Packaging

The Card

Sapphire Pulse design for the RX 7900 GRE follows the company's design theme for the Radeon RX 7900 Pulse, but there are subtle differences in both cooler and shroud, when compared to the RX 7900 XT Pulse. On the back you'll find a metal backplate, which is designed to let some airflow through the cooler.


Dimensions of the card are 32.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1107 g.


Installation requires three 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 classic dual 8-pin plus PCIe slot power input config, altogether rated for 375 W maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12V-2x6 connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw.

Teardown

Sapphire's card lets you remove and replace the fan assembly without touching the thermal paste. This makes it easy to fix the fans after a few years when their bearings are worn out.


The thermal solution on the card has five heatpipes. The main heatsink 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.