This is my ninth review of a Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX Navi 31 card, I've tested all the other major models.

Positioning & Architecture
The XFX Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is a highly customized variant of the RX 7900 XTX, using a stronger VRM design and featuring triple 8-pin power inputs paired with a powerful cooler. I reviewed XFX's predecessor—the Merc 310—during my launch-day coverage of the RX 7900 XTX. Compared to that, the "Magnetic Air" model comes with magnetic fans and an improved cooling solution, but uses the same PCB design and VRM. The clock frequency specs are identical, too. Do note that there's quite a bit of variance in the leakage current of the Navi GPU, so even though both cards are powered by "Navi 31," at same clock and voltage targets, actual clock and voltage values will differ slightly because there's a feedback loop taking into account, power, heat and other factors.

AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX was launched in December 2022 and introduced the world's first graphics cards based on a chiplet design architecture. Why is that a big deal you ask? Making large chips is expensive, more expensive than making several small chips. AMD realized that years ago and built their Ryzen CPUs using the chiplet approach, which is the foundation for the company's tremendous comeback in the CPU space. Using chiplets gives another major advantage—you can combine multiple production processes. For the case of the Navi 31 GPU that powers the Radeon RX 7900 Series, the central compute die is fabricated on TSMC's leading 5 nanometer node, because efficiency greatly matters for its design. On the other hand, the memory-cache dies don't put out as much heat, and contain analog technology, which doesn't scale as well with process size. That's why AMD decided to build those with 6 nanometer tech, making them cheaper to produce.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD's flagship for this generation—it comes with the full Navi 31 GPU: 6144 cores, 96 compute units, 24 GB GDDR6 and six MCDs with 96 MB of L3 cache. RDNA 3 also introduces an upgraded display engine with support for DisplayPort 2.1, allowing higher refresh rates on upcoming 4K and 8K displays, and you also get support for hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding—the video format of the future.

Performance
Averaged over our whole 25-game test suite at 4K resolution, with RT off, the factory-overclocked XFX Magnetic Air has a 2% performance lead over the AMD reference design. These gains increase the performance uplift against the RTX 4080 Super to 5%, and the XFX card is 7% faster than the older RTX 4080 non-Super. For rasterization, this card is definitely superior to the RTX 4080 Series. Just like other custom designs, the performance increase of the factory overclock isn't huge, but it's still a welcome improvement. The gap to RTX 4090 is now 21%, compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, the XFX card is 23% faster and the increase over the RTX 3090 is 39%. The XTX's smaller brother, the RX 7900 XT, is 18% behind and the RX 7900 GRE is around 30% slower.

With this review we're introducing our updated H2 2024 test system, which adds several new games, a new MSI Z790 Carbon Wi-Fi II motherboard, a new case from DarkFlash and Arctic's newest Liquid Freezer III. As expected, we've retested all comparison cards with the newest drivers.

Ray Tracing
Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a formidable choice for gaming at 4K, with maximum details and 1440p at high-refresh-rate. You can crank up everything, and you'll still run at over 60 FPS. Things are different when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XTX is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. On average, the RTX 4080 Super is around 25% faster than the RX 7900 XTX with ray tracing enabled, which isn't monumental, but definitely more than what I would have expected. I think everyone agrees that ray tracing is the future, and just disagrees on how quickly that future is happening. If you're part of the "I want this now" camp, then you should preferentially consider the 4080 Super or RTX 4090. On the other hand, if you feel like ray tracing is just minor additional eye candy, that comes with a huge performance hit, then you can happily grab the RX 7900 XTX. That's not to say that AMD's new cards are useless with ray tracing, but if you consider the differences in price and RT performance, then the value-proposition of RTX 4080 Super is considerably better for this scenario.

FSR, Frame Generation and DLSS
No doubt, RX 7900 XTX has a ton of horsepower and reached 60 FPS at 4K in almost all our games at maximum details. Still, you might want to go beyond that, to drive a high-refresh-rate monitor for example. One approach is to reduce the settings, another option is to enable upscaling using AMD FSR upscaling, which renders the game at a lower than native resolution and intelligently upscales the image for a minimal loss in image quality. FSR works well and is supported in many games, which makes the technology easy to use. AMD has recently released FSR 3 Frame Generation, which is only available in a few titles so far, but the list will definitely grow in the coming months. While AMD's FSR is hardware-agnostic—it works on all GPUs from all vendors—NVIDIA's DLSS requires certain hardware units, which is a strong selling point for NVIDIA. While an NVIDIA card will give you the ability to run all currently available upscalers; DLSS, FSR and XeSS, owning a Radeon card means you won't be able to use upscaling in games that support NVIDIA DLSS exclusively. NVIDIA DLSS 3 is the best frame generation technology available today, is usable combined with native rendering or DLAA (upscaling not required), and is only supported on NVIDIA GeForce 40 series cards. AMD thus developed AFMF, which is a driver-level frame-generation solution that works in nearly all games, but at lower quality, because it doesn't have knowledge of static objects like the HUD and text overlays, to exclude those from frame generation.

