said NVidia GPUs. Reality also shows said AMD GPUs gulping down obscene amounts of power in comparison to NVidia GPUs - reality says that the Vega launch is a bit of a disapointment! I do want AMD to do well, but we have to base ourselves in reality don't we. If they launched these GPUs a year ago, it would make sense, now is too late for these.

 

There are still people wanting / needing GPU's, and AMD is a nice alternative to Nvidia, plenty of sales for AMD to be made in the whole range of 1060 - 1080 alternatives for desktop gaming rigs.

Especially those that are building Ryzen and ThreadRipper builds, who wants to get Green in their Red build?

 

Yeah, still gonna be 'some' people that buy these GPUs, specifically FreeSync requirements and AMD fans, but for gamers without FreeSync requirement they could have or already have bought NVidia GPU with same or more performance over 1 year ago - and even if you're buying now without Freesync requirement the prices & power consumption (combined with performance as a whole) side with NVidia still. If they were able to launch 1 year ago the amount of sales would have been so much greater.

 

A year ago the AMD CPU's available were crap

If you wanted to build an AMD only desktop you woulda been out of luck.

Then the complaint would have been "where are the AMD CPU's??"

And, now, 1 year later when the AMD CPU's come out, everyone would be like "too bad AMD didn't come out with these Ryzen / Threadripper CPU's when AMD released the awesome Vega GPU's last year".

The Vega GPU's are so awesome now with all the driver updates over the last year, but man, "what if AMD released their Ryzen CPU's 1 year ago??"

 

It's not about 'tweaking to the max' specifically.
Undervolting is a no-brainer that AMD really should have done initially right out the door... but because they don't do auto-voltage tuning, they couldn't.
Nvidia's GPU's stock clocks run on much lower voltages (were optimized)... so, power efficiency comparisons aren't really fair because AMD is known to overvolt (which throws efficiency out the door).

As for Vega gpu's being too late... the fact that Vega is sold out practically everywhere plays contrary to that statement.
Also, you need to take into account there's much of the Vega architecture that's not being used in games by the developers to make a valid comparison at this time.
When Vega's architecture is properly utilized, then we can say whether it was too late to the party or not.
Otherwise, it can just as easily nullify Tesla (if/when it comes out)... nevermind what happens when Navi hits the spotlight.

AMD could simply be targeting different market segments as they can... and for some reason, they chose to prioritize servers when it comes to Vega - but much like Ryzen, it will need devs to optimize for the architecture.

 

I do agree that Vega will likely stand the test of time better than GTX 1080 for instance, but only by a small amount, not a significant amount, especially given that today they are behind the performance curve. Being sold out is due to miners & lack of supply too - selling to miners is no bad thing for AMD in the short term, but it does make their product irrelevant for gamers - that's 'ok' if miners are here to stay, but otherwise it hurts their relationship with gamers.

 

All during when they were touting the compute power they were comparing against all 1080 variants including the 1080TI. By including the numbers they are referring a comparison. Just because after the fact when they release it they say to not compare it, when they were, does not get them forgiven.

They said do not compare the FE for gaming as the drivers were not there and when those were released with the RX version things would be different. Really, well where? As far as for gaming the Vega 64 is a huge disappointment.

Edit; I should note, for $399 I would take a Vega 56 but I would not mind a middle of the road GPU at a decent price point that can run close to a GTX 1080.