Is AMD Radeon VII the best GPU for Hackintosh running macOS Mojave?
Are there still problems running it in Hackintosh, or is everything already fixed?
And how does it perform?
So let’s find out…
Hi, I’m Teresa from morgonaut.cloud and I help people with Hackintosh builds, Macintosh
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So AMD Radeon VII is on the market already for some while.
If you are watching some Hackintoh forums, you may know, lot of people were reporting
dozens of problems with running Radeon VII on macOS Mojave, like freezes, mouse stuttering,
artifacts etc.
Those people were looking forward to the latest macOS Mojave 10.14.5 update in hope, their
Radeon VII will finaly get full support.
But even after release of this update people were still reporting problems.
So where is the truth?
Is it running fine or not?
I wanted also answers to these questions, so….
I bought one too.
I bought the Sapphire Radeon VII model, updated my system, installed the card and…?
Let’s have a look.
I’m running latest macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and About this Mac shows correctly recognized
Radeon VII with 16GB of VRAM and System Report complete full Metal support.
So far so good, but let’s see how it performs in real life tasks.
Let’s say for example 3D rendering.
This GPU should have really great OpenCL performance by it’s pure specifications.
Here I prepared a test scene, where can I test the Radeon VII in Maya 3D package and
AMD ProRender.
IPR render is in FullHD resolution.
Wow, this is really great, it’s really insanely fast, GPU is fully utilized, no glitches,
no artifacts, simply running great.
UI and render performance is absolutely fantastic.
So let’s move on to video editing and test Radeon VII in Metal performance instead of OpenCL
inside of Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 15.
Here I opened project with my previous video.
My timeline and all my source media are in 4K resolution, ProRes 422 HQ, 4:2:2 and 10-bit.
I have also some H.264 4K footage in my timeline.
And my 4k clips have quite a lof of color correction and color grading.
As you can see the timeline performance is amazing, scrubbing my project is without any
limit, everything is extremely fast.
So let’s render it out and see if this Radeon VII will be fully utilized while final render,
or if it will be limited as I saw on some reviews.
Bang, as you can see this card is perfect companion to my Intel Core i9-9900k, Radeon
VII is maxed out and shows it’s real power.
In Luxmark, intensive OpenCL benchmark my Radeon VII scored 50550 points.
That’s really very impressive.
And I test all my builds on stock settings, so no overclock applied.
For example my Radeon Vega Frontier Edition with also 16GB of VRAM in this benchmark scores
only around 27 thousand points, so Radeon VII is quite 2 times faster.
And what about temperatures?
Classic GPU sensors for FakeSMC will NOT show you temperature for this card.
I had to compile newest kexts from source and now I get the temperature reading.
But here stop for a while.
Radeon VII does not show just one temperature as for example previous Vega GPUs.
It has now also so called junction temperature.
And that’s exactly the temperature which shows my HWMonitor.
This junction temperature is about 30-35 degrees of Celsius higher then the classic GPU temperature, so
as you can see now while running the Luxmark benchmark, the junction temperature stabilized
at maximum 97 degrees of Celsius, so that means my GPU temperature is around 62-67 degrees
of Celsius.
Under maximum load.
And I get even higher score than on first run - 50952 points.
I think all these numbers are also very nice surprise.
Simply the smaller nanometer technology can been seen here.
BTW EFI folder which I offer for my 14-core iMac Pro Killer and Vega GPUs has full support
for Radeon VII and already contains all these latest packages, so feel free to download
my EFI, if you plan to buy Radeon VII.
I cannot talk for other brands of Radeon VII like XFX or PowerColor, I tested this Sapphire
version and because I recommend strictly only components I tested and verified personaly,
I can recommend this Sapphire one.
Link to my exact tested model you can find now in this video description.
I run this Radeon VII for a month already and I haven’t seen single problem with it!
In all applications and also system wide it is simply running perfectly.
I run three 24 inch displays out of three DisplayPorts on the back of the card.
There is also HDMI port on this card, which is also running fine.
The only issue, which IS NOT related to Hackintosh I’ve found is - when I reboot now my computer,
after reboot only 2 out of 3 displays will be showing picture.
I would need to disconnect the DisplayPort cable and connect back to see picture also
on the third display.
But when I boot this Hackintosh from the shutdown state, all three displays will come up fine.
I said this is not related to Hackintosh, because absolutely same behaviour I noticed when testing
this card under latest Windows 10.
Probably something in VBIOS is still waiting for fix.
BTW when speaking about VBIOS, Radeon VII was originaly shipped with VBIOS which was
causing lot of issues.
Few weeks ago AMD released the 106 update, so check what version of VBIOS is your card running.
The old VBIOS is identified as 016.blabla simply like this, the new one after update
is like this.
So conclusion.
Can I now after really heavy testing recommend this card to Hackintosh users?
My answer is - ABSOLUTELY!
And not to just hackintosh users, also to Mac users, because this card will easily outperform
ANY GPU which Apple currently offers even in their high-end iMac Pros.
I think this is now my number 1 choice for any Hackintosh, where you really need ultimate
performance.
3D artists or video editors will be totally happy with Radeon VII.
I think for next few years this amazing GPU will always have it’s place in my Hackintosh.
So I hope I made your day again little better, if so, please click on the like button below,
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Morgonaut is always here to help :) So, that’s all for today, thank you for watching and
see you next time my Hackintosh friends.