This summer, AMD’s Vega graphics cards will celebrate their fifth birthday. Always standing in the shadow of Nvidia’s Pascal cards, the power-hungry cards were never really popular with gamers. Currently, the small models with 56 shader clusters change hands for just over 100€ on the second-hand market. Without further ado, we organized such a model, optimized it, “hacked” the drivers, and wanted to find out if it might be possible to get a bargain here. Can you? Jain…
I have already written a few articles about AMD’s Vega graphics cards in the past, and I have outed myself as a fan of these bizarre graphics cards several times. Without a doubt, these cards were incredibly thirsty and somehow they never really got their performance “on the road” either. Today, we know that the cards have aged relatively well and have the corresponding counterparts from Team Green (Vega 64 vs. GTX 1080 | Vega 56 vs. GTX 1070) safely under control. To be fair, however, it has to be said that the cards were catastrophically configured out of the box and only offered solid performance with acceptable power consumption after days or weeks of optimization. The keyword is “undervolting” and I will come back to this in the course of the article.
Initial situation
The whole adventure started with an inventory of the used market. When looking for a usable graphics card for my junior’s first computer, I was on the lookout for cards of the GTX 1070 caliber, i.e. roughly in the performance class of the RTX 3050, for which cheeky prices of 300€ and more are currently still being called. It didn’t take long until Vega 56 cards with cooler conversions (Morpheus “Ghetto Mod” or water blocks) crossed my way, partly at prices below 100€. Because I was able to secure a GTX 1080 with the urgently needed DVI port for the junior in my circle of acquaintances, I had not pursued the matter further. However, the Vega 56 at 100€ is not out of my mind. I had so much fun tweaking and optimizing my Vega 64 back then that I only sold it with a heavy heart and because of the insane prices during the mining boom. But let’s cut it short at this point. A week later, I held this bolide in my hands:
Sapphire’s Vega 56 Pulse was one of the more “reasonable” Vega cards. The power consumption out of the box was within limits and the well thought-out cooling system with the cooler protruding over the very short custom PCB worked excellently. Of course, after all these years, the little card was crying out for some love.
Cleaning and new thermal paste
But considering that the card has never been cleaned, let alone opened, the soiling was actually within limits. The cooling fins should still have done their job without any major restrictions.
However, what might not have worked optimally anymore is the completely dried out thermal paste on the almost 500mm² GPU.
I carefully cleaned the fortunately “molted” package and applied new thermal paste. The radiator was freed from the dust with an air-duster and then cleaned with a brush and a damp cloth.
What came to light was this beautifully shaped piece of silizum
When applying the thermal paste and mounting the cooler, I advise every Vega owner to follow these instructions from Igor, which had always worked well for me so far. I will show temperatures later. And this is what a happy Sapphire RX Vega 56 Pulse looks like – with fresh snake oil and a clean cooler.
