Sapphire Reportedly Developing Radeon RX Vega Nano Graphics Card
In another four months, it will be a full year since AMD launched its first Radeon RX Vega graphics cards to consumers. Thanks to a combination of cryptocurrency miners ravaging the GPU market and a memory chip shortage, graphics cards have been tough to come by. Hopefully that will change soon. Despite the unusual landscape, manufacturers have not been shy about releasing new models. ASRock, for example, recently announced a line of Radeon cards for gamers. It also appears that Sapphire is getting ready to introduce a pint sized version of Vega.
With regards to the latter, this was actually teased last year at SIGGRAPH 2017. At the time, AMD's senior director of global marketing PR, Chris Hook, excitedly displayed a Radeon RX Vega Nano card with a single cooling fan. After the brief appearance, he slipped out of view with the card in hand, and we haven't really heard much about it ever since. That is, until now.
Over at Reddit, a user posted an image of a naked Radeon RX Vega built by Sapphire, a longtime partner of AMD. With the heastink and cooling assembly stripped away, we get a pretty clear view of the GPU nestled into the comparatively tiny printed circuit board (PCB). According to the post, what you see above is the PCB that Sapphire is using for its Radeon RX Vega 56 Pulse graphics card.
According to the forum member, the PCB is exactly the same as the Radeon RX Vega Nano that AMD was showing at SIGGRAPH. While we obviously can't confirm that ourselves, it makes sense, given Sapphire's relationship with AMD as a reference board maker over the years.
"Guess AMD could never fit Vega in the thermal envelope of a Nano-sized PCB, so gave all their Nano PCBs to Sapphire?," jstefanop1 surmises.
He also claims he was successfully able to flash a Sapphire Nitro 64 BIOS on the Nano card and get it to work, with higher HBM voltage and HBM clockspeeds, up to 1,200MHz. That's not too shabby for a Radeon RX Vega 56 card. Whatever the case might be, it shows that Sapphire has the design chops to build a Nano card around Vega. Whether this product sees the light of day is another question.
With regards to the latter, this was actually teased last year at SIGGRAPH 2017. At the time, AMD's senior director of global marketing PR, Chris Hook, excitedly displayed a Radeon RX Vega Nano card with a single cooling fan. After the brief appearance, he slipped out of view with the card in hand, and we haven't really heard much about it ever since. That is, until now.
Over at Reddit, a user posted an image of a naked Radeon RX Vega built by Sapphire, a longtime partner of AMD. With the heastink and cooling assembly stripped away, we get a pretty clear view of the GPU nestled into the comparatively tiny printed circuit board (PCB). According to the post, what you see above is the PCB that Sapphire is using for its Radeon RX Vega 56 Pulse graphics card.
According to the forum member, the PCB is exactly the same as the Radeon RX Vega Nano that AMD was showing at SIGGRAPH. While we obviously can't confirm that ourselves, it makes sense, given Sapphire's relationship with AMD as a reference board maker over the years.
"Guess AMD could never fit Vega in the thermal envelope of a Nano-sized PCB, so gave all their Nano PCBs to Sapphire?," jstefanop1 surmises.
He also claims he was successfully able to flash a Sapphire Nitro 64 BIOS on the Nano card and get it to work, with higher HBM voltage and HBM clockspeeds, up to 1,200MHz. That's not too shabby for a Radeon RX Vega 56 card. Whatever the case might be, it shows that Sapphire has the design chops to build a Nano card around Vega. Whether this product sees the light of day is another question.
