AMD RX 7900 XTX Review

1. Introduction2. Meet the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Cyberpunk 20778. Days Gone9. Dying Light 210. Far Cry 611. Forza Horizon 512. God of War13. Horizon Zero Dawn14. Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Resident Evil Village17. Total War: Warhammer III18. Performance Summary (12-Game Average)19. Cost Per Frame Analysis20. Ray Tracing: Cyberpunk 207721. Ray Tracing: Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered22. Ray Tracing: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition23. Ray Tracing: Resident Evil: Village24. Clock Speed25. GPU Temperatures26. Acoustics27. Power Draw: 1080p28. Power Draw: 1440p29. Power Draw: 2160p (4K)30. Performance per Watt: 1080p31. Performance per Watt: 1440p32. Performance per Watt: 2160p (4K)33. Total System Power Draw34. Overclocking35. Closing Thoughts36. View All Pages

For our manual overclocking tests, we used AMD's built in tuning tool. Our best results are as below.

Our best result came with a 2500MHz minimum GPU frequency and 2900MHz maximum. We increased the VRAM slider to 2730MHz.

This didn't result in much extra frequency for the 7900 XTX, as its average clock speed increased to 2657, so only about an 80MHz improvement.

Gains from this overclock were minimal at best, in the 3-4% region.

That's despite power draw increasing from 354W up to 415.7W when testing Cyberpunk 2077 – a 17% increase.

Interestingly, when reviewing the data logs for this overclock, I noticed that the GPU hot spot temperature had ramped to 100C, peaking at 102C, even with fan speed at 100%. As this is the only 7900 XTX I've tested, it's hard to say if this applies to all XTXs, but I suspect the 415W load is too much for the reference cooler to handle, so clock speed is thermally limited. We'd hope this won't be the case for partner cards which likely have more robust cooling solutions, but only time will tell.

Launch Day Update: AMD has since gotten in touch and given us the following recommended settings for tweaking the XTX :

Undervolt -125mV, +100MHz memclk and +15% powerlimit

It's important to note that we did not try undervolting during our overclocking process, purely due to time constraints, but that could well help the thermals we observed above, while also providing more performance. We will be sure to test this in more detail when we assess partner cards.

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