Packaging

The Card

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT follows the same design theme as the XTX, it looks fantastic, but is just a little bit smaller. AMD has refined their design approach even further, the card is dominated by black in various shades of gray. On the metal backplate you get some red highlights, and three fins on the side have been painted red to represent the third generation of the RDNA architecture.


The Radeon RX 7900 XT has no RGB lighting, the gray/white highlights on the front cooler are fixed-color plastic.


Dimensions of the card are 28.0 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 1533 g.


Here's various comparisons to other relevant cards. The RX 7900 Series is clearly much more compact than the offerings from NVIDIA.


The Radeon RX 7900 XT is slightly smaller than the XTX.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and one HDMI 2.1a (same as RDNA 2). The USB-C port that you see is not a classic USB port that you can attach storage to, it only supports DisplayPort 2.1 passthrough + PD, for use with VR.

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 classic dual 8-pin power input config, rated for 375 W of maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, rated for up to 600 W of power draw. This makes it easy to install the AMD card in older systems, but it does limit their maximum current delivery capability. Some custom board designs of the RX 7900 XTX will have three power inputs.

Teardown

Taking the RX 7900 XT apart is really easy, it's straightforward to disassemble and maintain.


The main heatsink provides cooling for the GPU chip, memory chips and VRM circuitry.


After removing the fan assembly, we can see that AMD is using a very large vapor-chamber that has fins directly attached to it. There's no heatpipes in use.


The backplate is made from thick metal and of excellent build quality. It protects the card against damage during installation and handling.