Packaging
The Card
XFX is reusing their design philosophy from the Radeon RX 6000 Series. The main color theme is black with metallic highlights. I have to say I really like the sleek looks of the card, and the matte metal surface. Both the main cooler shroud and backplate are made from thick metal.
Dimensions of the card are 34.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 1433 g.
Installation requires three slots in your system. The card's width is 57 mm.
Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA 2 had 1.4a) and one 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.
All AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT designs use dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
XFX has placed a dual BIOS switch near the monitor outputs. Both BIOSes are identical.
Teardown
The thermal solution on the XFX RX 7800 XT uses a vapor-chamber base, paired with 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. Note how it curves around the card, which looks very nice.