Vega 56 Preliminary results - Flashed to 64 Bios and undervolted / overclocked
Hi everyone
With yesterday's release of Fortnite - Battle Royale mode (free) I gave it a go and quite enjoyed it. First game I've played in ages to be honest. I stuck the 4ghz overclock on my Ryzen 1700 and decided now would be as good a time as any to look into boosting up my Vega 56.
First step - since the card has dual bios, it's relatively risk free to install a Vega 64 bios on the card, which increases the HBM memory speed / vmax and also clocks the core higher. In my case it was stable but some may need to decrease core clock after flashing the bios (in software). Here are the instructions I used: (source)
1) Download ATI Win Flash (here)
2) Run it as admin, and backup current BIOS to a file
3) Download a 64 stock air bios from TPU (here)
4) Flash it and restart the PC
that's it!
-=-=-=-=-
Next, this morning, was the process to overclock / undervolt the core and HBM memory to get the best from the thermal and power envelope of the GPU. This is more complex but well worth it. Source.
You'll need
a) 3dMark Demo (here)
b) OverclockNTool (here)
c) HWInfo 64 (here)
d) Tomb Raider Dagger of Xian Game demo (here)
I'll let you use the Reddit guide for this as I'd just be typing it up again basically.
I chose my clocks and volts based on looking at some result via Reddit. A couple of people actually got their HBM up to 1100 but I wasn't able to get it above 1020 MHz without artifacts.
Here are my results before and after this process:
#before (VEGA 64 BIOS)
Timespy 6828
6605 / 8452
Firestrike 16880
20909 / 20562 / 6221
OVERCLOCK SETTINGS
1640 MHz core
1040 mv core
1020 mhz HBM
950 mv HBM
#after
Timespy 7160
6973 / 8451
Firestrike 17328
22238 / 20568 / 5995
Small improvements, but every little counts, and the bump in GPU Firestrike from 20909 to 22238 is not bad for free :) I didn't bench before flashing the BIOS so I did make a little more gain than this overall.
I hope this helps. I am a little worried they will check the BIOS if I need to do a warranty return but if the card is bricked, they probably won't care and will RMA me. If it's not bricked, hopefully I'll be able to flash my Vega 56 bios back before returning it.
Hope that helps :)
If you have a Vega 56 and have also gone through this process please post your final stable core and hbm speeds and voltages for comparison.