AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 gets faster with Vega 64 BIOS

A member of Chiphell forums has finally tested whether RX Vega 56 can be unlocked into full-fat RX Vega 64. Well, it can’t (at least according to GPU-Z), but this mod brings some interesting results.

RX Vega 56 with 64 BIOS is 2% slower than RX Vega 64

Although it was expected, the sample used by KDtree did not unlock to full 4096-core Vega. This means that flashing 64 BIOS into 56 will not give you any extra boost thanks to more cores. However, the BIOS will change clock speeds which apparently have a much greater effect on the performance.

The RX Vega 64 BIOS has 1545 MHz boost clock and 945 MHz HBM2 clock. The RX Vega 56 is slower with boost clock at 1471 MHz and memory clock at 800 MHz. The BIOS mod gives you the same clocks on your 56, which practically improves performance.

By increasing the frequency by 75 MHz the modder noticed that the card was only 2% slower than reference RX Vega 64.

Furthermore, it was proven that overclocked RX Vega 56 at 1650 MHz (core) 2200 MHz (memory) actually surpasses 64 at default clocks.

If those results are correct then RX Vega 56 may become even more popular thanks to this simple mod. Of course, such modifications will void your warranty, but since the RX Vega series have two BIOSes, this mod is almost fool-proof.

Note: GPU-Z reports peak clock (1630 MHz):

Radeon RX Vega Series
VideoCardz.com	RX Vega 64 Liquid	RX Vega 64 (Air)	RX Vega 56
Vega RX
GPU	Vega 10 XTX	Vega 10 XT	Vega 10 XL
Cores	4096	4096	3584
Base Clock	1406 MHz	1247 MHz	1156 MHz
Boost Clock	1677 MHz	1546 MHz	1471 MHz
Memory Clock	945 MHz	945 MHz	800 MHz
Memory (HBM2)	8 GB	8 GB	8 GB
Memory Bus	2048-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit

Source: Chiphell via Expreview