Gadgetory

well if you can't tell by now Radeon 7s wholly lifted no more the crappy unboxing things most people don't care about especially when it's a box you don't even yet we've got all the gooey details at least with our experience with Radeon 7 it Radeon 64 or something dear I apologize I just they change the name a little bit from this so no fake it 64 ad on 7 build from NZXT let's buyers customise their gaming experience based on their desired FPS goals in today's most popular game titles choose a game you want to play set a budget and build will recommend the best parts for your build want to get gaming faster then choose blitz mode in order before 11 a.m. Pacific time in your order will be built tested and shipped same day to learn more about NZXT tees build follow the link in the description below alright this was a heck of a rollercoaster of a review please do me a favor watch to the end and watch the other reviews typically reviewers will just watch there one or two favorite guys and if it's like what they expected like I okay cool and off they go but typically when you have an interesting experience it was called an interesting experience it's important to watch everyone else's videos to see if they're getting similar experiences and make your own opinions don't follow my opinion don't follow any one person's opinion make a collective objective opinion of your own on whether not the product is worth it but unfortunately our testing here didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped and I want to talk about that but we did get through our testing and obviously we tested our typical suite of games now we're adding to that slowly the problem is some of the games I really like testing like battlefield 5 and now Resident Evil 2 and doom and stuff like that don't have built-in benchmarks and I know a lot of you guys are like well synthetics are not real indicative of performance I understand that but what we need is a repeatable a versus B taste test when it comes to seeing the the differences between the cards you're not looking for necessarily a figure that says this is the FPS I'm getting its this is the FPS versus this and this and this in the same test that's the way you should be looking at these charts where there's enough reviews out there with enough games tested you can get a sampling of what to expect if you're looking for a specific performance number obviously it's gonna be better than the Vegas sixth for the question is how did it stack up versus the 2080 and there by default the because you know those two cards are like competing with each other even though they're two different generations as long as DL SS and the touring car the tents of course are doing nothing and the RT cords are doing nothing the 2080 and the 1080 TI are essentially the same thing in terms of performance so that's why we compared this to that and we threw the 64 in there so that you can see the generational improvement what that said watch the slides and then listen to the discussion because we have a lot to talk about okay so the Radeon seven is a few differences here in terms of the PCB but obviously the coolers different blower style cooler triple fan PCB wise we look at the back you'll notice that not only is the card a little bit taller it's the same length we don't have the dip switches anymore which would change the GPU tach the GPU tach has gone entirely also to this is a dual BIOS card which had a performance bios and a standard bios which basically changed I believe the fan curve and maybe a little bit extra GPU boost but they got rid of that again on the Radeon seven this card is $700 which makes it one of the most if not the most expensive single GPU AMD has ever made I believe the 295x2 might have been somewhere around that price point or maybe was like $9.99 but that was a dual GPU card and for its time was an absolute beast of a card rivaling even that the of the Titans II which was $3,000 at the time so that was that was that was like the last amazing card AMD made in my personal opinion and then they went away from that dual GPU design so in terms of our experience we're gonna talk about temperatures first because with the triple fan it's obvious that more power smaller process more focused heat means better cooling I'm not gonna tear it apart in this particular video because there is a like a graphite thermal pad in there I don't want to destroy I'm gonna do another video where we do temperature testing by replacing that pad with thermal paste to see if things change but the thermal pad is what they use you can actually see gamers Nexus did a video about that we have a massive copper heat plate that actually touches the entire die array and everything around it be RMS and all that giving you direct copper contact a much more improved design over the Vegas 64 the triple fans obviously exhaust air basically from all three sides not four because the rear is not open so yeah bottom top front the bottom unfortunately goes kind of down against the motherboard so this is kind of useless just like on the Nvidia card which kind of sucks because if you look at the top it's much more restrictive here versus the bottom because they had to get the giant Radeon in there as if you forgot who it was it could have made it smaller and a little bit less in-your-face and gotten more cooling but they opted for making sure you remember who made the card rather than how car cool the card stays speaking of cooling though there are you need to understand the way the temperatures are being reported a lot of people don't seem to understand the edge temp versus junction temperature so they renamed the hotspot temp on the 64 to junction temperature which is the same thing and then GPU temperature on this has changed Vega 64 is GPU temp was just that it was like was the GPU temp like you'd expect to hear on Nvidia cards and whatever it's like that's the temp of the core is that there's like 60 some odd temperature sensors in here now and what you're getting is edge temp versus Junction temperatures so Junction temperature is the hottest of all of those sensors it tells you whatever the hottest one is and on this in this card throttling starts at 110 see now a lot of you already are like oh my god I got me all over again for a hot litter that that's not the case here it's just that of the super concentrated dye of the seven enemy process with these 16 gigabytes of HBM to that stack there's a lot of focused heat in there so what you're able to see is the hottest of all of those different sensors which is no different than any sort of like your CPU die or VRMs or whatever that's normal that is a normal temperature we did see this get all the way up to about a hundred and fourteen see though at stock settings which we were really concerned about and I'll come back to that in a second the lower temperature is edge temp that is the coldest of the die so no longer are you getting any sort of a rolling average or any sort of like a just a singular number to look at you're getting a range you're getting the coldest and the hottest well what's your GPU really running at well pick any number in between and that's it so and it can't really tell you if it's running necessarily hotter or colder than Vega 64 because we don't really know like we don't have that that same volumetric metering of temperatures it's not done in the same way so I can't tell you but I can tell you we saw a 114 see with stock settings which then led me to immediately call AMD and be like guys I need to talk to somebody and see if this is normal because I was experiencing quite a few issues with this we had several games just completely lock up on us wildlands was one of them now remember we're a media drivers here these are drivers that are said to media probably not the driver that's gonna