Product Photos

Product Photos

AMD's Radeon RX 7900 series was released a few weeks ago, but the firm has only just recently revealed how it stacks up against NVIDIA's RTX 4080, the company's latest card based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. As expected, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX outperforms the Radeon RX 6950 XT and provides better value for money than the RTX 4080.

XFX fabbed a rather mythical Speedster series graphics cards ready, locked, and loaded ... BIG! I won't make any THICC puns here, but oops I just did, The Speedster Merc 319 in a BLACK edition was submitted, and while in the more mainstream/high-end segment, this product looks like it is the most premium you'll ever have seen.  The XTX die features 96 ray accelerators, 192 ROPs, 6,144 (x2) shader processors, and 384 texture units. It is made up of 58 billion transistors. These will reach a peak half precision performance of 123 TFLOPs and a single precision of up to 61 TFLOPs. A 96 MB infinite cache backs it up. The maximum bandwidth achieved from the 24 GB of GDDR6 operating at 20 Gbps is 960 GB/s. Additionally, the reference card will only need three 8-pin power connectors. BTW see that bar? XFX includes its unique Z support bar system to help protect the card and motherboard to help compare GPU sag caused by ever-increasing GPU sizes.

It is based on a triple-fan cooler and a 2.7-slot design with dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, the card is bound to please and tease many. The design stays close to XFX's THICC III cards, however, THICC branding was succeeded by the 'Speedster MERC series.' In addition to two DisplayPort 2.1 outputs, two HDMI 2.1 outputs but not USB Type-C connector that supports DP2.1.  As for frame rates, they may go as high as 480Hz in 4K and 165Hz in 8K with the help of AMD's new Radiance Display engine, which supports DisplayPort 2.1. It is another question whether you will be able to take advantage of it, but it is nice to see AMD add the display connector since Nvidia conspicuously left it off the RTX 4090.

Apart from certain minor details, the RX 7000 series appears to be similar to the previous generation Merc 319 cards. The black and silver design with three fans is back, however, the backplate is now a silver-coloured grille. For the time being, it appears that XFX will no longer display the type of Radeon GPU on the side.

The aluminium backplate spreader, Z support bar system, and cast aluminium shroud are three stiffness structures offered by XFX.