AMD’s Air Cooled Radeon Vega Frontier Edition GPU Runs Better When Undervolted

For a bunch of reasons, AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition workstation GPU is an interesting beast. For starters, it’s the first GPU AMD’s released that bundles its Vega architecture, which in itself is interesting for a number of reasons. But also interesting is the fact that there’s an air and liquid-cooled version available, a rather blunt hint that the card will perform better when it’s not sweating bullets (the same largely applies for most high-end cards).

Our friends at Gamers Nexus purchased their own Frontier Edition, and have thus far performed an almost ridiculous number of tests on it. While all of the testing so far is interesting in its own right, the latest test – almost a revelation – caught my eye. Apparently, the stock settings for the FE card are a little more aggressive than they need to be, resulting in unnecessarily reduced performance.

As the chart above highlights, the Frontier Edition performed better when the power target was increased 50%, and the voltage was lowered. Heat is the biggest foe of the FE, so if you can do anything to reduce temperatures, you really need to commit. Real performance is at risk (we’re talking a 7~10% uplift in 3DMark).

It’s not just with 3DMark that a performance gain was felt. DOOM and Ghost Recon Wildlands experienced the very same. With DOOM in particular, a rather dramatic improvement of ~12% was exhibited.

Frontier Edition looks awesome, but runs hot

Ultimately, Gamers Nexus recommends anyone running the Vega FE to undervolt their cards, and increase the power target just to be safe. The warning is given that not all chips are alike, though, so you can’t expect your FE to undervolt as well as theirs did. It’s sure worth the attempt, though, as any improvement would be appreciated. Plus, no one wants their card to run at the temperature threshold all of the time.