Final words and conclusion
The 7900 GRE stands out as an unconventional product, eliciting mixed feelings. Including this model in the 7900 series is a notch confusing, considering it is 10~15% less powerful than the 7900 XT—a reduced version of the XTX—and features 20% less memory than the XT. Of course the card is introduced into the western markets to compete with the 4070 Ti and 4070 SUPER, and speaking purely rasterized, it certainly is capable of doing that. That 4070 SUPER sits roughly at $649 in detail at the moment of writing. But as we confirmed, the card did pretty much what a 6950XT/6900XT can do. AMD's graphics solutions perform well overall, but they face challenges in Ultra HD settings where a notable area of weakness is ray tracing performance; although AMD has improved ray tracing capabilities, they still lag behind NVIDIA, which makes larger advancements with each new generation. Activating ray tracing in games exacerbates these performance issues in Ultra HD. The introduction of technologies like FSR will further enhance AMD's ray tracing performance in QHD / Ultra HD at the cost of a bit of image quality.
Cooling & noise levels
Our test shows that gaming will get you an approximate volume level of an excellent 34 decibels for the tested sapphire PULSE model we tested, which is silent. Moreover, the graphics card temperature is around 60-65 degrees Celsius.
Energy
Remember that the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is a high-end gaming product that still uses much power. Under full load, the reference edition uses about 260 Watts (average TBP). This Wattage is directly related to how much heat the GPU, which sits inside a closed case, gives off. Overall, FPOS versus Wattage, this card does well.
Coil whine
Every graphics card will inevitably produce a discernible buzzing sound known as coil whine when operating at high FPS. Is it bothersome? It becomes noticeable once you push the frame rates to extremely high levels. In a closed computer case, this noise tends to recede into the background. However, when the chassis is open, the coil whine or squeal becomes audible. Almost all graphics cards exhibit this phenomenon to some extent, particularly when operating at higher frame rates. Despite its presence, we have not noticed it enough to be a significant inconvenience.
Pricing
Admittedly I did not expect to really like something call 'Golden Rabbit Edition' as it's a reshuffled SKU based on the 7900XT. However once I started testing this product I swayed around quite a bit, as at a projected $549 the GRE does offer quite a bit of value for money. I mean the XT model is hovering at $779 and the 16GB memory certainly is plentiful also. That said, it'll remain to be a hard sell with fierce competition from NVIDIA. But the WQHD and Ultra HD domains are perfectly playable with this card.
Suggested Retail Prices for the SAPPHIRE RX 7900 GRE Series:
- NITRO+ RX 7900 GRE: $599
- PURE RX 7900 GRE: $569
- PULSE RX 7900 GRE: $549
Tweaking
To be updated, we had a very unstable graphic card, and are awaiting a replacement.
Conclusion
At $549 we have a performance equivalent of the 6900 Series in our hands, and it's not a bad deal. It boasts a dimmer clock of 2200-2300 MHz and offers much better power consumption. Of course, the cut towards 16GB / 256-bit bus you could consider to be a downfall, however 16GB at this time is enough. So for that $549, you'll gain a lot of performance as this is a high-end graphics card. Looking at the other side (team green) we see the 4070 SUPER continuously in the path of the 7900 GRE with a rasterizer engine advantage for AMD, but a Raytracing and DLSS performance win for NVIDIA. Choices choices. While its ray tracing performance doesn't quite match up to its competitors, technologies like FSR can help bridge the gap, similar to how NVIDIA uses DLSS3. In summary, the 7900 GRE Pulse OC offers a compelling blend of silent operation, aesthetic appeal, and performance, making it a worthy product in AMD's range of high-end cards. Despite its slight performance decrease over 7900 XT it offers far better energy consumption making this a fairly energy-efficient card. The market is saturated though very saturated. We do hope that the next iteration of anything GRE will be named a bit differently though .. I mean Golden Rabbit Edition, come in. But yeah, recommended.
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