The GTX 1080 is $550; Vega 56 is $400 and Vega 64 is $500. With decent cooling, the vega gpus can be overclocked to give significant boost. Also the freesync monitor is cheaper than gsync. Vega56 + FreeSync will save you around $350. That is ~ 25% saving if you are going for a 1.2-1.5k$ rig.
I don't think so. The article touched on the fact that the watercooled one is already seeing a disproportionate ramp-up of power in order to ramp up clocks. That says to me that it's beginning to eat in to the headroom of the card and will soon begin to run up against its voltage wall. That suggests to me that they're already pushing the card pretty hard to get the stock performance levels, which doesn't leave a lot on the table for overclockers.
Here, AMD is once again (see last year's Polaris) a victim of the inferior GlobalFoundries 14nm LPP process. TSMC 16nm would have been much better in perf/W, but sadly a very restrictive wafer supply agreement locks AMD to GloFo for the time being.
It is just sad AMD could not get both Graphics and CPU momentum at the same time.
Poor thermals means that this line of GPUs will find it's way into exactly 0% of the laptop market, which is unfortunate.
Alienware will find a way, even if it requires a water connection to cool it
And after the price parity, you're just stuck with a worse card.