RX 7700 XT Revisit – ft. Gigabyte, PowerColor & Sapphire

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte RX 7700 XT Gaming OC3. PowerColor RX 7700 XT Hellhound4. Sapphire RX 7700 XT Pure5. Testing Methodology6. Game Benchmarks7. Clock Speed8. GPU Temperatures9. Acoustics10. Noise-Normalised Temperatures11. Power Draw and Efficiency12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

It's been a year, almost to the day, since we first reviewed AMD's RX 7700 XT. While it was clearly faster than its Nvidia rivals at the time, we couldn't quite understand the appeal of this GPU given it was priced so closely to the superior RX 7800 XT. It's time to revisit the RX 7700 XT however and see if anything has changed, with a bit of help from the Gigabyte Gaming OC, PowerColor Hellhound and Sapphire Pure models…

With prices dropping across the board, some RX 7700 XT models can now be found for as little as £340 at the time of writing, down from the £430 MSRP that we saw at launch. That's a hefty discount and could go some way to making these GPUs more appealing.

We already looked at the Sapphire Pulse in our day 1 review, and today we are including the Gigabyte Gaming OC, PowerColor Hellhound and Sapphire Pure cards to see what they can bring to the table.

	RX 7900 XT	RX 7800 XT	RX 7700 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT
Architecture	RDNA 3	RDNA 3	RDNA 3	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2
Manufacturing Process	5nm GCD + 6nm MCD	5nm GCD + 6nm MCD	5nm GCD + 6nm MCD	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	57.7 billion	28.1 billion	28.1 billion	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	17.2 billion
Die Size	300 mm² GCD 220 mm² MCD	200 mm² GCD 150 mm² MCD	200 mm² GCD 150 mm² MCD	519 mm²	519 mm²	336 mm²
Compute Units	84	60	54	72	60	40
Ray Accelerators	84	60	54	72	60	40
Stream Processors	5376	3840	3456	4608	3840	2560
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2000 MHz	2124 MHz	2171 MHz	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 2424MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2400 MHz	Up to 2430 MHz	Up to 2544 MHz	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 2581MHz
ROPs	192	96	96	128	96	64
AMD Infinity Cache	80MB	64MB	48MB	128MB	128MB	96MB
Memory	20GB GDDR6 20Gbps	16GB GDDR6 19.5 Gbps	12GB GDDR6 18Gbps	16GB GDDR6 16Gbps	16GB GDDR6 16Gbps	12GB GDDR6 16Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	800 GB/s	624 GB/s	432 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	384 GB/s
Memory Interface	320-bit	256-bit	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit
Board Power	315W	263W	245W	300W	250W	230W

First, let's take a quickly recap the specs. Unlike the smallest RDNA 3 GPU – the RX 7600 – AMD has made a return to its chiplet-based design for the RX 7700 XT, as we initially saw last year with the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. This time around, the 7700 XT offers a 200mm² Graphics Compute Die (GCD) using TSMC's 5nm process, flanked by four 150 mm² Memory Compute Dies (MCDs) built on TSMC's 6nm node. One of those MCDs is disabled however, as the 7700 XT is not a full implementation of Navi 32.

Internally though, the compute makeup hasn't been radically changed. The cut-down Navi 32 silicon deployed here packs in 54 Compute Units, each of which houses 64 Stream Processors, for a total of 3456 shaders. There's also 54 Ray Accelerators – one per CU – and 96 ROPs.

As for clock speed, this remains high with the RX 7700 XT, with AMD touting a boost of up to 2544MHz, though a slightly lower game clock of 2171MHz. The Pulse we tested on day 1 is clocked at reference speeds, however the Gigabyte Gaming OC and PowerColor Hellhound tout a 2599MHz boost, while the Sapphire Pure is rated for 2584MHz.

Meanwhile, the memory configuration is almost identical to the previous generation RX 6700 XT. We still find 12GB GDDR6 operating over a 192-bit interface, but this time the memory clocks in at 18Gbps, up from 16Gbps. This gives a memory bandwidth of 432 GB/s, though AMD claims an ‘effective' bandwidth of 1995.3 GB/s due to the 64MB of 2nd Gen Infinity cache.

Power draw for the RX 7700 XT is rated at 245W Total Board Power (TBP), though AMD pointed out to us that this is an ‘up to' figure. We are using our well-established GPU power testing methodology in this review, so read on for our most detailed power and efficiency testing yet.

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