RX Vega 56 Hybrid Mod & (Half-Working) 242% Power Offset

As exciting as it is to see “+242% power offset” in overclocking tools, it’s equally deflating to see that offset only partly work. It does, though, and so we’ve minimally managed to increase our overclocking headroom from the stock +50% offset. The liquid cooler helps, considering we attached a 360mm radiator, two Corsair 120mm maglev fans, a Noctua NF-F12 fan, and a fourth fan for VRM cooling. Individual heatsinks were also added to hotter VRM components, leaving two sets unsinked, but cooled heavily with direct airflow.

This mod is our coolest-running hybrid mod yet, with large thanks to the 360mm radiator. There’s reason for that, too – we’re now able to push peak power of about 370-380W through the card, up from our previous limitation of ~308W. We were gunning for 400W, but it’s just not happening right now. We’re still working on BIOS mods and powerplay table mods.

In the least, then, our “242% offset” has managed to get us another 70W of power to the core, which is enough to push the clock into competition with V64 overclocks.

We’re presently in the midst of researching clock reporting errors with Vega monitoring software, as they’re limiting our ability to adequately list overclock successes and failures. There’s a threshold at which overclocking seems to just stop working, but the card will report whatever frequency the user has set – it’s just not actually achieving that frequency. That’s a separate content piece, though.

In the meantime, it looks like the registry mod managed to get us some extra power. As we’re finalizing this part of the content, the card is presently sitting under load with FET thermals below 45C and GPU thermals well under control – though AMD’s GPU diode temperature reporting does seem a bit off, too, as it will report below ambient when idle and with liquid (clearly impossible, in this case).

Editorial: Steve Burke
Video: Andrew Coleman