Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed it is time to check out AMD's latest offering for gamers the Radeon seven that'll be clear this is a compute product that's been repurposed for gaming as well as content creation it's based on the Radeon instinct mi 50 now the Radeon 7 is essentially gimped Vega 20 silicon though it's not gimped in a way that's meaningful to gamers also what's not gimped is today's video sponsor hosting out if you have to fast web hosting at an affordable price then look no further as one of the industry leaders they offer a wide range of services with a focus on shared hosting cloud hosting and VPS hosting setting up and creating your own website with hosting it isn't costly or difficult thanks to their drag-and-drop website builder that makes it possible to get your website online in less than an hour with a professional team of experts online 24/7 hosting and manages to keep its support service a class above the rest but still remains incredibly affordable for a 15% discount please check the link in the video description right so getting back to the Radeon seven what's all this talk about it being gimped okay so for starters the double precision floating point on FP 64 as it's often referred to has been disabled reducing throughput from 6.7 teraflops down to just 1.7 teraflops but again this will have no impact on gaming performance AMD has also disabled PCIe 4.0 limiting the Radeon 7 - the more commonly used pcie 3.0 interface again for gaming this is really a non-issue now for those of you unaware AMD did announce the Radeon 7 GPU at CES just a month ago now and it wasn't exactly met with a lot of fanfare everyone was expecting AMD's new GPU architecture codenamed navi or at least that's what most were hoping for so a repurposed compute project wasn't exactly what everyone was clamoring up the walls for and certainly not at $700 us sure this is a new 7 nanometer gravity's car but unfortunately it's based on the GC and 5th generation architecture the same architecture used by Vega 56 and 64 and well let's be honest they weren't the most exciting products unless you found on sale for a hefty discount the move from Global Foundries 14 nanometer process to TSMC 7 nanometre FinFET process has allowed AMD to shrink the die size by 32 percent while also packing 6 percent more transistors now you could technically say that the Radeon seven should be called Vega 60 if you were to go off the previous Radeon rx Baker series naming though that would be confusing and silly as it will be quite a bit faster than Vega 64 still what we have here is 60 compute units for a total of 3840 stream processors so 6 percent fewer cores than Vegas 64 however the cores are clocked at least 13% higher and we have some serious memory upgrades and I'm not just talking about that insanely unnecessary at least for gaming 16 gigabyte VM capacity in addition to having as much memory as your entire system the radio and seven also gets a massive 4096 bit wide memory bus allowing for an insane 1 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth double that of Vegas 64 now AMD CEO Lisa sue has already stated that Radeon 7 performs competitively with NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 and as such will be available at the same $700 us asking price even so it's believed at this high price aimed he's not actually turning a profit on these so I guess we're not gonna see the monster hell anytime soon anyway that's probably enough chitchat for now let's get into the important stuff before delving into the benchmarks as usual our corsair GPU test rebuilt inside the crystal 570 X has been used and it comprises of a core I nine 900k clocked at five gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of vengence ddr4 30 Turner memory I've tested a dozen tiles at 1080p 1440p and 4k though for this video we're only going to focus on the 1440p numbers but you can get all the 1080p and 4k data via a link in the video description before we get into the benchmarks so we'll just like to note that while testing the Radeon 7 into numerous stability issues with the press drivers supplied by AMD as I pieced this video together on the day of the release I'm still we get to receive an update a driver from AMD so rather than test 30 plus games I'm sticking with a dozen titles that accurately represent how the radio and seven performs across a wide range of titles and then when we get an improved driver I'll go back and test two or three dozen games I'll talk more about the current issues I faced with the press driver but for now let's just get into the blue bar graphs first up we have for tonight and I have to say not a good start for the Radeon seven as it trails the r-tx 2080 by a massive 20% margin thankfully though this isn't the norm as you're about to see still we do have a good mix of games that I believe paints a pretty accurate picture of overall performance this is certainly a worse case though is the radio and GPU could only match the r-tx 2070 and it was just 22 percent faster than Vega 64 it's also a far cry from the now two-year-old GT X 1080 Ti it's a bit brutal to be honest but let's move on to some more promising results all right this looks much better the Radeon 7 / in battlefield 5 using the DirectX 11 API pumping out an impressive 122 fps on average the one percent low performance was a little lower than expected but we do see a similar thing with Vegas 64 and 56 when compared to Vegas 64 we do see a 31 percent boost to the average frame rate so that is quite nice here we have another title where Radeon 7 I mean 156 FPS on average and World of Tanks is ample performance but it also meant the new radio and GPU was 17% slower than the r-tx 2080 and only slightly faster than the RT x 2070 so a pretty poor result here over all that said Vega never really did that well in this title so the result isn't entirely surprising Vega 64 only just beat the gtx 1070 after all a title where the radeon gpus shred is strange Brigade though like battlefield 5 we do see slightly weaker than expected 