TechPowerUp's resident GPU reviewer extraordinaire—W1zzard—has grappled with a handful of custom design AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB models. Team Red and its board partners are pushing a proper/widespread Western release of the formerly China market-exclusive "Golden Rabbit Edition" GPU. TPU's initial review selection of three Sapphire cards and a lone ASRock Steel Legend OC variant garnered two Editor's Choice Awards, and two Highly Recommended badges. Sapphire's Radeon RX 7900 GRE Nitro+ was also honored with a "...But Expensive" tag, due to its MSRP of $600—the premium tier design was one of last year's launch day models in China. Western reviewers have latched onto a notable GRE overclocking limitation—all of TPU's review samples were found to have "overclocking artificially limited by AMD." Steve Walton of Hardware Unboxed has investigated whether the GRE's inherent heavily limited power specification was less of an issue on Sapphire's Nitro+ variant—check out his "re-re-review" video below.

The higher board power design—305 W OC TGP limit and 351 W total board power—is expected to exhibit "up to 10% higher performance than Radeon RX 7800 XT" according to VideoCardz, but falls short. TPU's W1zzard found the GRE Nitro+ card's maximum configurable clock of 2803 MHz: "Overclocking worked quite well on our card, we gained over 8% in real-life performance, which is well above what we usually see, but less than other GRE cards tested today. Sapphire's factory OC eats into OC potential, and maximizes performance out of the box instead. Unfortunately AMD restricted overclocking on their card quite a lot, probably to protect sales of the RX 7900 XT. While NVIDIA doesn't have any artificial limitations for overclockers, AMD keeps limiting the slider lengths for many models, this is not a gamer-friendly approach. For the GRE, both GPU and memory overclocking could definitely go higher based on the results that we've seen in our reviews today." An AMD representative has contacted Hardware Unboxed, in reaction to yesterday's Update review—the GRE's overclocking limitation is a "bug," and a fix is in the works. This situation is a bit odd, given that the Golden Rabbit Edition is not a brand-new product.Hardware Unboxed: "Were Mistakes Made? Radeon RX 7900 GRE Review Update."


"AMD has told me that extremely limited overclocking of the GRE cards is a bug, and it will be addressed shortly."

• Steve Walton, Hardware Unboxed