VRAM Size
Radeon RX 7900 XTX comes with an impressive 24 GB framebuffer, which is 8 GB more than what the RTX 4080 and RTX 4080 Super offer. More VRAM will not magically make all your games run faster, it only helps in those games that run out of VRAM. While it could be useful in some rare edge cases, for the vast majority of games it makes no significant difference. In our test suite there's not a single result where 24 GB RX 7900 XTX beats 16 GB RTX 4080 due to VRAM, not even with ray tracing enabled. Especially in the latter scenario, NVIDIA's more powerful RT hardware units make a difference. Due to the way AMD designed their GPU architecture, the VRAM size = number of memory chips also affects the bus width, which drives memory bandwidth. Since the L3 cache of the GPU is located in the MCD tiles, these VRAM choices also affect how much L3 cache is available to store data locally inside the GPU, so a costly data transfer to the memory chips can be avoided for highly popular data. That's why RX 7900 XTX has an additional performance advantage over the XT, on top of just shading units and clocks.

Magnetic Fans
As mentioned before, the highlight of the XFX card in this review is the magnetic fans. While other vendors offer removable shrouds, or removable fans that require careful use of a screwdriver, XFX went beyond that and lets you swap just the fan and its motor. The system works extremely well, it's by far the best experience I ever had when it comes to user-replaceable cooling. Everything is built from high-quality materials and feels well-thought-out when using. The strength of the magnets is enough to make sure the fans will never come off accidentally, yet they can be easily replaced without tools. This new design not only makes it easy to replace the fans should they break at some point, it's also a huge improvement when it comes to cleaning your card. Just pop the fans off, clean out all the dust and pop them back in!

Physical Design, Heat & Noise
I also like the XFX design theme of the card—a clean aesthetic with red highlights—perfect Radeon! Under the hood we found a slightly improved heatsink design compared to the Merc 310 predecessor. Our apples-to-apples heatsink comparison test confirms that at the same heat output and fan noise level, the Magnetic Air cooler runs 2°C cooler than the Merc 310. Other cards like the ASUS TUF, Sapphire Nitro and ASRock Taichi do still offer more powerful cooling solutions that are up to 8°C cooler in this test. Noise levels of the Magnetic Air are definitely improved over the Merc 310, but still louder than some competing models that run almost whisper-quiet.

Admirably, XTX breaks tradition and uses Honeywell PTM 7950, a phase change thermal compound that should provide superior performance and longevity over typical factory applied thermal pastes.

XFX includes a dual BIOS feature with their card, the second BIOS runs at higher power limit, which yields another percent or so in performance. Other vendors ship a "quiet" BIOS here, which is more useful in my opinion, as it provides a more meaningful choice than just higher power limits. As expected from a modern graphics card, the fans stop completely in idle, desktop work, Internet browsing and light gaming.

Power Consumption
One of AMD's goal with RDNA 3 has been to improve power consumption, and they achieved that. While their cards are not as energy-efficient as NVIDIA's Ada series, it's pretty close. Power consumption of the XFX custom-design however has increased by quite a bit compared to the AMD reference, 401 W vs 360 W, +11%, certainly not the end of the world, but significant enough to lower the overall energy efficiency and affect noise levels, because the GPU fans have to work harder to keep the chip cool.

Overclocking
Overclocking on the XFX RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is fantastic, we achieved a massive 13% real-life performance improvement, which is better than on any other RX 7900 XTX that we've tested so far. While the card still can't catch RTX 4090 in raster, it makes up quite a lot of ground. The actual mechanics of overclocking are fairly complicated on Navi 31, just follow what I wrote on the OC page, and you'll have a good starting point. Seeing all the pieces come together to unlock a large overclock with 13% real-life performance gained is pretty fun.

Pricing & Alternatives
High-end graphics card inventory levels are very stable these days and most models are in decent supply. According to XFX, the Magnetic Air model will sell for around $980, which is pretty close to the $1000 MSRP of the RX 7900 XTX. The most affordable RX 7900 XTX model on the market sells for just $910, which is almost 10% lower. While these cheaper models won't have the amazing magnetic fans, and the cooler will be weaker, they're still a significant savings option. Strong competition comes from NVIDIA's RTX 4080 Super, which currently sells for $970, with slightly weaker raster performance and slightly better energy efficiency, but much better FPS when ray tracing is enabled. On top of that there's support for DLSS, which is a unique selling point. Overclocking on the XFX card is better though, with similar noise levels, unless you opt for the more premium RTX 4080 Super cards around $1000, which still isn't that far away from XFX's price.

If XFX bring the price of their magnetic fans down a bit more, and it turns out that the overall RMA experience is more enjoyable, then this is definitely a step in the right direction. Now all we need is a standard, so that you can mix and match magnetic fans from all vendors, or use your own.