AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference-design isn't a first-party product with limited availability like the NVIDIA Founders Edition; but rather a classic reference-design that's sold by AMD's add-in board partners under their marquee (without sticking their own labels on the product). AMD and its partners internally refer to reference-design cards as "MBA cards" (made by AMD cards). The company gave us a technical overview of the reference-design PCB. As with every reference AMD PCB for the past several generations, the RX 7900 XTX PCB has a premium selection of components. The card uses an expensive 14-layer PCB with 4 additional layers of 2-oz copper. 14-layer PCBs are typically used with enterprise-grade products, and graphics cards typically tend to have PCB layer counts of around 10. The PCB also uses ITEQ IT-170GRA epoxy and laminate materials, which enable a glass transition temperature (Tg) of 175 °C (no, the GPU won't get anywhere near as hot).

The reference-design RX 7900 XTX PCB draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. With the typical board power of the RX 7900 XTX rated at 355 W, this falls inside the 375 total power-draw capability when you add up the 150 W input from the two connectors, and 75 W from the PCIe slot. AMD worked to minimize power-draw spikes at least from the PCIe slot. Excursions, if any, should be localized to the 8-pin power connectors. The card features 20-phase VRM solution, using "high efficiency" DrMOS power-stage phases (could be very high current). The "Navi 31" GPU is surrounded by 12 GDDR6 memory chips given the GPU's 384-bit memory interface. Two of these memory pads could end up unused on the RX 7900 XT, which has a 320-bit memory interface. Display outputs of the RX 7900 series include two standard-size DisplayPort 2.1, one USB type-C with DisplayPort passthrough; and one HDMI 2.1a.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX reference design graphics card features an innovative new real-time monitoring feature, the Fan Intake Temperature Sensors. The reference-design RX 7900 XTX cooler has the ability to report individual fan-speeds to software (which isn't new, given that each fan will independently connect to the PCB); but what's new is that each of the fans has a temperature sensor that can detect the temperature of the air as it's being drawn in, before reaching the heatsink.

The temperature measurement of the fan intake sensors should give you a fair idea of what is the ambient temperature inside your case. At this point we don't know if the feature is exclusive to the AMD reference design, or if the company has shared the know-how with its add-in board (AIB) partners to add to their custom-design products. This sensor should be accessible by AMD Software, the utilities included by AIB partners, and we will try to add ability to read from this sensor to TechPowerUp GPU-Z. The reference RX 7900 XTX cooler also features addressable RGB LEDs, first ever for a reference-design graphics card (they've had single-color lighting).

PowerColor put out its first teaser of a custom-design Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card, the RX 7900 XTX HellHound. The teaser is a back 3-quarter picture of the card, revealing its well-ventilated dual aluminium fin-stack heatsink and a triple fan setup, which make up a triple-slot cooling solution. The cooler's fans, and the HellHound logo on the backplate, are illuminated.

A striking aspect of this card is that it has the same set of power connectors as the AMD reference design, with just two 8-pin PCIe power connectors for a power-delivery capability of 375 W. It's possible that PowerColor is using a common board design for both the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT HellHound products. Besides the two power connectors, we spot a switch to control the LED illumination. There's another switch toward the front-end of the card, which works as a dual-BIOS selector.

Although we're over a month away from any kind of actual availability of AMD's just announced Radeon RX 7900 cards, ASUS has already shown off what is the first custom Radeon RX 7900-series cards. The two cards are the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XTX and unsurprisingly the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XT. ASUS has gone for what the company calls a 3.63-slot design and the TUF cards appear to be a fair bit taller than the AMD reference designs. ASUS has gone with larger fans, which requires a bigger cooler shroud and the company claims they provide 13.8 percent more airflow and an eight percent increase in static pressure compared to its last gen—presumably Radeon RX 6900—cards, while maintaining the same noise level.

ASUS claims to have added wider vents on the backplate to help improve airflow and to have increased the total heat dissipation area by 22.8 percent, whatever that actually means, as ASUS didn't show off the rear of its cards. The TUF Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XTX sports three 8-pin power connectors and has a 17+4 power stage design. Unlike AMD's reference cards, the ASUS TUF cards won't have a USB-C port at the rear, as the company has gone for three DP 2.1 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port. ASUS didn't reveal clock speeds and the remaining specs are as announced by AMD.

AMD today announced the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT gaming graphics cards debuting its next-generation RDNA3 graphics architecture. The two new cards come at $999 and $899—basically targeting the $1000 high-end premium price point.Both cards will be available on December 13th, not only the AMD reference design, which is sold through AMD.com, but also custom-design variants from the many board partners on the same day. AIBs are expected to announce their products in the coming weeks.The RX 7900 XTX is priced at USD $999, and the RX 7900 XT is $899, which is a surprisingly small difference of only $100, for a performance difference that will certainly be larger, probably in the 20% range. Both Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT are using the PCI-Express 4.0 interface, Gen 5 is not supported with this generation. The RX 7900 XTX has a typical board power of 355 W, or about 95 W less than that of the GeForce RTX 4090. The reference-design RX 7900 XTX uses conventional 8-pin PCIe power connectors, as would custom-design cards, when they come out. AMD's board partners will create units with three 8-pin power connectors, for higher out of the box performance and better OC potential. The decision to not use the 16-pin power connector that NVIDIA uses was made "well over a year ago", mostly because of cost, complexity and the fact that these Radeons don't require that much power anyway.

