Introduction

The ASRock Radeon RX 7800 XT Steel Legend is a custom-design graphics card built around the white aesthetic. The Steel Legend brand that ASRock originally developed for its motherboards has made its way to graphics cards with the recently unveiled RX 7600 Steel Legend. The card is positioned above the company's Challenger OC line of value custom-design cards, and below the more upscale Phantom Gaming series, such as the RX 7800 XT Phantom Gaming we recently reviewed. The ASRock Steel Legend brand responds to a small but growing demand for graphics cards built around an all-white color theme. Custom-design vendors across GPU brands are responding to this, with examples being ASUS TUF Gaming White, Sapphire Pure, PowerColor Spectral White, Galax EX White, etc. The Radeon RX 7800 XT, along with its sibling, the RX 7700 XT, are designed to fill a vital gap between the mainstream RX 7600 and the enthusiast-class RX 7900 series.



The Radeon RX 7800 XT is designed for maxed out gaming at 1440p. It's capable of 4K UHD, too, if you know your way around your game settings, or take advantage of features such as Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) and FSR. The RX 7800 XT is based on a maxed out version of the Navi 32 silicon. This is a chiplet GPU, much like the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series. The RX 7800 XT is very much a next-generation GPU, based on the latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, and taking advantage of the contemporary 5 nm EUV foundry node, at least where it matters.

The new Navi 32 silicon sees AMD nucleate all logic-heavy graphics rendering and compute machinery into a centralized 5 nm silicon called the Graphics Compute Die (GCD), surrounded by four memory cache dies (MCDs), each built on the older 6 nm node. Each of these four MCDs has a 16 MB segment of the GPU's 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of its 256-bit GDDR6 memory interface. The memory components don't benefit as much from the switch to 5 nm, and AMD figures it can leave them on the slightly older 6 nm node, and maximize its utilization of the 5 nm node on account of the GCDs being much smaller than if they were monolithic dies.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT enables all 60 compute units physically present on the Navi 32, along with all four of its MCDs. This results in 3,840 stream processors, 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The 256-bit memory bus drives a healthy 16 GB of 19.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory, giving the GPU 624 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture introduces several improvements, including a new dual issue rate compute unit with support for newer math formats and a 17% IPC increase over RDNA2, the introduction of the new AI accelerator, a component that enables matrix math speedups of up to 2.7x on the stream processors over RDNA2, and the new 2nd generation Ray accelerator offers a 50% increase in ray intersection performance. AMD has generationally widened the memory bus and increased memory speeds, and while the Infinity Cache is smaller in size, it comes with increased data-rate.

The ASRock RX 7800 XT Steel Legend features a design that's neither similar to the Challenger series, nor the enthusiast-focused Phantom Gaming series, while offering a fairly large triple-fan cooling solution. The cooler shroud and backplate get a two-tone white color, while the fan impellers are clear acrylic, with RGB LED illumination. ASRock included a nice little factory overclock, running the GPU at 2213 MHz Game clock (compared to 2124 MHz reference), and up to 2520 MHz boost (vs 2430 MHz reference). The memory is untouched at 19.5 Gbps. ASRock is pricing the RX 7800 XT Steel Legend at $520, a $20 premium over the $500 reference price.