Pricing For AMD’s Radeon Vega FE Workstation Graphics Cards Revealed

With the official release date of AMD’s Radeon Vega Frontier Edition graphics card right around the corner (June 26), isn’t it about time we get that bit of information we all want? I’m of course talking about the price, and it’s a question that components etailer SabrePC has decided to answer.

On its website right now, SabrePC is selling the air-cooled version of the FE card for $1,199, while the liquid-cooled variant commands a $600 premium. At this point, there is no telling if these are suggested retail prices, or if there is some markup here, but $1,200 is what’s been rumored for the air-cooled version, so this adds up so far.

But in what world should a liquid-cooled version of the exact same product command a $600 price premium? It seems obvious by the fact that there is a liquid-cooled version that the GPU is going to work better with lower temperatures, although how much better is yet to be seen.

The specs for the card found on SabrePC’s website are a little more detailed than those we’ve seen from AMD itself. AMD said that the memory bandwidth on this card would be ~480GB/s, and according to this listing, it’s a pinch better than that, at 483GB/s. AMD said that the half-precision performance of this card would be ~25 TFLOPS, so to see 26.2 listed above is interesting (and a cool thing if true).

Perhaps even more interesting than any of that is the fact that the liquid-cooled version of the card appears to be in stock, while the air-cooled one is sold out. That of course implies that the cards went sale quite a bit in advance (10 days), and likewise could mean that the product may begin popping up at other etailers soon.

If you’re a gamer who loves to live on the bleeding-edge and are thinking about picking this card up, I wouldn’t recommend it simply because it’s not a gaming-focused product, and you’ll be restricted to the Radeon Pro drivers which don’t have per-game profiles and optimizations. That said, if you’re a workstation user, and especially a workstation user who likes to game, by all means purchase one, and make the rest of the world jealous.