Packaging

The Card

The Radeon RX 7600 follows the design theme established by the company's previous Radeon RX 7000 cards. The main color is black with a few small red highlights. The three red painted cooler fins stand for "3" in RDNA 3—a nice touch. This cooler is all-metal, both the main heatsink and the backplate.


Dimensions of the card are 20.5 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 758 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and two HDMI 2.1a (same as RDNA 2).

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with two independent hardware units that can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. There's support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


The card uses a single 8-pin power input, rated for 150 W maximum power, plus 75 W over the PCIe slot.

8-Pin won't Connect

When I first installed the RX 7600 I noticed that plugging the power cable in didn't feel 100% right (easy after doing it 10,000+ times in my life). After taking a second look I realized that the PCIe 8-pin didn't go all the way in. It took me a few minutes to figure out that the problem is that the backplate is expanding too far to the PCIe connector area.


Due the way some 6+2 pins are designed they won't fit, because there's a plastic lip that makes contact with the backplate, so the connection can't be made properly. With some other cables in my labs there's no issue—these don't have the raised lip. Roughly 20% of the cables I have here are affected. This is clearly an AMD issue—I've never encountered it on any other card before.


One solution is to remove the backplate and run the card without it, now the plug goes in all the way. Another option is to buy an 8-pin PCIe extension cable without the lip, or try to cut it off from your connector.

Teardown

AMD's thermal solution uses a copper baseplate and two heatpipes to keep the card cool. The main cooler also provides cooling for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.