MSI Radeon VII 16G 7nm AMD Vega 20 Graphics Card Gets Official
Update 2/72019, 9:28AM: Our full Radeon VII review with copious benchmark data is now live, if you'd like details on how this MSI card should perform.
In just one more day, AMD's recently announced Radeon VII graphics card will be available to purchase. That's also when reviews will hit the web (ours included). In the meantime, several of AMD's hardware partners have erected Radeon VII product pages on their websites, including both MSI and Gigabyte.
In just one more day, AMD's recently announced Radeon VII graphics card will be available to purchase. That's also when reviews will hit the web (ours included). In the meantime, several of AMD's hardware partners have erected Radeon VII product pages on their websites, including both MSI and Gigabyte.
The Radeon VII is an interesting product for the fact that it's the first consumer gaming card to feature a GPU built on a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, and specifically Vega 20. It's not actually the first 7nm GPU product, as AMD kicked off the 7nm graphics era with its Radeon Instinct MI60, but that's a professional accelerator for high performance computing (HPC) and deep learning applications.
In contrast, the Radeon VII is built for gaming, with AMD claiming it offers performance comparable to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 in rasterized games (based on the internal benchmarks it shared). However, it might also find a home in some workstation PCs because of the generous amount of memory—16GB of 2.0 Gbps HBM2, on a 4,096-bit bus.
The Vega 20 GPU inside the Radeon VII sports 60 compute units and purportedly offers a 25 percent uplift in performance compared to the Radeon Vega 64 at the same power level, according to AMD. Reference base and boost clocks have been set at 1,400MHz and 1,750MHz, respectively.
For the time being, it looks like AMD's hardware partners will be sticking with those clocks. Either that, or they're waiting for tomorrow's launch to unveil custom models with factory overclocks and spiffier coolers.
As it stands, Radeon VII product pages at ASRock (Phantom Gaming X Radeon VII 16G), Gigabyte (GV-RVEGA20-16GD-B), and MSI all list reference speeds and show AMD's reference three-fan cooling solution. We'll have to wait and see if custom models emerge.
In the meantime, check out our unboxing video of the Radeon VII, and stay tuned for a full review with benchmarks and analysis!
