Alleged AMD RX 7000 (RDNA 3) reference card leaked and it’s already better than RTX 4090

Considering the horror of the recent Nvidia RTX 4090 power connector fiasco, potential buyers who are afraid of burning up their cards are waiting to see what AMD has to offer. The wait isn’t long as Team Red has an announcement planned for November 3rd

For those who don’t know this issue, a lot of Nvidia RTX 4090 12-pin connectors are breaking and in the worst case scenario, they are catching fire.

Fortunately for those afraid to go ahead with a 4090 purchase, AMD has already confirmed that this type of power connector cannot be used due to the many dangers associated with it. The confirmation came via SVP and GM of AMD Radeon, Scott Herkelman:

So with the launch and official confirmation that no 12-pin will be present on the next generation AMD cards, it’s only a matter of time before reference card designs pop up. We have them now courtesy of their Twitter account HXL. It looks like there are two card designs with one using the usual cooling shroud with the “R” representing the Radeon. The other has an interesting logo although they both seem to feature the same axial fan design.

Of course more interesting is the apparent use of the more common dual 8-pin power connectors currently present in the RX 6000 series, just as Herkelman said. This is a tried and tested approach that works and it may be wise for AMD to reuse this design. Dual 8-pins will provide the AMD RDNA 3 reference GPU with a power headroom of 375W. This is far less than the RTX 4090’s 450W TGP (Total Graphics Power).

In terms of horsepower, RDNA 3 is expected to make a big jump in general raster performance, though Nvidia is expected to be ahead in ray tracing performance.

Source and image: HXL (Twitter)