AMD Radeon RX Vega Uses a “Damn Lot of Power”

Over the past couple of months, AMD has slowly released some of their Vega products in dribs and drabs. Most of the cards have targeted enterprise or professional users. As expected, these cards tend to clock a bit lower to ensure 100% reliability and performance consistency. However, according to the latest reports, Vega will require a lot of power to run at maximum performance.

As we’ve known for quite a while, AMD’s Vega architecture is the successor to GCN 4 (Polaris). With the new architecture, AMD has made a large number of improvements on paper to boost performance. At the same time, the use of HBM2, 14nm and various power saving improvements should improve efficiency. Despite this, it looks like the significantly higher clock speeds will mean a large power demand.

Full Vega 10 Is a Power Hog

According to an MSI representative, Radeon RX Vega GPUs will require a “Damn Lot of Power”. Furthermore, the incredible power demands are part of the reason why the launch is taking a while. This is especially true of the consumer side of things where we have yet to see a card.

So far, we already have the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition which also sucks a lot of power as a semi-professional card. This card is confirmed by AMD to typically draw less than 300W of power. Capping the card of at 300Ww makes sense as you can provide all the power you need using 2x 8pin PCIe power connectors.

Given this information, we can expect the consumer version to draw even more power. Some reports have pegged the RX Vega to clock about 200 MHz higher than the Frontier Edition. Throwing in the 75W from the PCIe slot along with 2x 8 pin PCIe plugs, this gives us a max power draw of 375W. However, one possibility is that this might not be enough power to fully unleash Vega, leading to the delays. It will be interesting to see what solutions AMD and their partners come up with.