Gigabyte’s Beastly Radeon RX 7900 XTX And 7900 XT Cards Bring 2.68GHz Boost Clock
We're just a couple of days out from the December 13th launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon GPUs based on its RDNA 3 architecture. The first will be the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the similarly-named but slightly-slower Radeon RX 7900 XT. When AMD announced these, it rated the faster card for a 2.3 GHz game clock and 2.5 GHz boost clock. That's a far cry from the 3GHz that the GPU was apparently designed for, but partner cards look like they're getting a bit closer.
As an example, we offer the Gigabyte Aorus Radeon RX 7900 XTX Elite 24G. The product pages for Gigabyte's new Radeons are all up, and this top-end model has been marked down for a game clock of 2.51 GHz, up 200 MHz from the AMD reference design. Meanwhile, Gigabyte specs the card for a best-case Boost clock of 2.68 GHz, which is a solid step toward that 3 GHz number.
To assist with these higher clocks, the card comes with an extra eight-pin PCIe power connector, giving it three of the plugs. Naturally, we can expect that the power consumption and heat output of this card will be well ahead of AMD's reference design, although Gigabyte declines to define a power target on the specs sheet. The company does recommend an 850W power supply, though.
AMD's reference card is significantly more svelte.
For reference, AMD's own Radeon RX 7900 XTX cards are rated for a 355W TDP, and unsurprisingly, only take a pair of 8-pin power connectors. The company recommends an 800-watt power supply, which isn't really much different from the Gigabyte recommendation given most vendors' preference for "x50"-watt breakpoints in their power supply lineups.
We don't have one of these fancy Gigabyte cards on hand, but in case you missed it, we did an unboxing video for the two RDNA 3 GPUs that we do have in house. Marco's been burning the midnight oil testing out the new GPUs, and we'll have those numbers for you as soon as AMD says we can share them, so stay tuned.
