Card Layout and Photos

So at the end of the day, the main thing you get is the Vega 64 Liquid Cooled and here it is in all of its glory. This model only comes in the special edition design because this is AMD’s flagship card. What that means is the card itself has the metal shroud with a silver finish where the regular Vega cards have a black plastic shroud similar to the RX480 and RX580 reference cooler designs. Of course being the liquid cooled edition also means in addition to the card itself you have the whole water cooling assembly sticking out of the top with the 120mm radiator. Initial impressions were mostly with just how big the whole setup is all together. But I’m really loving the Special Edition fan shroud as well. The silver finish is going to be very polarizing though, most builds use black as a base color and this doesn’t really go with that. But a build featuring this on the MSI motherboard I reviewed at the Ryzen launch with its silver finish would really stand out.

So with this being water cooled the shroud unique in that it doesn’t have a big intake fan on the side. With that, the overall look of this card is extremely clean. If you are able to feature the card with this side out in a vertical mount configuration it is going to look good. You have a brushed aluminum finish with just the Vega V logo in red and the Radeon R up in the top right corner.

Up around the top edge, you can see that the aluminum shroud has a nice machined edge then up on top they have the full Radeon brand name up on top. The logo is in red and is backlit. Really if you think about it, the color, all metal shroud design, and the backlit logo are a lot like the reference or now “founders edition” Nvidia cards. I wouldn’t consider that a bad thing as I do really like the overall quality and look of both this card and what Nvidia has done. This is a step in the right direction for AMD.

Also up on the top of the Vega 64 are the power connectors. They face up and because there isn’t a big heatsink to work around the locking tabs for the power connectors face out the correct way. With this card calling for 345 watts of power usage, AMD went all out and packed in two 8-pin PCI power connectors to feed the beast. Right under the power connections they also slipped in a really unique feature. There is a line of surface mounted LEDs that they are using for that they call the GPU Tach. Similar to a tach in your car, this shows how hard the video card is working by increasing the number of LEDs lit up as it goes under load. The small dip switches down in the bottom right corner also go with this. The one on the left lets you switch between red and blue lighting to better match your build and on the right you can turn the tach off altogether if needed.

Also tucked in up around the top next to the two water cooling lines is a small dip switch. This gives you the choice between two BIOS profiles, one with a slightly lower power profile.

With the top completely enclosed I took a look at the end of the card as well as the bottom to see if AMD was relying on any other ventilation for the Vega 64 LQ but nope, all of the edges are completely enclosed. The end of the card has four pre-tapped screw holes for use in servers and if you have a case with a mountable support bracket but there aren’t any other holes. This means the water cooling system is handling all of the cooling. That isn’t a huge surprise given that the memory is also on the GPU die, but a lot of the water cooled cards still use some air cooling. I love the red cube in the corner btw, it looks great. Depending on what side you look at it the R faces different directions.

Around on the back AMD also included a matching backplate with the same color and brushed aluminum finish as the special edition shroud. It has the same Vega V logo on it only it is a little smaller. The back of the GPU has a cutout in the shape of the bracket so the backplate can fit tight up against the PCB and the center is open along with cuts all around it for ventilation. Backplates help prevent GPU sag, give a cleaner look, and help prevent damage to the PCB itself when being handled but they typically don’t help cooling. In most cases, they will trap heat in without that ventilation.

On the end of the Vega 64, much like Nvidia did with the 1080 Ti, AMD dropped the DVI connection altogether and kept things simple with three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. I don’t mind this too much but I do wish they would include the DisplayPort to DVI adapter for those who still use the connection. The rest of the cover is covered in long ventilation cuts. The most interesting thing to me though is that the cover is painted black. This is a small detail that goes a long way to matching most cases.

So the cooler lines are longer than your average AIO cooler to give you options when mounting the radiator in your case but it’s the finishing touches that I like the most about them. Like the aluminum shroud, AMD was careful to give these a premium finish with sleeving on both lines as well as matching sleeving on the fan wire that runs the length of the tubs. I do think they could have cleaned it up even more by doing what Fractal Designs recently did with their AIO kits and putting the fan wire up under the tubing sleeving so it is all one unit.

Then for cooling, we are left with the 120mm fan and radiator. The fan is unique in that it has a ring a few millimeters from the outside of the blades, I think it adds stability. They also matched the fan sticker with the silver finish of the rest of the card. Then the radiator is a little thicker than your average AIO 120mm radiator. Given the high power draw of the card, this isn’t a big surprise. Beyond that, it is black like normal and has a normal fin density from the looks of it.