AMD’s newest flagship graphics card, the Radeon VII, has finally hit the hands of reviewers amid a swarm of unboxing videos… Whoopie, everyone’s favorite… Early results show it keeping up with Nvidia’s 2-year old GTX 1080 Ti as well as being on par with their new RTX 2080.
However, no full-scale independent benchmarks have been released yet. None that I would consider reputable at the very least. Well, outside of a couple of Radeon VII leaks. Expect more benchmarks before the February 7th release date.
The Radeon VII is the world’s first consumer-grade 7nm graphics card. It’s a huge step forward in GPU tech and could completely revolutionalize the market. It’s packing an impressive 16GB of 4096-bit HBM2 VRAM that operates up to 1TB/s, a whopping 3840 Stream Processors, and support for AMD’s FreeSync 2 HDR tech.
Early teardowns show the Radeon VII to be using a sub-optimal graphite thermal solution in comparison to traditional TIM. Most day-1 reviewers have mentioned that they would be replacing it with their own choice of TIM, likely some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut or Arctic MX-4. Personally, I would opt for MX-4 because it’s cheaper and the performance difference is negligible.
If you want to see a full tear-down and first-hand opinions, definitely check out Gamers Nexus’ video:
Whether you should buy a Radeon VII over another card, like the RTX 2080, is a tough call. While it’s rumored to perform similarly to an RTX 2080 with RTX off, it’s also priced the same with an MSRP of $699. Personally, I would wait for benchmarks. Again, you can expect to see A LOT of reputable benchmarks dropping within the next 2 days.
The Radeon VII officially releases on February 7th, 2019. Once more info is available, we’ll be posting an update.
