AMD Radeon VII Review

Up Close

We've often spoken about how much we dislike the blower style of cooler, and as you can see in the comparison between the Vega behind and the new Radeon VII, they've finally listened and installed a proper triple fan cooler onto their reference design. Long live the King.

Just because we now have three fans to keep the heatsink cool doesn't mean that AMD have lost the smooth clean lines of their Vega design. The Radeon VII looks very nice with a big hunk of oblong silver accented by the red Radeon logo on the side and a red R in the corner. It looks like it's been hewn from a single piece, which is always a good look in our books.

There is plenty of ventilation on the side edges, and you can also get a good look at the regular spacing of the heat sink fins. It's been a long time since we've been this impressed by a reference AMD GPU cooler. It promises much better cooling than the old Vega one and as we all know if you have better thermals then you can get higher boost clocks. No matter how good something looks, performance is the priority.

It might be a simple thing, but we're positive that the minimalist design of the Radeon VII cooler will win a lot of, ahem, fans. As more and more partner cards have creases and folds and angles it is nice to go back to a simpler design. After all, minimalist design is what turned Apple into one of the richest companies on Earth, so clearly we're not alone in liking this particular aesthetic.

At the business end of the card we have a 8+8pin PCIe power input to keep it fed with lots of lovely power.

Whilst outputs are a single HDMI and three DisplayPorts. Those with an old DVI-D monitor need not apply. Or buy an adaptor. But really, by now we should all be on modern high bandwidth connections for our display panels. You spend so much time looking at it it's a shame to not have a modern one.