Packaging

The Card

Sapphire Pulse design for the RX 7900 Series follows the design theme of the previous generation—black is the dominant color with red highlights. On the back, you'll find a metal backplate, which is designed to let some airflow through the cooler.


Dimensions of the card are 31.5 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 1420 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 power input config, rated for 375 W maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw.

Teardown

Sapphire's thermal solution provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also the memory chips and voltage regulator circuitry. There's five heatpipes on the cooler.


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