ASRock Radeon VII Phantom Gaming 7nm Vega 20 Graphics Card Revealed

Earlier this month at CES, AMD CEO Lisa Su unveiled its first consumer graphics card -- the Radeon VII -- built on the company's new 7nm manufacturing process. Now, we're getting a look at one of the first third-party cards based on the new GPU that will be arriving for gamers, and it comes from ASRock.

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As you can see, the ASRock Radeon VII Phantom Gaming is strictly a reference design card and about the only real change that we can see versus the AMD-branded card are ASRock/Phantom Gaming stickers on the center of the triple fans. At this point, we don't know if all third-party cards that will see the light of day will all be reference designs, or if there will be freedom to explore more customized designs.

With that being said, we can expect the Radeon VII Phantom Gaming to include two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPort connections. And based on the reference design that was unveiled in Las Vegas, the card features 16GB of HBM2 memory (4,096-bit bus, 1TB/s of theoretical bandwidth), a base clock of 1.45GHz and a boost clock of 1.8GHz. The GPU itself has 60 compute units and 3,840 stream processors.

At its unveil, AMD said that the Radeon VII offers a 25 percent uplift in performance versus the preceding Radeon Vega 64 at the same power levels. The company later released benchmarks of two dozen games showing a roughly 29 percent performance advantage for the Radeon VII. The Radeon VII is also said to offer comparable performance to the GeForce RTX 2080, albeit without dedicated hardware for real-time ray tracing.

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AMD's reference Radeon VII

Needless to say, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hasn't been impressed with what he's seen so far of the Radeon VII. "The performance is lousy and there's nothing new," said Huang said in reference to the Radeon VII. "No ray tracing, no AI. It's 7 nanometers with HBM memory that barely keeps up with a 2080. And if we turn on DLSS we'll crush it. And if we turn on ray tracing we'll crush it." 

AMD's reference Radeon VII will launch on February 7th with a $699 price tag.