AMD Radeon VII Review: Seventh Son or Seventh Sin?

Item: AMD Radeon VII Review: Seventh Son or Seventh Sin?
Author: Matthew Lambert

Written by Matthew Lambert

February 7, 2019 | 14:00

Tags: #7nm #gcn #gpu #graphics-card #graphics-core-next #radeon-vii #vega #vega-10 #vega-20

Companies: #amd

Overclocking

Usually, this is the section that gets us all excited here at bit-tech. After all, who doesn’t like extracting maximum performance from their hardware? Sadly for Radeon VII, though, we simply couldn’t get anything to work reliably here, so we’ve nothing to report.

Since our favourite tool for the job, MSI Afterburner, doesn’t yet support the card (fair enough), we headed into Radeon WattMan. Starting with a 20 percent power limit increase and a 100MHz core clock increase, we began a benchmark and started logging performance, but nothing changed. Clock speeds, power consumption, fans, performance – everything was roughly the same as before. AMD has since admitted that there’s a bug with settings not sticking, so we had to admit defeat – it wasn’t fixed in time for the review.

AMD did suggest an overclock to us, quoted exactly below:

‘GPU: Undervolting values of ~0.95-1.0V (with increase max power 20-50%) and a frequency increase ~80Mhz (3-5%)’

This suggests that perhaps even AMD isn’t expecting to see much more than a 3-5 percent performance increase, but we’ll have to wait and see until overclocks can be applied manually with more reliability.

We had a modicum of luck with the auto-overclocking functionality in WattMan. After applying this, we ran a benchmark and noticed the fans ramping up as well as a minor 20-30MHz boost to clock speeds, but again we want to hold off reporting any results until we’re more certain things are working properly. The auto memory overclocking, meanwhile, resulted in a crash rather quickly.