So don't take these watt differences as hard "apples-to-apples" numbers.
![amd radeon rx vega 56 amd radeon rx vega 56](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/cZEAAOSwojJhRb-z/s-l1600.jpg)
Note, though, that the way competing companies calculate these kinds of things often differs. The Vega 56 is rated to 210 watts, while Nvidia rates the GTX 1070 at 150 watts. And it's also important to note that the Vega 56 still faces the same power, heat, and efficiency deficits of the Vega architecture in general, although the disparities here are less than with the Radeon RX Vega 64 card we tested. Clock- and memory-speed differences make a difference, too, as we'll see in the Performance Testing section of this review later on. Of course, performance doesn't all hinge on compute units and memory allotments. In a broader sense, the Vega 56 does a somewhat better job of outperforming that competing card than the Radeon RX Vega 64 does of besting its own Nvidia nemesis, the GeForce GTX 1080. In this price range, $100 is a lot of money when considering one card versus another, and the target card on the Nvidia side, in the case of the Vega 56, is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 in its various forms. At its $399 MSRP, it is $100 less than the Vega 64. And you get the same 8GB of high-bandwidth HBM2 memory running on the same "Vega 10" chip that powers the Vega 64. As its name implies, it has 56 compute units to the higher-end card's 64. In many ways, the Radeon RX Vega 56 that we're looking at here occupies a similar spot in AMD's new-for-2017 lineup of Vega enthusiast-grade graphics cards. When we wrote this, the Ryzen 5 1600X was selling for about $235, compared to about $460 for the Ryzen 7 1800X. Its six cores are a slight downtick from the Ryzen 7 1800X's eight, but with that 25 percent downstep in physical cores comes a nearly 50 percent reduction in price. We think it's the best value among the AMD Ryzen processors we've tested (11 so far this year!), in part because it delivers the same clock speeds (3.6GHz to 4GHz stock) of the top-end mainstream AMD Ryzen 7 1800X.
![amd radeon rx vega 56 amd radeon rx vega 56](https://tpucdn.com/gpu-specs/images/c/2993-i-o.jpg)
Take, for example, our favorite AMD Ryzen CPU of the moment, the Ryzen 5 1600X. But it's often the products one or two steps down the stack that offer the better value, delivering most of the performance of the costliest video cards or processor chips, but at a much-reduced price. In AMD's world in 2017, that's been processors such as the beastly Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and the Ryzen 7 1800X, as well as its long-awaited Radeon RX Vega 64 ($999.77 at Amazon) graphics card. As a rule, the top-end performers on the PC-component front get the most attention.