1% low performance not terrible and there was no sign of stuttering but the 1% lows are still low relative to the GeForce GPUs still when comparing the average frame rate the Radeon 7 GP was 10% faster than the RT X 2080 at this point you might be starting to sense a bit of a trend you might be onto what I've done here basically I'm giving you some bad news followed by some good news just try to let you guys down gently as all you know I really do care that said it is time for some bad news monster hunter world sees the Radeon seven fall behind the r-tx 2080 here it was 16% slower and just 7% faster than the RT X 2070 so let's just move along well they would you look at that some good news for prospective buyers the 489 7's back on track four shut off the Tomb Raider though if you were expecting or at least hoping for an RT x 2080 killer then these results what exactly send tingles through your spine it's a few frames faster on average while a few frames down for the 1% low result so basically on par with an ITX twenty eighty and one of 2018 s best looking titles moving on we've seen in the past and in videos cheering architecture is well suited to Rainbow six siege and while the radeon gpus once enjoyed a strong performance advantage in this title that's really no more here Radeon 7 struggled to keep pace with the RT X 2080 and in fact was just a whisker ahead of the RT X 2017 far cry 5 is a well optimized tile and also happens to be sponsored by AMD though that isn't to say they have an unfair advantage here they really don't I'd actually say this is a fairly even playing field and as such the Radeon 7 and GeForce r-tx 2080 are basically neck-and-neck Forza horizon 4 is another well optimized title and while Vega gives the Pascal base GeForce 10 series GPUs and absolute pounding the new RT X models don't suffer the same weakness and we see that the RT X 2080 was just able to outpace the new Radeon 7 weather evil 2 is yet another well optimised toddle at scales very well across a wide range of hardware and here the RT X 2018 Radeon 7 very evenly matched along with the two-year-old GT X 1080 Ti another $700 GPU I have to admit I seriously want to drop ARMA 3 from the testing I've now put my foot down and deleted GTA 5 I'm done with it no matter how much noise you guys make it ain't coming back please don't make too much noise you know I'll end up caving anyway ARMA 3's days really have to be numbered at this point it's basically a dual-core CPU benchmark it's going to skew the results somewhat due to the CPU bottleneck but given some games our CPU limited it's not exactly an unrealistic test condition like some people would claim because as I said some games are CPU limited anyway moving on performance in hitman is pretty even between the gtx 980ti r-tx 2080 and vegas 7 but again this is another title that's somewhat CPU limited at 1440p so keep that in mind well that's all 12 games I think now it's time to check out some power consumption for use we all know AMD's at least a generation behind on video when it comes to efficiency and well Radeon 7 really does nothing to change that it was slightly slower than the GTX 1080 on average and here we see it consumes a whisker more power honestly that's pretty depressing given that we're comparing a two-year old product using tsmc 16 nanometer process to a brand new product using tsmc 7 nanometer process granted the GTX 1080 Ti is a purpose-built gaming graphics card but at the end of the day gamers really don't care about that they care about performance and how much that performance costs anyway pretty disappointing stuff here if I'm honest I mean the RT X 2080 is 65% larger packs roughly the same amount of transistors yet reduced total system consumption by 15% and for total system consumption that is a significant number moving on operating temperatures were also pretty disappointing actually the temperature alone is okay at least compared to that of the RT X 2080 found musician the issue is the fan speed required to allow these temperatures and I will get to that in a moment something else worth mentioning is that I replace the attached ehm 0-3 carbon fiber pad with Arctic's MX for thermal paste after tearing the card down in my unboxing video just a few days ago out of the box with an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees the radio and seven hits 74 degrees however when I went back and retested using the thermal paste that temperature under the same conditions dropped in to 69 degrees and the fan speed were unchanged so that's interesting not sure if that's normal as I can't actually go back and retest with the carbon fiber pad until I get my hands on another card but if others are seeing these same kinds of temperature drops then that is a shame and it means enthusiasts hoping to overclock will want to remove the carbon fiber pad and use a quality film or pay anyway wrapping up this section of the review I'll just say the radio and seven is bloody loud even when running at just shy of 70 degrees as soon as the card was placed under any kind of load the three fans spun up to a vacuum cleaner like 2900 rpm and it was at this point that I realized yeah this is an AMD reference card that makes sense I mean this card does look beautiful but boy oh boy is that hard on the ears and videos founders Edition graphics cards aren't exactly quiet either and that's why I recommend that you don't buy those and their fans spin at 2,000 rpm but even so they are significantly quieter than what we've got here with the radio and seven okay so we've seen how the radio and seven performs in a dozen titles we've taken a look at power consumption and we've also checked out thermals so it is time to start wrapping up our day 1 coverage starting with a few performance breakdowns before we do though please note I haven't tested with that many games for this review as I'm not really that confident with AMD's driver as I said earlier it's very unstable and I've confirmed the stability issues with other reviewers so I know this isn't an issue it's just limited to my test