AMD Vega Graphics Card Pictured at CES

During CES, AMD showed off their new Ryzen and Vega products. The big demo was DOOM running on Ultra settings and 4K using a combined Vega and Ryzen system. While we did see a Vega GPU held up to the public, no working Vega product was shown off. Fortunately for us, Linus from Linus Tech Tips was given the opportunity to view the new working GPU and show it with the rest of us.

With the major caveat that this is still an engineering sample, the card does give us quite a new tidbits of information. First up, the card is adequately cooled by air cooling solution without having to resort to any hybrid solution. This speaks to the TDP which if it is the rumors 225W should be more than controllable. Unfortunately, the power connectors are covered up so we can;t confirm the maximum power draw and TDP through that.

Moving on, it looks like AMD has already settled upon some kinds of reference cooler design. The cooler looks a lot more ready than what a mere engineering sample would get. Discounting the extra USB board for debugging and monitoring purposes, the card is about 9 inches long. Given what we know of HBM and Fiji, I expect most of the length is dictated by the cooler just as we saw with the Fury vs the Fury X/Nano.

With a pretty much almost complete hardware design ready for the market, I expect AMD is pretty close to finishing up Vega. The timeframe for a launch has been set for the first half of 2017 so hopefully, that will mean sooner rather than later.