Intro

The PowerColor Red Devil Vega 56 review vs. the GTX 1070 Ti

The Red Devil RX Vega 56 arrived last week at BTR for evaluation from PowerColor and we have been benching it versus the Gigabyte RX Vega Liquid Cooled edition and versus the stock GTX 1070 Ti video card using 35 games. Although the Red Devil RX Vega 56 is an aftermarket RX Vega 56 with the same speeds as the reference card, the card has drastically altered its form into a large open-design triple-fan, 3-slot card.

AMD released its Vega architecture in August, 2017 as the blower-style reference versions of the RX Vega 56 and Vega 64. We saw that even though they launched on immature drivers and with power issues, Vega was able to compete in performance with the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080. In early 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 56 with the Liquid Edition of the RX Vega 64.

The Red Devil RX Vega 56 vs. the reference RX Vega 56 and vs. Vega 64 LC

If you need a refresher on Vega 64 and 56 architecture, check out our first showdown between the GTX 1080 and the RX Vega 64 Liquid Cooled Edition or our introduction to Vega. The PowerColor Vega 56 is cut down having 56 compute units compared with the Vega 64’s 64 compute units. The memory clocks of the reference RX Vega 56 and the PowerColor Red Devil Vega 56 are both set at 800 MHz, while all of the Vega 64 editions’ memory are clocked to 945 MHz which brings a significant boost to performance.

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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 56 is clocked to the same boost as the reference Vega 56 at 1471 MHz. The big advantage of the PowerColor RX Vega 56 over the reference version is that the superior cooling of the Red Devil should maintain a steady clock without throttling.

The PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 uses the same two 8-pin PCIe power connectors as the reference RX Vega 56. However, we saw the original reference RX Vega 56 get into trouble with its power delivery as being insufficient for overclocking vs. the GTX 1070 Ti. We also needed to increase the reference RX Vega’s fan speed to 100% to maintain its overclock. The Red Devil Vega 56 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 56 is the GTX 1070 Ti and we are going to use the Founders Edition at stock clocks to compare its performance with the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56. The GTX 1070 Ti has been released at $449.99. Although the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56 is listed on PowerColor’s website, there is still no official mention of clock speeds nor is there a price yet set.

UPDATE: We have received word from PowerColor that the Red Devil RX Vega 56 has been priced at $599 and the 64 edition at $699.

Let’s take a closer look and unbox the PowerColor Red Devil RX Vega 56.