PowerColor Radeon RX 7800 XT Red Devil practically officially
Just after the rumors that a low-cost gaming Radeon RX 7500 could be coming out, it turns out that AMD is probably going to launch a more powerful model before that – the Radeon RX 7800 XT, which will rank below the also new OEM-only RX 7900 GRE. PowerColor basically went and revealed more or less everything about the 7800 XT graphics card that is going to use the Navi 32 GPU so now it’s just a question of when it will hit the market.
PowerColor, which is one of the main graphics manufacturers dedicated purely to cards with AMD-made GPUs, published a complete presentation of the Red Devil OC Radeon RX 7800 XT graphics card (“RX 7800 XT 16G-E/OC”). AMD hasn’t announced this model yet, so what we are seeing is probably a classic case of a partner leaking what they shouldn’t or pulling the trigger prematurely.
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PowerColor has directly shown official images of their card, which you can see here in the article, and like with the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, also the GPU used itself. The PCB photo shows that it is a Navi 32 chiplet GPU with four MCDs around the main GCD chiplet.
The RX 7800 XT graphics card provides 3840 shaders and 60 ray accelerators, which should apparently be the full configuration of the GPU – in fact, so far everything matches the information about this GPU that leaked about a year ago. Navi 32 will probably have a 64MB Infinity Cache (because of the four MCDs), although PowerColor doesn’t mention it in the specs.
The graphics card will, as expected, use a 256-bit memory bus with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. AMD will use a lower clock speed than in the high-end models – just 18.0 GHz effectively. The card will thus have the same bandwidth as the RX 7900 GRE (or Radeon RX 6950 XT) – 576 GB/s.
GPU clock speeds are 2255 MHz (game clock speed) to 2565 MHz (boost) in the faster of the two modes the card provides. However, this is the mode labelled OC. The other slower mode, labelled STD/Silent, has a game clock of 2210 MHz and a boost clock of 2520 MHz. These clock speeds are more likely to match the reference clock speeds that the RX 7800 XT is officially supposed to use without overclocking. However, it’s possible that some overclocking is already included in this profile as well, so take these clock speeds as a rough guide.
This particular card will be cooled by three 100mm fans (with rings for better stability, and Japanese twin ball bearings), including a 0dB mode that switches the fans on from 60°C. It uses a VRM with 11+3+1 DrMOS phases for the GPU and 2+1 phases for GDDR6. The PCB is 14-layer and the card has two BIOSes as well as some ARGB backlighting.
What PowerColor hasn’t revealed yet is the card’s TDP. Since this is an OC model, it might be higher than the reference anyway, but unfortunately the leak doesn’t give even such an indirect indication. The question is whether the card will have a TDP closer to 200W, which would be welcome, or more likely somewhere around 250W and above (the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is supposed to be a 260W card). It could probably be more than 225W at the very least, since the power supply is via two eight-pin connectors. Granted, this could also be caused by the PCB being shared with the RX 7900 GRE (which we assume could be the case).
The specs also reveal that the graphics card will use the classic PCI Express 4.0 interface, if anyone was wondering that AMD could perhaps get PCI Express 5.0 working in this newer GPU. While it’s not stated that the interface will have 16 lanes, we don’t expect it to be cut down. PowerColor’s card will have a standard output lineup with three DisplayPorts 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1.
One interesting note is that only two ports can use the higher DP 2.1 speeds at the same time, when you plug in the third port, it can only run on the DP 1.4a standard. Presumably this is some limitation of the GPU output block used by Navi 32. Unfortunately, it is not communicated whether the graphics card can do UHBR13.5 ports or just UHBR10 with lower bandwidth, like the Navi 33-based Radeon Pro W7600 and W7500 that were just released. The maximum resolution is 7680×4320 pixels according to the specifications. Hopefully it will be able to drive LCDs at a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz (which is probably the biggest benefit of DP 2.1), but the exact max refresh frequency figure is missing.
The price is not yet known
PowerColor’s website also – as you might expect – shows nothing about the suggested price. This will of course be critical for this card and will determine how interesting it will be for gamers. Even if we ignore GeForce graphics cards, this GPU segment has extreme competitive pressure from the presence of older models like the Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT, which can now be had at various discounts.
Sources: VideoCardz, PowerColor
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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