AMD Radeon RX Vega needs a lot of power

MSI marketing director spills the beans

While it certainly does not come as a big surprise, unnamed MSI’s marketing director has revealed that the upcoming AMD Radeon RX Vega graphics card “need a damn lot of power”.

We have already seen the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition and the Radeon Instinct MI25, both based on the same Vega GPU, but targeting professional and deep learning markets, and both with high TDP requirement, ranging over between 300W for both the standard air-cooled Radeon Vega FE and the Radeon Instinct MI25, and 375W for the liquid-cooled Radeon Vega FE.

The comment from MSI marketing director, spotted at Tweakers forums and caught by Videocardz.com, stating that he has ” seen the specs of Vega RX. It needs a damn lot of power. We’re working on it, which is a start so launch is coming closer :)”, does not come as a big surprise.

This is in line with earlier rumors that AMD AIB partners will soon get to play with the custom design, but according to our sources, reference version of the RX Vega comes first, followed by custom versions at a later date, as it was the case with earlier launches of AMD flagship graphics cards. In case you somehow missed it, the Radeon RX Vega is expected to launch at Siggraph 2017 event on July 30th.

Some rumors suggest that Radeon RX Vega could end up between 250W and 300W, and need two 8-pin PCIe power connectors but also offer good “performance per watt”, at least compared to the competition.

The demand will probably be high, so supply issues are expected, especially if RX Vega is good in cryptocurrency mining.