Not Ryzen related, but seems you're pretty up to speed with AMD products. Does that include Radeon as well? I have a MBP and I am considering a Radeon VII for my external GPU (currently GTX 1080 but only usable in Windows. Thanks Mojave). My main concern though is thermals and noise. Does it perform on par with Nvidia there or little bit worse or considerably so? Power draw I'm not that concerned with.
thanks for that. That's a huge bummer. Really wish Apple wouldn't force the Metal issue with Nvidia. Yeah, it'd be nice and all, but as a user, I'm fine with the various scripts I have to run after macOS updates to get the card running again but they just nixed that outright. Oh well, hopefully AMD can solve the fan problems or Nvidia and Apple can work something out, either or.
The Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT are supposed to be competitive with the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 at slightly lower prices. Only reference cards right now, but things might be looking up once OEMs have a chance to put better coolers on instead of AMD's reference blower.
I'm planning to hold out for next gen when they get ray tracing hardware to be a bit more future proof (my GTX 970's not dead yet), but since I'm thinking of trading my Wintendo out for a Mac + eGPU setup it's nice to see that AMD could actually be a good GPU option now.
Those were just announced this week, so keep an eye out for 3rd party benchmarks soon.
Will probably pull the trigger on a Radeon VII myself, only because of the better Linux drivers, and possibility of hackintosh usage. At least for my current system, I did a mid-cycle upgrade for the GPU (GTX 1080) and added NVME a couple years ago. Still running 4790K on 32gb ram, and does great for most stuff, but not so much for encoding or dev work (couple dbs and services in background).
Sadly they both appear to have a total board power 50W higher than NVIDIA's comparable model(s), so NVIDIA might still win out on power. But we'll have to wait for third-party benchmarks to confirm that.
I would wait the month or so for Navi cards to show up and see how they do on thermals and if the application performance is to your liking; Navi is intended for midrange cards(says the PR) but getting similar performance to your 1080 is possible.
AMD's recent releases have a reputation of releasing at "hot/high-power" stock and then doing much better when undervolted. Navi will get the die shrink, so the results for both power and thermals are likely to be even better, but benchmarking needs to be done before we have a full picture of what's changed.
It looks like the latest AMD cards are a bit more power hungry than NVidia counterparts. On performance, the Radeon VII seems to be closely aligned to the RTX 2080 (not TI). The RX 5700 XT is around the RTX 2070, and the RX 5700 is above the RTX 2060. Depending on your workload, and if it can leverage the AMD targets, it could be good to great. If you don't actually care about RTX features (and the slow framerates that comes with it), then you're better off with AMD for the price difference, even considering the extra power needs.
