EK showcases the benefits of watercooling AMD’s RX Vega GPUs

  

 

What EK has found is that simply water cooling AMD’s RX Vega 64 GPU can offer a 9% performance increase in 3DMARK, owing thanks to factors like lower thermals and the fact that power is moved away from the GPU’s cooling solutions (fans) and into the GPU itself. Beyond that, power consumption also drops, owing to the fact that the GPU no longer needs to power and fans.  

EK recommends three things in order to get the best performance out of AMD’s RX Vega 64 when water cooling, first to undervolt the GPU as much as you can while maintaining stability, second to increase the GPU’s power limit to +50% and then overclocking the GPU’s HBM2 memory. 

When using their water cooled RX Vega 64 with an undervolt of 1.05V (default 1.2V) and an increased power limit of +50% EK was able to achieve a 17% performance increase with only a 5.6% increase in GPU power consumption. This was without an HBM2 memory overclock, though the performance benefit is clear to see.  

  
  

 

This leaves us very interested in seeing more RX Vega GPU designs, especially custom board designs from 3rd parties like ASUS, MSI, XFX, Gigabyte and Sapphire. How much will they be able to improve the performance of AMD’s RX Vega series GPUs with their own custom power delivery and cooler designs? 

  

You can join the discussion on EK’s RX Vega 64 overclocking/water cooling tests on the OC3D Forums.