Radeon RX 7900 XTX Reference Design Unboxing

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX RDNA 3 retail box looks awesome and is practical, made of hard cardboard, with a clamshell opening mechanism. As you open it, you're greeted by a message on the top half that reads "Welcome to the Red Team," and the card itself in the lower half, and that's basically it, in the box—no cables or adapters. To be clear, this package will be available in the retail channel, through the AMD website, as a directly-branded product, and the package isn't some fancy media kit that's exclusive to the press.


The Radeon RX 7900 series reference designs are an evolution on the RX 6900 series. The two-tone silver+black makes way for a mostly-black scheme with some gunmetal accents. The cooler shroud and backplate are made entirely of a die-cast aluminium alloy, and have a solid premium feel. While the looks and aesthetics may be subjective, the build-quality of these cards are right in the league of NVIDIA's Founders Edition cards.


The 3-quarter angle shots show you the design changes of the RX 7900 XTX over the RX 6900 XT—a curvy design that maximizes the volume of the heatsink inside the cooling solution, replacing the boxy, inward-sloping design of the RX 6900 XT. The heatsink appears bulging out, and is definitely larger in surface area than the its predecessor's. Besides gunmetal, there are subtle red bits across the card. Three of the fins of the fin-stack heatsink are painted red to denote this card being the 3rd generation of the RDNA graphics architecture (RDNA 3).


The embossed Radeon logo on the rear I/O shield makes way for a spot for regulatory markings, which we feel is nicely done. You're not going to crane your neck behind your case all that often, and you'd rather not have ugly regulatory stickers on the visible parts of your card. The tail-end has mounting holes for workstation chassis retention braces.

AMD cannot stop talk about beating NVIDIA to DisplayPort 2.1, an advanced new connector that enables much higher resolutions and refresh rates through a single cable than DisplayPort 1.4, which the competing GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs use. The reference design RX 7900 XTX provides two standard-size DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, one HDMI 2.1a, and a USB type-C port with DisplayPort 2.1 passthrough.


An interesting new feature being introduced with this card is air intake temperature measurement. This lets the card report the temperature of the air as it is being drawn into the card from the fans, before it comes in contact with the heatsink, to the software. At the hardware level, this is just a thermal diode that sticks out from behind the fan hub of one of the three fans (the one at the tail-end). This little stub is barely visible unless you look closely. Only the XTX has this feature, the XT does not have the intake temperature sensor.


Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Radeon RX 7900 series is the lower typical board power compared to their NVIDIA rivals. While the RTX 4080 uses a 450 W-rated 16-pin 12VHPWR connector, the RTX 4090 uses a 600 W-rated version of this connector, and both the Founders Edition and custom-design cards include an adapter that converts 8-pin PCIe power connectors into a 16-pin 12VHPWR (3x 8-pin for the RTX 4080 and 4x 8-pin for the RTX 4090). There has been some controversy over the reliability of these power adapters, and AMD seems to be cashing in on some of it. Both the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT reference designs come with just two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, with standard connectors right on the card—no adapters. This power configuration is rated for 375 W (connectors + slot-power). The RX 7900 XTX has a board power rating of 350 W, which should fit within these specs. Much like NVIDIA "Ada," AMD RDNA 3 sticks to PCI-Express 4.0 x16 as the host interface, despite both Intel and AMD having desktop platforms with PCIe Gen 5 now.