Here's what is possibly the very first picture of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX RDNA3 graphics card. AMD engineering samples and prototypes tend to use red color PCBs, which is what this card is. It reveals what could be the final design of the reference cooling solution for the card, and it seems to match the teasers the company put out in its Ryzen 7000-series launch event.

The RX 7900 XTX cooling solution design builds on that of its predecessor. The card itself has 3 slots thick, but slightly longer than the RX 6900 XT. The aluminium fin-stack heatsink is bulkier than the one on the RX 6900 XT cooler, and appears to be bursting out of the vents. It stretches out to the edges of the cooler shroud. The bulge toward the tail-end could be housing the tips of the heat-pipes. The prototype card has two 8-pin PCIe power inputs. There's no backplate, because the PCB has several headers in place for diagnostics and developmental use by AIBs and OEMs.

AMD's next-generation Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards based on the RDNA3 graphics architecture, are expected to launch in early-December 2022, according to greymon55, a reliable source with AMD leaks. The cards will be unveiled at a media event to be held on November 3, 2022, with market availability following a month after (between 1st to 5th December). The company is expected to take a top-down product-stack release cycle similar to that of NVIDIA, with the release of two of its top SKUs, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT. Both these cards are based on the 5 nm Navi 31 MCM GPU. This will be AMD's first client-graphics MCM GPU with more than one logic die. The company has a decade of experience with MCMs, but past generations have been one logic die surrounded with on-package HBM. Navi 31 has on-package logic chiplets, but discrete GDDR6 memory, like most other GPUs in the market today. It's rumored that the company is targeting a 100% performance uplift over the previous-generation, which means team-red is on the prowl to compete with NVIDIA's fastest SKUs, including the RTX 4090 and upcoming RTX 4080.

AMD is reportedly bringing back the "XTX" brand extension to the main marketing names of its upcoming Radeon RX 7000-series SKUs. The company had, until now, reserved the "XTX" moniker for internal use, to denote SKUs that max out all hardware available on a given silicon. The RX 7000-series introduce the company's next-generation RDNA3 graphics architecture, and will see the company introduce its chiplets packaging design to the client-graphics space. The next-generation "Navi 31" GPU will likely be the first of its kind: while multi-chip module (MCM) GPUs aren't new, this would be the first time that multiple logic chips would sit on a single package for client GPUs. AMD has plenty of experience with MCM GPUs, but those have been single logic chips surrounded by memory stacks. "Navi 31" uses multiple logic chips on a package; which is then wired to conventional discrete GDDR6 memory devices like any other client GPU.

The rumored Radeon RX 7900 XTX is features 12,288 stream processors, likely across two logic tiles that contain the SIMD components. These tiles are [for now] rumored to be built on the TSMC N5 (5 nm EUV) foundry process. The Display CoreNext (DCN), and Video CoreNext (VCN) components, as well as the GDDR6 memory controllers, will be built on separate chiplets that are likely built on TSMC N6 (6 nm). The "Navi 31" has a 384-bit wide memory interface. This is 384-bit and not "2x 192-bit," because the logic tiles don't have memory interfaces of their own, but rely on memory controller tiles shared between the two logic tiles, much in the same as a dual-channel DDR4 memory interface being shared between the two 8-core CPU chiplets on a Ryzen 5950X processor.

Seasonic has recently updated their wattage calculator tool to include the unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7000 series however it is currently unknown if the power information comes directly from AMD. The RX 7900 XT and 7800 XT are both listed as requiring a 750 W power while for the RX 7700 XT a 650 W supply is recommended with these values all aligning with those of the corresponding Radeon RX 6000 models. The RDNA 3 architecture of these new graphics cards is expected to increase performance by up to 40% according to recent leaks with AMD confirming they are targeting a 50% performance/watt increase over RDNA 2.

AMD's RDNA 2 architecture provided a significant performance increase for the company and allowed them to re-enter the high-end GPU market. AMD hopes to keep this momentum up with the launch of its RX 7900 XT card featuring the RDNA 3 architecture which will reportedly bring a further performance increase of at least 40% over the RX 6900 XT with internal projections as high as 60% - 80%. The RDNA 3 architecture is expected to feature a chiplet-based design with discrete I/O and compute dies similar to Ryzen processors. AMD has officially said they are targetting a 50% performance/watt increase over RDNA 2 with the new architecture which lends weight to this rumor. The RX 7900 XT is not expected to launch in the foreseeable future so take these rumors with a healthy dose of skepticism but if these performance improvements are anything close to accurate AMD could have a winner with RDNA 3.