AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition Specs, Price Review: Pre-Order Opens with Expensive Price Listing
Online retailers and some brick-and-mortar stores have reportedly opened its pre-orders for the AMD Radeon Vega Frontier Edition video cards Thursday. The new editions are supposed to launch on June 27 but retailers have jumped the gun.
The pre-order's price, however, doesn't come cheap as the AMD's air-cooled video cards reportedly cost $US1199, while the liquid-cooled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition cost $US1799. AMD engineers detailed in a Reddit AMA last May that the video cards were not aimed for mass consumption anyway, so the price shouldn't come as a shock. It's been designed with for workstations of professionals like engineers and designers or data scientists, hence the above average price tag.
But gamers still expressed interest in the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition knowing its capabilities. With 16GB HBC RAM, 64 compute units, 483GB memory bandwidth and 4096 stream processors, it is, no doubt, powerful and efficient. The graphic cards also deliver 26.2 TFLOPS of peak double-precision compute performance and 13.1 TFLOPS of peak single-precision. It even comes with triple DisplayPort 1.4 HBR3 and a segregated HDMI port.
AMD Radeon executive Raja Koduri, however, said gamers would be better off purchasing and using the RX Vega Edition, which is the touted consumer graphics card, instead of the upcoming Vega Frontier Edition. "Consumer RX will be much better optimized for all the top gaming titles and flavors of RX Vega will actually be faster than Frontier version," Koduri revealed.
Not to mention, the RX Vega will also be cheaper than Vega Frontier Edition. RX Vega is expected to be out in the market by August, so there is still a short few months of wait.
Meanwhile, even as the water-cooled Vega Frontier Edition cost $600 more than the air-cooled edition, the specs of the two kinds of Vega Frontier Edition video cards remain identical. Only, the water-cooled version has a water block that will help keep it cooler.
