Intro

The PowerColor Red Devil Vega 64 review

The Red Devil RX Vega 64 arrived last week on loan from Tech of Tomorrow, and we have been benching it versus the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled edition using 30 games. The Red Devil RX Vega 64 is now a large open-design triple-fan, 3-slot card that looks very similar to the Red Devil RX Vega 56.

AMD launched the reference versions of the RX Vega 56 and Vega 64 last August. Even though Vega launched on immature drivers and with power issues, Vega was able to compete in performance with the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. In November, NVIDIA released the GTX 1070 Ti to compete with the RX Vega 56 aftermarket versions and we are now going to compare their performance as well as compare the Red Devil Vega 64 with the Liquid Edition of the RX Vega 64.

The Red Devil RX Vega 64 vs. the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition & vs. the RX Vega 56

To review Vega 64 and 56 architecture, check out our original showdown between the GTX 1080 and the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition and our introduction to Vega. The memory clocks of the RX Vega 56es including the PowerColor Red Devil Vega 56 are clocked at 800 MHz, while all of the Vega 64 editions’ memory clocks are set to 945 MHz which brings significant boosts to performance. The Vega 56 has 56 compute units compared with the Vega 64’s 64 compute units.

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The Liquid edition of the RX Vega 64 is significantly faster than the reference version, not only because it does not throttle, but because the liquid edition boosts to 1677 MHz while the reference edition is clocked to 1546 MHz. The PowerColor RX Vega 64 is clocked to 1607 MHz which means it will be significantly faster than the reference version and only slightly slower than the liquid cooled edition. The primary advantage of the PowerColor RX Vega 64 over the reference version is that the superior cooling of the Red Devil should maintain a steady clock without throttling just as the premium Liquid Cooled edition of the RX Vega 64 rarely throttles.

The PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 64 uses the same two 8-pin PCIe power connectors as the reference RX Vega 64. However, we saw our original reference RX Vega 56 and 64 get into trouble with their power delivery as being insufficient for overclocking vs. the GTX 1070 Ti or versus the GTX 1080. We also needed to increase both of the reference RX Vega’s fan speed to 100% in an attempt to attempt to maintain their overclocks. In contrast, the Red Devil Vega 64 features a 12 phase power delivery and a huge heatsink and 3 fans with 3 BIOSes for the ultimate in stable power delivery and air cooling for enthusiasts.

The primary competitor of the RX Vega 64 is the GTX 1080 which can be found for $549 when it is in stock at NVIDIA’s store and currently it is at Best Buy for $559. We didn’t include the GTX 1080 results this time as the Adrenalin drivers for Vega are in terrible shape. The performance is lower generally than with the November drivers and they are quite unstable. We are waiting for new stable drivers from AMD before we revisit RX Vega 64 versus GTX 1080 performance.

The PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 64 is listed on PowerColor’s website and is priced at $699 but are available only in very limited quantities that sell out instantly. The RX Vegas are quite popular for memory bandwith intensive crypto-currency mining, and the miners are evidently willing to pay a high price well above MSRP, and even RX Vega reference versions often sell for $699 or more.

Let’s take a closer look at the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 64.