be released when it's retail ready it's kind of this weird limbo driver which kind of sucks because I mean performance as you know can change and make or break with a driver same thing with stability so we experienced number of issues black screen freezes complete restarts of the system when loading games in fact even complete restarts just sitting at the desk top which is extrude Woodson was extremely frustrating seeing the temps go to 114 and the fans not ramping up to the 90% to whatever they're supposed to was bad enough to make you get on the phone and being a good I need to know what's going on here my first first issue here was with the exception of the fans not ramping up as high as they should the black screen restarts the overclocking persisting in the driver even after clearing profiles causing crashing because if it was a crashed if it was a profile that was crashing even if you wiped it and got rid of it some of it was persisting and still causing crashes Steve probably will talk more about that he had a bigger experience with that than I did they knew about it they every problem I mentioned they were like we know we know we know we're working on it we're working on it which was really disappointing to me because it was like if you know about this why weren't you telling us why weren't we warned why weren't we given more time why didn't you delay because it's Chinese New Year the driver team apparently is working on testing new drivers to be more ready for retail and my problem with that is when you take a card like this and you give it to media and you go here you go that's our offering what do you think we have to go by the experiences that we're getting and unfortunately we caught some of those experiences but I was really concerned with the fact that they seemed to know about these issues we were talking about in fact one of the issues regarding the black screen restart was it was sort of disclosed to us that it's known with two major brands of motherboards on the market one being Asus which is what we're testing with right here so what I what I asked them was can I please get a test driver something to validate whether or not I've got some sort of a physical problem with the card here in terms of temperatures and the fan control versus the actual you know hardware that we could be experiencing so they were like let us send you a new card please and they sent me a new card fortunately FedEx is plane got delayed and broke and stuck in snow somewhere so that card did not make it in time they did however send me the the non validated non testing driver one that we did not do our tests with in terms of scores all of our scores are with the media driver but for sanity testing I wanted them to send me the driver that I could test that they were testing to see if my problems went away fortunately some of the problems we were experiencing like wildlands crashing that was fixed the fan curve acted normal again so that was resolved but unfortunately the black screen restart persisted so here's the bottom line regarding this this card when it performs as it should in games like hitman this card decimated Nvidia in hitman I mean hitman was an AMT title I believe but this card tells me what that engine in that game absolutely dominated the competition so it's one of those things where when it performed as it should like when it didn't have any sort of weird driver bugs or crashes or whatever in all resolutions it just scaled beautifully it ran well it wasn't overly noisy I mean it's not the quietest cooler the fans still have a bit of a chop to them if you look at the fan curve they're very aggressive like the actual fan pitch on there is very steep which means you're gonna have a very much more choppy sound to it but obviously in my personal opinion thermals take precedence over acoustics because I tend to game with hip bones and stuff anyway so I don't care we saw temperatures on the GPU - AGP I mean edge temp one sitting usually about 59 to 65 C but we saw a 30 C Delta between that and the junction temperature hitting 90s and in the mid 100's with the latest driver so we no longer saw the 114 that we were seeing 110 to 114 and 110 is where throttles by the way so we did see temperatures and and throttling kind of occur right around that range but for the most part it stayed just under 1800 megahertz which is the advertised boost on this which was actually pretty decent the 64 card would definitely throttle down lower cooler not good enough to kind of keep that where it needed to be the thing that sucks is the card performs beautifully when it performs when it's not dealing with any of these random lock ups or restarts or glitches on the screen whatever it may be the card performs exactly as it should a couple of tests that you saw in our slides were just there just anomaly is it's it's it's way behind in stuff like Metro at 1080p anyway and then it's it's closer at higher resolutions but we feel there's something in the driver that's causing it to not keep up with 1080 maybe we know AMD performs better in DX 12 in a lot of instances but unfortunately this particular card just obviously needs some maturity with the drivers which is why I wish they had waited I wished AMD had she had just had the the balls really to push this out a little bit and say we need a little more time it's more important to put out a product to maybe make people talk about it positively then put out one that feels rushed and if you want to compete in the space as we all are die early hoping you can bring some competition to Nvidia for the sake of pricing your $700 graphics card that you sent to media and say we're ready tell us what you think should definitely feel like it's ready to be scrutinized at the $700 price point I I think the card is going to do amazing things when the drivers are ready but as of right now while we're seeing all these glitches and the freezes and the black screen restarts like I said the temperatures did improve with the latest beta driver that they let us test with it just needs a little bit more if you guys can't if you if I feel like I'm suddenly over my words because I am I want this card to do well I want the card to be I want this to be the savior I want to see this card literally well like Kyle did in his little thumbnail right like I did yeah I want to see that I wanted to see Nvidia just feel a little bit pressured to do better but unfortunately this card until the drivers are resolved is not gonna do that it also does not crossfire this is where you guys sound off you guys can call me all the names you want he can see I hate him AMD whatever which is absolutely not the truth I wanted AMD to do well on this and they're going to do well later do me a favor please watch other people's videos see what they're saying because you're gonna probably find that there's a common thread here of a lot of the folks I've talked to you my problems are not one off my problems are more so the norm and Kyle told me he had a lot he didn't have most of the issues if hardly any of the issues I mentioned that makes him the one-off we all know Kyle's a little off anyway I got another card coming like I said FedEx delayed it so at least we can determine if the card that I was sent was faulty which doesn't change anything I said because I can only go by what they sent me and that's what we got alright guys thanks for watching try not to kill me in the comments I really want AMD to do well I really do is this this this driver didn't get it its driver I'm sure they're already clicking dislike the audience won't let us have fun if we have any fun in this video they'll assume that we're not taking aim be serious no serious no go go go okay well the I really want aim dd-do well I'm going to jump but they did it we did but did you know I had a thought and it's me