Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Taichi White is a special edition of the company's top air-cooled graphics card that's suitable for boutique gaming PC builds with an all-white theme. This is ASRock's first such graphics card, although the white-theme can be had with the company's Taichi Carrara series motherboards, such as the Z790 Taichi Carrara and the X670E Taichi Carrara. We have also reviewed the regular ASRock RX 7900 XTX Taichi OC a while ago, this review is the white version. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the fastest graphics card from Team-Red, and rocks the latest AMD RDNA 3 graphics architecture. The company is promising to repeat a generational 50% performance/Watt increase like it had with the RX 6000 series, which would put the company back in competition with NVIDIA's fastest GeForce RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs, such as the RTX 4080, and occasionally even the RTX 4090.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture debuts the world's first chiplets-based gaming GPU. The "Navi 31" ASIC at the heart of the RX 7900 XTX sees the core number-crunching and graphics rendering machinery of the GPU placed on a large central die based on the 5 nm process, called the Graphics Compute Die (GCD), while the parts of the GPU that don't benefit as much from the switch to the latest foundry process, namely the Infinity Cache memory, and the memory controllers, are disintegrated into six chiplets surrounding the GCD. Each chiplet has a 16 MB segment of the GPU's 96 MB of Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit GDDR6 memory interface; and is hence called the Memory Cache Die (MCD). There are six of these, making up the GPU's 384-bit GDDR6 memory interface, handling 24 GB of memory.



The RDNA 3 graphics architecture debuts a new-generation Compute Unit with dual instruction issue-rate SIMD components, support for new math formats, AI acceleration integrated at the CU-level, and 2nd generation Ray Accelerators that improve ray tracing performance over the previous generation. AMD claims a 17.5% IPC uplift over RDNA 2 compute units, which when combined with generationally increased clock-speeds, and a 20% increase in CU counts over "Navi 21," form the bedrock of the performance uplift over the previous generation, with the company claiming to have retained the streak of 50% performance/Watt uplift with each generation of RDNA. With a 50% wider memory interface and proportionately larger memory, the GPU's reliance on the Infinity Cache isn't as much, and so it is reduced in size to 96 MB (compared to 128 MB on the RX 6900 XT). AMD is also using faster 20 Gbps-rated GDDR6 memory, which means the total memory bandwidth is now all the way up to 960 GB/s, a massive 87% generational increase.

As we mentioned earlier, the ASRock Taichi White is a color-scheme based variant of the company's original RX 7900 XTX Taichi OC. Both cards offer the same factory overclocked speed of 2510 MHz game clocks, and 2680 MHz boost (compared to 2269 MHz game and 2499 MHz boost); while the memory is left untouched at 20 Gbps (GDDR6-effective). Matte white replaces gunmetal-gray on all the gunmetal-colored bits of the original RX 7900 XTX Taichi, including the cooler shroud, the fan impellers, and the backplate. The underlying PCB is still black, but that's barely noticeable. The card draws power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, for a total power input capability of 525 W, which means the GPU enjoys much better boost frequency residency, particularly to sustain the factory-overclock. ASRock is pricing the RX 7900 XTX Taichi White at $1,120, a small $40 premium over the original Taichi price of $1080, and $120 higher than the $999 AMD MSRP.