Hi!
I've acquired a Sapphire Vega 56 PULSE from one of my friends who upgraded from it and didn't have any use for it. He had reported to me that it was really really loud and dropping frames, though I put it on the fact that it was really dusty and poorly REpasted(which turned out to be true as the guy he gave it to to repaste it did a really really sloppy job, as in half the GPU die next to the HBM modules had next to no paste. I think it's a miracle the card is alive, given the issues I'm about to describe and the fact that he never undervolted or tinkered with it).
Without anymore preamble:
Issue #1: The model of the card shown in various pieces of software, from the Adrenalin utility, to Task Manager, GPU-Z, Fan Control and so on is ASUS Radeon RX Vega.
The only pieces of software reporting correctly (so far) are AIDA64 and HWInfo. The reason this is annoying is because it seems to be locking me out of manually controlling the fan properly. Fan Control, for one defaults to looking for an Embedded ASUS EC, as it assumes the card is Asus and is presumably looking through the LibreHardwareMonitor library for the controls to pair with the card. Naturally it can't find any. I can't force FanControl to look for anything else. Using the ADLX plugin does net me a sensor and a control, but still under the ASUS label, which may or may not interfere with proper controlling of RPM.
The same behaviour from the AMD Adrenalin utility bleeds into Issue #2. The fan control is weird...to say the least.
At default behaviour, with Zero RPM ON the card does indeed keep its fans off up to 55 degrees or so and then spins them immediately up to ~1400RPM, as reported by HWInfo. Increasing the temps does increase this to about ~1600RPM, maybe 1700RPM but that's where it stops.
The card keeps climbing in temps though. At default voltages/clocks and with the power limit raised by 50%, the hotspot temp went as high as 96 degrees, while the GPU temp remained ~70-75 as it drew ~250W-260W as reported in the AMD utility.
I first decided to tinker with clocks/voltages and managed to drop the 7th Pstate to 1070mV(down from stock 1200) and keep the clock at ~1600MHz(in settings, as in reality it jumps MUCH higher, don't know or understand why. I've seen spike readings up to the 1900s even a 2000MHz. Mostly though, it stays around that 1600MHz mark). I dropped the rest of the states progressively and for the memory I managed to raise it to 950MHz with 1000mV on the voltage (which I understand isn't memory voltage but a core floor voltage and that 1V is where it should be at). It looks stable up till now, despite it being Hynix memory(which I understand is much more unstable than Samsung), reported through GPU-Z, though given that also reports the card as an ASUS, I don't know if that's properly reported or not.
Temps have come down significantly, hotspot is hovering around 80-85, GPU hovers in the 60s, depending on the load. Power draw hovers around 180W-220W. All these "tests" have been performed in ambient 24°-25°C, in a well ventilated Lian Li Lancool 216 case(all fan slots are populated, including 2 140mm fans BELOW the GPU blowing air towards it and RPM/curves are set in Fan Control)
With that sorted, I've turned my attention to the fans as I didn't like the sudden ramp up in RPM and the noise they make.
Unfortunately the behaviour is bewildering to say the least.
First off, the absolute minimum floor for the fans seems to be 29% or ~1350RPM which is audible...easily audible at idle if I choose the curve approach which doesn't work in tandem with 0 RPM. Then, at 100% they spin at 3300RPM, but when trying to ramp them down...they takes AGES to do so. Even weirder, if I set them to 100, then drop the manual curve back to auto+ZeroRPM, they first take ~3-4mins to come down to 1400RPM before shutting the fans off to Zero. This is happening in the Adrenalin utility and at complete idle (a.k.a. 26°C on the sensors)
For FanControl, using the ADLX plugin, due to the slow ramp down the fans can't calibrate properly. Doing it manually works though which reveals that the fans can go below 29% and still spin. The start threshold seems to be 10%-11% for the PWM signal. Yippe, I can use this to tune the fan right? WRONG, the FanControl curve overwrites EVERYTHING in the Adrenalin utility, including the voltage settings which sends the card back to 1.2V and the hotspot temps in the 95-100 range.
So I am stuck here, I don't want or need the fans to run at 1400RPM at idle...they can do lower but the Adrenalin utility won't allow me to set that.
And FanControl will overwrite the OC settings which will make the card a flaming hot potato.
This has been happening with BOTH the 24.3.1 normal driver and the 22.Q4 PRO driver which tells me this has been quite a long standing issue. I have seen a few topics on reddit regarding the naming issue but all they were full of was "yeah I have that too". No solution, nothing...so I guess I'll shoot my shot here.
Is there anything, perhaps a driver version, a setup workaround, anything that could make this card work properly?
Because, as far as performance is concerned, I am **bleep** impressed with it so far. Coming from an RX 580 and playing in 3440x1440, I got quite a sizeable chunk of FPS BOOST. The cynic in me is saying...just "leave it as is, if my friend ran it stock, presumably in a worse case and with temps likely in the 100°C range for the hotspot...and it hasn't died, it won't do so on me either.".
