After what appears to be a very unusual false start, AMD has now formally launched their new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card. First…
After what appears to be a very unusual false start, AMD has now formally launched their new Radeon Vega Frontier Edition card. First announced back in mid-May, the unusual card, which AMD is all but going out of their way to dissuade their usual consumer base from buying, will be available today for $999. Meanwhile its liquid cooled counterpart, which was also announced at the time, will be available later on in Q3 for $1499.
Interestingly, both of these official prices are some $200-$300 below the prices first listed by SabrePC two weeks ago in the false start. To date AMD hasn’ t commented on what happened there, however it’s worth noting that SabrePC is as of press time still listing the cards for their previous prices, with both cards reporting as being in-stock.
Meanwhile AMD has also posted the final specifications for the card, confirming the 1600MHz peak clock. Sustained performance is a bit lower, with AMD publishing a “Typical clock” of 1382MHz. It’s worth noting that this is the first time AMD has used this term – they’ ve previously used the term “base clock”, which is generally treated as the minimum clockspeed a card under a full gaming workload should run at. AMD is typically very careful in their word choice (as any good Legal department would require) , so I’ m curious as to whether there’s any significance to this distinction. At first glance, “typical clock” sounds a lot like NVIDIA’s “boost clock”, which is to say that it will be interesting to see how often Vega FE can actually hit & hold its boost clock, and whether it falls below its typical clock at all.
Feeding the GPU is AMD’s previously announced dual stack HBM2 configuration, which is now confirmed to be a pair of 8 layer, 8GB “8-Hi” stacks. AMD has the Vega FE’s memory clocked at just under 1.9Gbps, which gives the card a total memory bandwidth of 483GB/sec. And for anyone paying close attention to AMD’s naming scheme here, they are officially calling this “HBC” memory – a callback to Vega’s High Bandwidth Cache design.
As for power consumption, AMD lists the card’s typical board power as “
