[GUIDE] Injection of AMD Vega Power and Fan Control Properties

[JozoR]

So I came to conclusion (after many restarts, failures etc):
soft power tables are definitely shared with Windows. Once you make your setting ie. in Wattman overclocking, undervolting etc. remains the same. So if you are dual booting, the only thing to fix is fans.

So I just set up 400 RPM at Idle and target temp to 50 °C for my Powercolor Red Dragon and left everything else. Benchmarking and really demanding 3D graphics consumes as much watts as under Windows, but once it stops, fans go to idle (turned off) like it should. Obviously, there is still an error with fans going up to target RPM even after GPU is cooled down, but after a while fans stops.

Now under load fans spin at 1400 RPM at maximum and temperature stays below 70 °C. Pretty quiet and cool.

 

[jaymonkey]

Yes, it works for sure. What doesn’t seem to work is to keep target temp. I’ve set it up to 60 °C but fans start slowly (and accelerating) somewhere at 70 °C so then it’s really impossible to get down with temperature below 80 °C as I have max RPM set to 2000.

Will have to start with lower target temp as you say, probably at 40 °C.

@JozoR,

As stated in the guide, not all Vega cards are created equal.

Many 3rd Party OEM Vega's use a custom cooling solution and non reference VBIOS to directly control the fan via on board fan controller, as such it is not possible to control the Fan via SoftPowerPlayTable (although you can still use it to define GPU/HBM clock speeds and voltages).

Vegas that follow the reference AMD design have the Fan controlled directly by MacOS via the Apple Vega kexts/drivers and the SoftPowerPlayTable.

Not sure which category the Powercolor Red Dragon Vega 56 falls into but something to be aware of.

Cheers
Jay

 

[JozoR]

yes I’m aware of that, Jay. I was curious if it can be handled. Red Dragon is custom cooling solution with 3 fans just like Red Devil, Asus Strix or Sapphire Nitro Vegas are.

What’s interesting is that it works - once I set up target temp to 50 °C fans start and stop properly. A reference card doesn stop it’s fan at all but custom solutions do so. Now I’m not sure how Powercolor handles fans in it’s BIOS (I have overwritten it with Sapphire nitro Vega 56 anyway). But there is one thing - not all fans start to spin together, just the one on PCB does and remaining two start to spin only after temperature is above certain treshold. Anyway, I’m happy.

 

[jaymonkey]

Now I’m not sure how Powercolor handles fans in it’s BIOS (I have overwritten it with Sapphire nitro Vega 56 anyway). But there is one thing - not all fans start to spin together, just the one on PCB does and remaining two start to spin only after temperature is above certain treshold. Anyway, I’m happy.

@JozoR,

I've seen posts with users mentioning that they have flashed the VBIOS on their OEM cards with a AMD or Sapphire VBIOS, seems risky to me but might be the only way to get certain OEM cards working correctly in MacOS ...

Glad you found a solution that works for you .... it might help others who have the same card.

Cheers
Jay

 

[Douirc]

ASRock Phantom Gaming X Vega 64 8G

For convenience, I attached the GPU-Z information from Windows side as well as VegaTab kext and data file using the setting mentioned before.

Thanks for sharing @mafx3 . I have the same GPU and your VegaTab_64.kext performed better than my last. I still have slight coil whine and was curious if you've had any luck eliminating it. Also have a favor to ask. Can you post the BIOS files for switch A & B? I flashed A with another card hoping the PPT worked natively with Mojave but it didn't (ASRock isn't a reference board) and of course my backup of the original got erased. Also, when you have time, can you boot in both A and B and see if you're performance is identical? Thanks for the help!

 

[Mech314]

Is there a list of Vegas that are actually can be controlled by VGtab?
I know about reference PSBs but what about custom ones?

 

[demonknight9]

did anybody got they're gigabyte RX vega 56 version working without the fan speed-up?

I would really like to know this as well. Did you have any luck in this method or bios flashing ?

 

[NOHOPEFORYOUNOW]

I would really like to know this as well. Did you have any luck in this method or bios flashing ?

yeah the fan curve app one i did, it states its only useful with non 3d party vega 56 - 64 ...

butt hope for a fix in the future...

 

[demonknight9]

I have some news for Gigabyte owners. I have the Gigabyte RX Vega 56 Gaming OC.

Here is what I did to fix all problems. After learning that I would not be able to use VGTab on my Gigabyte RX Vega 56 because of the custom OC bios, I did the following;

I first flashed the bios for the Sapphire Nitro +. The bios flash is a bit scary but because I just got the card, I rather do it now rather than later.
The version of the bios is the same. This is more of a rebranding, than anything else.

That didn't sort out the latest bug where the fan started out ok but once it started going it would not come down from 1500rpm until reboot or sleep. Even then it would start the process all over again minutes after doing this.

I then used VGTab with a target temp of 60c, target fan 1000rpm, idle and min 400rpm and max 2500rpm.

This has fixed all my issues. The fans are off from the start, they will only turn on when I use any graphics intensive applications. They will turn back off when the GPU has had a chance to cool down.

Thanks very much for this method. I had to use 2 methods but got there in the end.

Not much information for the Gigabyte Vegas so I thought this might be useful to someone in the same boat as I was.

 

[demonknight9]

yeah the fan curve app one i did, it states its only useful with non 3d party vega 56 - 64 ...

butt hope for a fix in the future...

So you have a gigabyte card and the fan curve didn't work for you?