Image of alleged AMD Radeon RX 7900 reference design
The first clear images of an AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics card have been shared online. A generally reliable Twitter-based leaker HXL Tencent-owned Chinese social media portal and instant messaging platform ‘QQ’ uploaded some pictures with credit. It’s exciting to see what could be the first proper look at one of AMD’s upcoming top-end RDNA3 chiplet-based desktop graphics cards, but add a pinch of salt to what is essentially an engineering sample design.
The first image shared, above, shows what looks like the Radeon RX 6900 XT reference design from AMD on top of the next-gen Radeon. Immediately you’ll see the new card, probably an RX 7900 XT or XTX, slightly larger than the previous-gen equivalent. It might feature a larger cooler due to a higher TDP, but it’s not really possible to draw that conclusion from such a figure.
Looking at the fans, we know the reference RX 6900 XT fan is 78mm in diameter. (This is based on our own measurements.) The 7900 card’s fan, whatever it’s called, seems a bit large. Scaling with respect to the 6900 XT suggests a fan size of 82-83mm. It’s still not particularly large compared to the non-reference cards we’ve reviewed. For example the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix uses a 104mm fan and the previous gen Asus RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming has a 97mm fan. Both cards have a 450W TBP rating, though, so big fans might be warranted.
Moving on to a top-down image comparison, where the alleged new Radeon RX 7000 graphics card is the bottom of the two images, there are some more interesting morsels to digest if these images are true. First, the new card (with the red stripe), is still powered by two 8-pin power connectors. No change where there is no need. This is an indication that the rumored 350W TDP is not far off.
The maximum draw for such a configuration should be 150W per 8-pin connector plus 75W through the PCIe socket (375W). A manufacturer will want to safely lower this value. Additionally, the RDNA 3’s alleged power efficiency means it doesn’t need to litter the design with 8-pin ports or go for the troublesome 16-pin solution Nvidia and partners have migrated with the GeForce RTX 4090.
Other things we can see from the top-down image are that the RX 7900 XT/XTX features a development PCB. The PCB is not covered by a backplate like a premium consumer design and has many extended pins that developers can use for tasks such as direct monitoring, diagnostics and hardware programming.
AMD has lined up a live streamed RDNA 3 launch event for this Thursday. We should get a lot more information about the launch model, the upcoming range of RX 7000 cards and the rollout. About the latest information from rumorville presence It suggests there will be about a month between Thursday’s event and third party review/retail.