Friday, December 9th 2022
Gigabyte's and Sapphire's Radeon RX 7900-series Cards Pictured
Courtesy of VideoCardz, we now know what Gigabyte's and Sapphire's upcoming Radeon RX 7900-series cards will look like. Gigabyte will offer at least two different custom designed models, with the Aorus Elite being the higher-end one and the Gaming OC being the mainstream one. Both appear to come in RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT SKUs. The Aorus Elite is said to be a 3.5-slot card sporting three 8-pin power connectors, whereas the Gaming OC is a 2.5-slot card with two 8-pin power connectors.
The Sapphire card in question is the Nitro+ which has been given a design overhaul compared to the Radeon RX 6000-series cards and it's quite a bright card thanks to its silver coloured shroud. We're once again looking at a massive cooler here, which is wider than three slots, but maybe not quite 3.5-slots wide. Unsurprisingly, Sapphire has kitted out the card with three 8-pin power connectors. None of the three cards have a USB-C port and it appears that those looking to get an AMD Radeon RX 7900-series card with a USB-C port, would have to go for the reference design cards.
Sources:
VideoCardz (Gigabyte), VideoCardz (Sapphire)
The Sapphire card in question is the Nitro+ which has been given a design overhaul compared to the Radeon RX 6000-series cards and it's quite a bright card thanks to its silver coloured shroud. We're once again looking at a massive cooler here, which is wider than three slots, but maybe not quite 3.5-slots wide. Unsurprisingly, Sapphire has kitted out the card with three 8-pin power connectors. None of the three cards have a USB-C port and it appears that those looking to get an AMD Radeon RX 7900-series card with a USB-C port, would have to go for the reference design cards.
33 Comments on Gigabyte's and Sapphire's Radeon RX 7900-series Cards Pictured
This generation is uber fail so far.
1. RTX 4090 - enormous and super expensive, melting, fire hazard
2. RTX 4080 - enormous and super expensive
3. RTX 4080 2 - rebadged and super expensive, not released yet, relatively slow
4. RX 7900 XTX - enormous and super expensive, stupid design decisions
5. RX 7900 XT - same as above
6. Lower tier cards nowhere in sight.
On top of that NVIDIA just retired their 2 best selling cards of all time the 2060 and 1660. But because they hate you they are not replacing them with new cards.
From the perspective of a computer hardware salesman this is incredibly frustrating.
RTX 4080 would also suffer from same infamy, if not for the fact that nobody wants to buy those... :P
But the reality is that hardware in general will be more expensive, among other things because the curve between increasing density of newer manufacturing process and production and development costs are out of sync. Putting it on paper and being optimistic the production cost of the XTX should be somewhere between $600-700, the memory alone should cost more than $300. I will not go into the question of long term support via software (drivers) and development.
So...realistically it is an excellent price
Another moronic design, 3.5 slot and RGB strips in underside of the cards. I mean like, how you gonna see it? If it two sides then yeah you definitely see partially.
I don't like it, but we're going to go through an artificial drought of mainstream GPUs again unless AMD and Intel can fill in the gap, soon.
The Elite has some nice gains
Boost Clock* : up to 2680 MHz (Reference card: 2500 MHz)
Game Clock* : up to 2510 MHz (Reference card: 2300 MHz)
TBH I didn't expect Sapphire to choose RGB over better cooling. That strip is clearly in the way of an exhaust. My bet it's on the other side as well. And it's kinda totally opposite direction compared to the reference design. Even though I find it ugly AF, reference might end up being better in every regard.