Among all the rumors and information leaks that's taken place for the past few weeks, AMD will finally start shipping their next generation graphic cards at the end of June, the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition. This is a AMD's highest-end GPU with impressive specs to show for it. The graphics card will come in two variants, an air cooled model which will retail for $999, and a liquid cooled model retailing for $1499.
The component specification of the Vega Frontier Edition graphics cards goes as follows: the card itself will come with 4096 stream processing, clock speed exceeding well beyond 1550MHz delivering 13 TFOLPs of FP32 and 25 TFLOPs of FP16 compute performance. There will be a total of 16GB of HBM2 VRAM coming in stacks of 8GB. Total bandwidth is rated at 480 GB/s, lower than AMD's Fiji graphic card which has 512 GB's total bandwidth. The graphic card will also feature a 90 GPixels/s rate.
Both graphics cards will display different color schemes and cooling features. The air cooled variant is colored in a nice blue industrial texture with the illuminated "R" emblem situated right on the far corner. The label and logo on the graphics card which is the "Radeon" is place on both the front and side. the entire backplate is also covered with the same blue texture. Moving away from the color scheme, this particular card is air cooled featuring a dual 8-pin connector configuration with a 300W TDP. In describing the cooling setup in detail, its cooled by a single blower fan which pushes air out of the I/O side exhaust vents.
The second graphics card have a brushed golden texture with the logo placement being the same as the other graphic card sporting blue LED lighting. Overall design is identical, but different is the cooling setup featuring liquid cooling that displays tubing extended right from the frontal portion of the graphics card. Now liquid cooling is needed with this particular model mainly because it have a much higher TDP wattage at 375. With this card being liquid cooled, increased speed is certainly expected.
Big question is can the Vega Frontier graphics card be used for gaming? Technically yes. Though AMD intended consumer target is the workstation driven content creator, the data scientist and CGI animators, AMD is offering dual-mode drivers, allowing user's to easily switch from complex software to video game acceleration. I'm betting you'll have many hardware enthusiasts put this card through a battery of tests and see if indeed it can handle some the most graphically intensive gaming titles around.
At present, the Vega Frontier Edition is now available for pre-order, market release is expected to take place late July.
Credit: credit video PC World