system I believe the performance that I've shown in this video is accurate but even so I would rather wait for a stable driver before investing a few days testing 30-something games okay so Amy's claimed with the Radeon 7 is on power of the RT X 28 II guess that statement is true enough and you could certainly very easily cherry-pick the games and settings to put them within a percent of one another anyway across a fairly random selection of games our Whitman sampler if you will the Radeon seven was on average four percent slower not too bad but it really only stood out in battlefield 5 and Strange Brigade performance was similar and shut off the Tomb Raider far cry 5 resident able to hit men two and a three then we start to see the Radeon 7 fall behind in Forza 4 and then well behind in Rainbow six siege Monster Hunter world World of Tanks and fortnight so given that the Radeon 7 comes with the same $700 US MSRP as the RT X 2080 and say this is a disappointing result moreover if you were disappointed that the GeForce r-tx 2080 was only slightly faster than the two-year-old gtx 980ti then you're no doubt disappointed the radio and seven is slightly slower also as we saw power consumption isn't improved in fact it's actually slightly worse so I'm not sure what more I can say at this point really so let's just move on to something that it can be yeah the RT X 2060 may be way cheaper but at least the radio and seven was 31 percent faster on average you just have to close your eyes ignore the fact that it costs 100 percent more and finally here we have some real hearty x-lite gains Vega 64 comes at a $500 u.s. MSRP making the Radeon 740 percent more expensive yet it was just 23% faster crap that's worse than r-tx like the only saving grace here is that AMD hasn't tried to sell us on a technology that won't deliver while effectively scamming customers with a 1 month long pre-order period and then having a good amount of them die in the hands of gamers so you know there's that got to look on the bright side guys seriously I'm not gonna try and sugarcoat it not that we ever do I guess I'm just over disappointing GPU releases that and I've spent a week dealing with random crashes and system resets while I try to benchmark this thing anyway here's the cost per frame data naturally given what we've just seen it is worst values in the r-tx 2080 and despite being faster than Vega 56 and 64 it's actually way worse value frankly I just turned down a few quality settings and enjoyed the almost 25% improvement in value with Omega 56 actually scrap that I'd probably just get nasty X 2060 given its slightly faster and slightly cheaper then I just happily grin as Radeon 7o nures tell me 6 gigabytes of vram isn't enough at this point you might be wondering where the overclocking performance is and unfortunately I don't have anything for you right now aim DS what man is basically broken at the moment none of the overclocking features seem to work and they just made my already unstable system even more unstable so this is something I will have to revisit laid up once it's fixed I know Tech Jesus Steve from gamers and XS was also having problems with overclocking and stability in general so if he's got a little less hair and he's radion seven review you'll know why us state was also very helpful to me as a MIDI wasn't confirming the stability issues I was seeing but with tech G's are suffering the exact same issues I knew it wasn't a problem on my end of course I did try multiple different test systems with numerous fresh installs of Windows but even so it's good to know another benchmark Stig saw the same issues there's also that massive sixteen gigabyte frame buffer an insane 1 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth which of course could be beneficial for content creators and other GPU accelerated applications but due to the stability issues I just talked about testing a dozen games was challenging enough so the application based benchmarks will have to wait I'm sure someone else has dug into that already though so you should be able to find something online another issue for the radio and seven will be availability the retailer's I've spoken to have all said availability is much worse than what they saw with the RT X 20 atti upon release so while I suspect the demand for this new radio and GPU will be very low production still might be even lower as such I'm not sure if or when we'll see custom AIB models amy has told me that AI bees are free to develop their own models but I suspect very few actually will we saw this with Vega there just wasn't enough volume and demand to warrant the investment from the board partners in the end radio and 7 looks to be nothing more than a stopgap to the now heavily delayed Navi it's a way for aim D to stick their hand up halfway and say hey guys we're still here don't forget us the only hope now though for ad on 7 really is that the production costs will come down over time over the coming months and we will start to see prices well I hope that we will start to see prices edge down towards $600 probably a big ask at this point I know but yeah at $600 it would be only slightly better value than Vega 64 and the RT X 2080 while it would still be worse in terms of cost per frame than the RT x 2070 so in summary the great graphics card depression continues and unless you're looking at spending less than $200 the options available really are that great in terms of value Amy also needs a miracle with Navi has a lot riding on that one but given what they've achieved with Verizon I strongly believe anything's possible at this point anyway that is going to do it for this one like if you want to see competition returned to the GPU market I'm just kidding like if you liked the video dislike it as far as if you disliked it and you can subscribe for more content also if you appreciate our honest opinion you can support us directly via patreon and receive a few cool perks there and yeah notice going to do it for this one I'm your host Steve thanks for watching I'll see you again next time you you