iMac Pro iMac Pro Vega 64 vs 56: difference in heat and noise

[Mac32]

Hi,

I'm about to purchase an iMac Pro for music and video work, and will also play PC games in Bootcamp.

The GPU-upgrade is tempting (and slightly overkill), but the regular Vega 64 generates considerably more heat (and noise) than Vega 56. I know the Vega GPUs in iMac Pro are downclocked, but it would be interesting to hear your experiences - now that people have had their iMac Pros for a few weeks.

How much/often does the fans ramp up during GPU-intensive tasks (including gaming) with the Pro 64? AFAIK the performance difference is about 15%, but a quiet computer is important to me - it's one of the reasons I'm choosing an iMac Pro over a high-end regular iMac. If Pro 64 throttles over time because of high temps, then the sustained performance difference could be smaller.

Any advice/info would be appreciated, thanks!

 

[Creedog]

I have the base iMac Pro with the Vega 64 upgrade. I never hear the fans spin up. I do development with unity, blender, Pixelmator Pro, and Xcode as well as play high-end 3-D video games. I think the low heat from the 8 core CPU offsets the extra heat from the GPU upgrade. Although the fans appear to be near silent in the reviews I’ve read regardless of configuration or workload.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hi,

I'm about to purchase an iMac Pro for music and video work, and will also play PC games in Bootcamp.

The GPU-upgrade is tempting (and slightly overkill), but the regular Vega 64 generates considerably more heat (and noise) than Vega 56. I know the Vega GPUs in iMac Pro are downclocked, but it would be interesting to hear your experiences - now that people have had their iMac Pros for a few weeks.

How much/often does the fans ramp up during GPU-intensive tasks (including gaming) with the Pro 64? AFAIK the performance difference is about 15%, but a quiet computer is important to me - it's one of the reasons I'm choosing an iMac Pro over a high-end regular iMac. If Pro 64 throttles over time because of high temps, then the sustained performance difference could be smaller.

Any advice/info would be appreciated, thanks!

By all reports it makes no practical difference.

 

[Mac32]

Thanks for the comments! It would be interesting to know what clock rates these Pro Vega cards are running at, though.

 

[kingtj]

I have a new iMac Pro but didn't set up Boot Camp on it this time. I purchased a gaming laptop last year with a GeForce 1080 graphics card in it which handles all my gaming needs nicely. Decided I'd rather do that than wasting a big chunk of my Mac's drive space for a Boot Camp Windows partition.

That sad, Apple doesn't even have the Vega card supported yet, officially, in the Boot Camp drivers. You have to use alternates available at the www.bootcampdrivers.com web site - which may not work 100% with everything.

Hi,

I'm about to purchase an iMac Pro for music and video work, and will also play PC games in Bootcamp.

The GPU-upgrade is tempting (and slightly overkill), but the regular Vega 64 generates considerably more heat (and noise) than Vega 56. I know the Vega GPUs in iMac Pro are downclocked, but it would be interesting to hear your experiences - now that people have had their iMac Pros for a few weeks.

How much/often does the fans ramp up during GPU-intensive tasks (including gaming) with the Pro 64? AFAIK the performance difference is about 15%, but a quiet computer is important to me - it's one of the reasons I'm choosing an iMac Pro over a high-end regular iMac. If Pro 64 throttles over time because of high temps, then the sustained performance difference could be smaller.

Any advice/info would be appreciated, thanks!

 

[CWallace]

How much/often does the fans ramp up during GPU-intensive tasks (including gaming) with the Pro 64?

It seems the only thing that can peg the fans is PCalc's "About" page.

 

[Mac32]

I have a new iMac Pro but didn't set up Boot Camp on it this time. I purchased a gaming laptop last year with a GeForce 1080 graphics card in it which handles all my gaming needs nicely. Decided I'd rather do that than wasting a big chunk of my Mac's drive space for a Boot Camp Windows partition.

That sad, Apple doesn't even have the Vega card supported yet, officially, in the Boot Camp drivers. You have to use alternates available at the www.bootcampdrivers.com web site - which may not work 100% with everything.

Yes, for now Apple's Bootcamp support is terrible. There are also several issues with the sound drivers (latency, weird echo effects), and there is no proper support for the Vega Pro 56/64 - only some kind of generic driver. It seemed like the new drivers from www.bootcampdrivers.com actually worked for a while, but the screen goes black after a few reboots - and then you have to reinstall the original bootcamp drivers.

Unfortunately I'll be sitting this one out for now. I don't absolutely *need* the iMac Pro for my work (I could get by with a high-end iMac), but the added power and improved thermals/quiet operation would be a great upgrade. Hopefully enough people are bugging AMD and Apple about this, so they can get their act together.