It's to be said that the difference between "need" and "want" has been slightly dulled or altered since I started focusing on our lovely STEEM network. While I didn't reeeaaaaallllly need to purchase this basically "top of the line" graphics processing unit the want for one has been there since I heard of them being developed and then released.

While these cards seemed almost like a myth for a while due to fellow crypto miners buying up basically anything they could find I finally managed to find a Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 56 card for the price of $1100 CAD (About $1250 by time taxes and shipping cleared) and snapped one up not only to review here on Steemit.com but also use in my main workstation, freeing up my 6th Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 to be put into my mining rig.. Which I'll make a post on later.

Huge fan of the company Sapphire Technology based out of Hong Kong. Any offering of theirs I've purchased to this date has far exceeded my expectations and it's to be mentioned that they do great work providing adequate cooling measures for their hardware. Not to mention the Nitro+ series has dual selectable BIOS which is great for a mad goblin tinkerer like me that likes to flash BIOS things in order to get the greatest bang for my buck when it comes to both mining and gaming.. More on that though later in this post.

Unboxing the Beast

The card was well protected by a number of inches of shipping foam on all sides. You could likely throw this bastard down a flight of stairs and still have it function given the great job Sapphire Tech has done packaging the thing. I'd have to estimate the weight of the box with card and packaging around 7-10 pounds or so.

First thing I noticed is how FREAKIN' HUGE this GPU is. I'm assuming my hands are about average size and as you can see above the unit is nearly 3 KLYE hands or larger in length and a full KLYE hand in width. While the dimensions of the card were written in the specifications of the thing.. I didn't expect such a massive thing.

_{( The protective plastic film is still on it in this picture... the smell was of fresh electronics )}

Not one, not two but THREE fans over two different heat sinks cool this beast. While initially I'd hoped to find a liquid cooled unit the prices were out to lunch on those and given the push / pull configuration of my workstations cooling one figured that the fanned Vega 56 would work just fine. Some people were bitching online about these cards running hot. No idea what these guys were talking about.. Card rarely ever even goes over 55c and even under a heavy load and over volted I've yet to see it hit 60c. For 3 fans spinning at over 3000 rpm it's actually pretty damn quiet..!

Stock Specifications

_{( Screencaps of the specifications of the Sapphire Tech RX 56 from newegg.ca )}

Gotta mention that while they've done a nearly accurate job of listing specs above the reality is the GPU is actually faster out the box than they have here. The stock clocks were 1605Mhz with the bios switched to the right for me.. Kinda neat! Also when I purchased this beast I had no idea it was the "limited edition" ... Got a surprise for sure when I recieved the package! That may be the reason for the extra clock speed. I believe the specs they had on the newegg.ca site were for the standard Vega 56.

Performance & Card Testing

Most folks would fire up their favourite game and check out the framerate in order to test their new GPU. While I do game a little bit (certainly spent a few hours gaming this week) what I was really interested in off the hop was what sort of hashrates this beast of a card could do before any modifications were done to the BIOS or clock speeds.

Out of the box it was running something like 1605 Mhz on the GPU side and 800 Mhz on the HBM2 memory.. Which was more than I was expecting for sure on the GPU side of things. Some of you are probably sitting there going "Pffft, 800Mhz memory speed? That is slow as hell ya noob" but honestly the new architecture of the HBM2 ( High Bandwidth Memory ) and the fact it is 2048-Bit memory makes it shine..!

Stock settings it pulled about ~50 MH/s on Lyra2Rev2 algorithm using just over 200 watts. From what I hear the best algo to mine with this card is CryptoNight (Monero) but I'm a fan of the one mining program I have and base all of my speeds off of that. As for the gaming side of things the old Sapphire Nitro+ RX580 8GB card I had in there ran a solid 120-150 fps ( Frames Per Second ) using custom graphics settings, where as the new Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 56 runs damn near 300 fps using the same settings.. Damn awesome I do say!

After tinkering about with overclocking and whatnot I ended up with the sort of hashrates you see below, I've yet to get settings in place for gaming, perhaps today I'll have a look into getting my settings right to maximize my framerate in gaming. As with all new technology I get my hands on it takes me a while to get the most out of it.

Needless to say, I am IMPRESSED by the Vega 56!

Final Thoughts

While the price point of $1100 or so may be a bit steep for some people looking to build a gaming rig or update their old card the truth of the matter is this card is actually a pretty damn good value for the MSRP when you consider a card that does basically half the hashrate and framerate costs $500-$700. I noticed today that the Pulse variant of this card is available for less than $1000 CAD (canadian dollars) but those lack the dual BIOS switch and pretty LED fan shrouds.. and only sport 2 fans.

If you can afford the somewhat ritzy $1100+ price tag of one of these bad boys and are looking to upgrade to the next generation of GPU I'd say it's pretty much worth it. While some people have been moaning about these GPUs the truth of the matter is they are actually pretty damn awesome considering the price point. Thanks for reading folks!

( Now to wander off and see if I can flash the thing to a Vega 64... )

---

Vote KLYE for Witness!