Graphics Card Makers Rolling Out Radeon RX Vega 56 Graphics Cards

Now that AMD has officially launched the Radeon RX Vega 56, it should come as no surprise that add-in board makers around the globe are releasing cards based on this new GPU. If you haven’t done so already, we highly recommend reading our Radeon RX Vega 56 review for a complete rundown on features, specifications, and performance.

First of all, let’s talk about what these cards from Asus, XFX, Sapphire, and Gigabyte have in common. All Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics cards feature the Vega 10 GPU, which is manufactured using a 14nm FinFET LPP process and is made up of close to 12.5 billion transistors. It’s equipped with four Asynchronous Compute units, four next-gen Geometry units, 56 next-gen compute units, and 3,584 stream processors. This GPU also sports 224 texture units and 4MB of L2 cache, and it employs 8GB of HBM2 memory.

All the Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics cards mentioned here have a core clock speed of 1,156MHz and a boost clock speed of 1,471MHz. It should go without saying that we will no doubt see overclocked versions of this graphics card from various vendors in the future.

Radeon RX Vega 56 series cards also support bridgeless CrossFire for when you want to use  more than one GPU simultaneously. They support AMD FreeSync Technology that eliminates image tears and choppiness, as well as AMD Eyefinity for a panoramic multi-screen gaming experience on up to four monitors.

The RX Vega 56 cards from Sapphire, XFX, and Gigabyte are reference cards equipped with a rear exhaust design utilizing a rear-blower fan mated to a red and black plastic fan shroud. The heatsink features a large direct contact copper vapor chamber with aluminum fins bonded to the surface that absorb the heat energy and are in turn cooled by the blower-style fan.

Asus has distinguished its RX Vega 56 by offering a non-reference design cooler. This card features a large custom-designed heatpipe heatsink that, according to the company, provides 40% more surface area compared to its previous dual-slot design. Asus also included three of its patented “wing-blade” fans and RGB lighting features to boot.  

As of this writing, availability and pricing are not available. Depending on demand and availability, we would assume that most of the reference design cards listed above will have an MSRP close to the $400. Graphics cards with custom cooling solutions will no doubt command a higher price. It’s too early to tell what kind of effect Ethereum mining will have on pricing and availability.   

We reached out to each of the companies listed above for more details.