AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT(X)series unboxing
Where GPUs hit the Chiplet era
Next week the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX launch; today we can show you some photos of the product. This post is a recap of what you can expect in the upcoming weeks' Radeon RX 7900 XT series products wise. It appears that an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX was in the works, implying that the original XT model will no longer be the company's top dog. The product will come out in early December. Two cards, the 7900XT and 7900 XTX, are announced. They are based on the Navi 31 GPU, which has RDNA3 architecture and is based on a new chiplet design. Yeah, chiplets man, and it's a big GPU, alright. The die area of the Navi 31 graphics processor chip is 300 mm2. AMD confirmed that its RDNA 3 graphics processing units (GPUs) have a huge performance boost. AMD will highlight some of the essential parts of the RDNA 3 GPUs, such as:
Radeon RX 7900 XT will have 20GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 10,752 shader cores, it probably will not be as fast as the RTX 4090, which closes in at 100 teraflops but might match the 4080. Instead, it looks like the RX 7900 XT may aim for 53 teraflops if it launches with the above core specs. The XTX is listed at 61 TFLOPS. AMD turned off some shading units on the Radeon RX 7900 XT with 20GB to reach its target performance. This is different from the fully unlocked Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which uses the same GPU but has all 12288 shaders turned on. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT uses two slots, so it gets power from two 8-pin connectors. The maximum board power it can use is 300W. There is one HDMI 2.1 output and three DisplayPort 2.0 outputs. During the presentation, there was no mention of PCI-Express 5.0 x16 connects, so we assume PCI-Express 4.0 for Radeon RX 7900 XT connects to the rest of the system. The card will cost $899
Radeon RX 7900 XTX will have 24GB of GDDR6 VRAM and the complete 12,288 shader cores, it will probably get close to the RTX 4090 thanks to its infinity cache as well. As mentioned AV1 en/decode is present. TBP is 355 Watt, and this card will cost $999 with availability on December 13th, just before Christmas. And that about sums it up for the info we can share.
Below a few photos of the two product, reviews will be up next week.
The Radeon RX 7900 series is an improvement upon the RX 6900 series in terms of reference designs. The two-tone silver+black makes way for a mostly-black scheme with some gunmetal accents. The cooler's shroud and backplate are both constructed from high-quality die-cast aluminium alloy.
The heatsink protrudes visually, and its surface area is more prominent than that of its predecessor. This card features hints of red alongside gunmetal. This card's third-generation RDNA graphics architecture is indicated by the card's red paint job on three of the fins of the fin-stack heatsink.
The rival GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs use DisplayPort 1.4, AMD will beat NVIDIA with the next-gen DisplayPort 2.1 connector, which would allow for significantly greater resolutions and frame rates over a single cable. The RX 7900 XTX reference design features two DisplayPort 2.1 connectors of normal size, one HDMI 2.1a connector, and a USB type-C port with DisplayPort 2.1 passthrough.
Although visually pretty similar to the RX 7900 XTX, the RX 7900 XT is noticeably smaller in size. Even though the design DNA is the same, some of the smaller bits have been compressed because of the decrease in length and height.
While the cooler shroud and backplate are made from the same premium die-cast aluminium as the RX 7900 XTX, the heatsink is smaller, lighter, and more unobtrusive. It still has that nice touch with the three red fins, three as in rDNA3.
Two full-size DisplayPort 2.1, one HDMI 2.1b, and a USB-C port with a passthrough for DisplayPort 2.1 are the display outputs, just like on the RX 7900 XTX.