Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 7600 Phantom Gaming OC is a premium custom-design rendition of AMD's latest mid-range graphics card. The RX 7600 is meant for 1080p AAA gaming with high to max settings, plus you can take advantage of AMD features such as FSR 2 to further improve performance. The Phantom Gaming series by ASRock is geared toward gamer aesthetics, with plenty RGB bells and whistles, and a racy design and a factory overclock to boot. The RX 7600 is based on AMD's latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, which means you get all of the innovations AMD introduced with this series, including the much more capable RDNA 3 Dual Compute Unit, second generation Ray Accelerator for generational ray tracing performance improvements, and hardware acceleration for AI.



While the Radeon RX 7600 is based on RDNA 3, the Navi 33 silicon at its heart is built on the older 6 nm foundry process, and not the newer 5 nm EUV powering the RX 7900 series. AMD calculates that in this segment, it doesn't really need the latest foundry node, and can achieve the desired power-draw and performance/Watt using the older node. What's also interesting, is that the Navi 33 die has numerically the same number of shaders as its predecessor. AMD intends for the RX 7600 to be seen as a successor to the RX 6600, and not the RX 6600 XT or RX 6650 XT, and because the RX 7600 maxes out the Navi 33 silicon, there is a generational increase in shaders compared to the RX 6600.

The Navi 33 silicon features 32 RDNA 3 compute units, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory size is unchanged at 8 GB, as is the 128-bit memory interface, and the 32 MB Infinity Cache size, although AMD has stepped up the memory speed to 18 Gbps, and the second generation Infinity Cache runs faster. There are other architectural innovations to be had, such as the AMD Radiance Display Engine, and hardware AV1 encoding capabilities. The ASRock RX 7600 Phantom Gaming OC features an upmarket design that looks like it belongs to a segment above, with its triple-fan layout. You get factory overclocked speeds in the shape of a 2356 MHz Game clock, compared to 2250 MHz reference, while the memory speed is left untouched at 18 Gbps. ASRock hasn't given us any pricing guidance, so we'll be assuming a $40 price premium throughout this review.

Architecture

AMD Radeon RX 7600 is based on the Navi 33 silicon that the company chose to built on the older 6 nm (DUV) foundry node that significantly lower transistor density than the 5 nm EUV node that the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series is based on. The chip has a die-area of 204 mm², and transistor count of 13.3 billion (for reference, NVIDIA is able to cram 22.9 billion transistors into a 190 mm² silicon using 5 nm, with the AD106 powering the RTX 4060 Ti). The GPU has essentially the same component hierarchy as the previous-generation Navi 23. Its host interface is PCI-Express 4.0 x8, and power is drawn from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, which is sufficient, given the gaming total board power for the RX 7600 of 169 W. The GPU features a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, and 8 GB is the VRAM size for the RX 7600.

AMD hasn't put out a block diagram of the Navi 33, but it features two Shader Engines (compared to six on the Navi 31). Each of these has 8 RDNA 3 Dual-Compute Units (16 CU), which share Raster machinery, and Render Backends. The GPU features Centralized Geometry Processors, asynchronous compute engines, and geometry processors shared among the two Shader Engines. Given its CU count of 32, we arrive at 2,048 stream processors, 32 Ray Accelerators, 64 AI Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The GPU uses a 2nd Gen 32 MB Infinity Cache memory that cushions data access to the memory.


Much of the architectural innovation is this generation is with the RDNA 3 Dual-Compute Unit (or Compute Unit pair). The "Navi 33" GPU physically features 32 compute units spread across two Shader Engines. AMD claims that at the same engine clocks, the RDNA 3 CU offers a 17.4% IPC increase over the RDNA2 CU.


The new RDNA 3 CU introduces multi-precision capability for the 64 stream processors per CU: operating either as 1x SIMD64 or 2x SIMD32 units. The Vector Unit that houses these SIMD units can either function as a SIMD execution mechanism, or as a Matrix execution unit, thanks to the new AI Matrix Accelerator, which provides a 2.7x matrix multiplication performance uplift versus conventional SIMD execution. Also added are support for the Bfloat16 instruction-set, and SIMD8 execution. The GPU hence enjoys AI hardware-acceleration that can be leveraged in future feature-additions relevant to gamers, such as FSR 3.0. Game developers will also look for ways to exploit accelerated AI, now that all three brands feature it (NVIDIA Tensor cores and Intel XMX cores).


AMD's first-generation Ray Accelerator, introduced with the RDNA2 architecture, was the result of a hasty effort to catch up to NVIDIA with a DirectX 12 Ultimate GPU, where they developed a fixed-function hardware to calculate ray intersections, and offloaded a large chunk of RT processing to the generationally-doubled SIMD resources. With RDNA 3, they've refined the Ray Accelerator to achieve an 80% ray tracing performance uplift over the previous generation, when you add up the Ray Accelerator count, their higher engine clocks, and other hardware-level optimizations, such as early sub-tree culling, specialized box sorting modes, and reduced traversal iterations.


There is a 50% ray intersection capacity improvement for RDNA 3 thanks to these optimizations, and cycles-per-ray reduction. Besides these, AMD has also made several improvements to the geometry- and pixel-pipes, with the introduction of the new multi-draw indirect accelerator (MDIA), which reduces CPU API and driver-level overheads by gathering and parsing of multi-draw command data. At the hardware-level 12 primitives per clock is now supported compared to 8 per clock on RDNA2, thanks to culling. The core-configuration overall enables 50% more rasterized performance per clock.


AMD has significantly improved the Display Engine of "Navi 33" over the previous-generation in terms of connectivity. The new Radiance Display Engine comes with native support for DisplayPort 2.1, which enables 8K output at up to 165 Hz refresh-rate, or 4K at up to 480 Hz, with a single cable. AMD has refined its FSR 2 algorithm to support 8K (i.e. render at a lower resolution with FSR-enhanced upscaling), to make it possible to enjoy the latest AAA titles at playable frame-rates on 8K displays. The RX 7600 gets two full-size DP 2.1 connectors, besides an HDMI 2.1b, and a USB-C with DP 1.2 passthrough. The "Navi 33" silicon receives full hardware-accelerated AV1 encode and decode capabilities. With this generation, AMD is also introducing SmartAccess Video, a feature that lets the AMD driver leverage the hardware encoders of the RDNA2 iGPU of Ryzen 7000 desktop processors, for additional encoding performance.

Packaging

The Card

ASRock RX 7600 Phantom Gaming OC looks swanky and from a segment above. A large triple-fan cooling solution dominates the card, and has plenty of RGB eye-candy from its central fan. The cooler shroud is made of plastic, while the backplate is made of metal.


An RGB illuminated zone has been placed around the center fan.


Dimensions of the card are 30.0 x 13.0 cm, and it weighs 900 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 ports (RDNA2 had 1.4a) and one HDMI 2.1a.

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


The card's sole power connector is an 8-pin PCIe. This configuration, together with 75 W PCIe slot power, is rated for 225 W.

Teardown

The cooler comes off easily along with its cooler shroud when you undo a set of screws at the back.


The cooler features two large aluminium fin-stacks to which heat is drawn by a set of copper base-plates, and fed by heatpipes.


The ASRock Phantom Gaming cooler uses three heatpipes.


The backplate is made of metal, and has thermal pads that draw some heat from behind the GPU and memory areas.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.


High-resolution versions are also available (front, back).