This is my sixth review of a Radeon RX 7900 XT/XTX Navi 31 card. Previously I've tested the Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+, ASUS RX 7900 XTX TUF, XFX RX 7900 XTX Merc 310, AMD RX 7900 XTX and AMD RX 7900 XT.

Launched in December last year, the RX 7900 Series by AMD introduces the world's first graphics cards based on a chiplet design architecture. Why is that a big deal you ask? Making large chips is expensive, more expensive than making several small chips. AMD realized that years ago and built their Ryzen CPUs using the chiplet approach, which is the foundation for the company's tremendous comeback in the CPU space. Team Red is betting that the same can happen in the GPU world. Using chiplets gives another major advantage—you can combine multiple production processes. For the case of the Navi 31 GPU that powers the Radeon RX 7900 Series, the central compute die is fabricated on TSMC's leading 5 nanometer node, because efficiency greatly matters for its design. On the other hand, the memory-cache dies don't put out as much heat, and contain analog technology, which doesn't scale as well with process size. That's why AMD decided to build those with 6 nanometer tech, making them cheaper to produce.

The RX 7900 XTX is AMD's flagship for this generation—it comes with the full Navi 31 GPU: 6144 cores, 96 compute units, 24 GB GDDR6 and six MCDs with 96 MB of L3 cache. RDNA 3 also introduces an upgraded display engine, which has support for DisplayPort 2.1, for higher refresh rates on upcoming 4K and 8K displays, and you also get support for hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding—the video format of the future.

Since AMD's launch two months ago we've upgraded our GPU test system to Intel Core i9-13900K with EVGA Z790 DARK, fast DDR5 memory and Seasonic's new Vertex 16-pin ATX 3.0 PSU. We've also made the switch to Windows 11, added several new games and added reporting for minimum FPS (one percent lows) to our data processing pipeline.

Averaged over our whole 25-game test suite at 4K resolution, with RT off, the factory-overclocked ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Taichi has a 4% performance lead over the AMD reference design, which makes it the fastest RTX 7900 XTX card we've tested. These gains increase the performance uplift to RTX 4080 from 2% to 6%—we're getting closer to AMD's marketing projections. Just like other custom designs, the performance increase of the factory overclock isn't huge, but it's still a welcome improvement. The gap to RTX 4090 shrinks to 18% now. Compared to the RTX 3090 Ti, the ASRock card is 23% faster and the increase over the RTX 3090 is 39%. Compared to last generation's RX 6900 XT, the Taichi is a whopping 56% faster. The differences between individual games are huge, in some titles the XTX is 25% faster than the 4080, in others it's 10% slower.

Back during the initial launch day reviews I speculated that we might see further driver optimizations, that make best use of the new RDNA 3 dual-issue compute units. So far it seems not much has happened, certainly nothing that can shift the balance of power in this segment. What AMD has addressed with newer drivers though is that power consumption in non-gaming states is considerably improved, so the driver team is certainly busy making things better.

Radeon RX 7900 XTX is a formidable choice for gaming at 4K, with maximum details and 1440p at high-refresh-rate. You can crank up everything and you'll still run at over 60 FPS. Things are different when you enable ray tracing though, here the RX 7900 XTX is considerably weaker than what NVIDIA offers. On average, the RTX 4080 is around 12% faster than the Sapphire RX 7900 XTX with ray tracing enabled, which isn't monumental, but definitely more than what I would have expected. I think everyone agrees that ray tracing is the future, and just disagrees on how quickly that future is happening. If you're part in the "I want this now" camp, then you should probably consider the RTX 4080, or RTX 4090. On the other hand, if you feel like ray tracing is just minor additional eye candy, that comes with a huge performance hit, then you can happily grab the RX 7900 XTX. That's not to say that AMD's new cards are useless with ray tracing, but if you consider the differences in price and RT performance, then the value-proposition of both cards is virtually identical, with NVIDIA RTX 4080 giving you the higher overall performance.

ASRock's Taichi name is legendary, we've seen so many wonderful motherboards and graphics cards with that branding, so the RX 7900 XTX Taichi has big shoes to fill. The triple-fan, triple-slot thermal solution does a great job keeping the card cool. Gaming temperatures are below 60°C, which is an impressive achievement, especially considering the performance offered. Noise levels with the default BIOS are "good," only 32 dBA is considerably lower than the AMD reference card, but other custom designs are still quieter. ASRock's solution for that is the dual BIOS, which lets you activate a "Quiet" mode BIOS. Now the noise levels are stunning—the card is whisper quiet, the quietest RX 7900 XTX that we've tested. Actually, with only 27.6 dBA it's among the quietest graphics cards that I've tested in a long time—and we're talking about a high-end GPU here that can achieve 4K60 easily. While nearly all other quiet BIOS designs that I know of lower the fan speed, while allowing higher temperatures at the same time, ASRock's approach is quite different. They've set their card to run at lower clock and voltage, which lowers the heat output considerably, because the card now operates closer to its maximum efficiency point. Lower heat output means the fans can run slower to achieve the same temperature. That's exactly what ASRock did: the regular and the quiet mode BIOS both have the GPU running at 59°C, but since the quiet BIOS has such reduced heat output, the fan speed can be lower. The performance cost is roughly 4%, which is reasonable, I still would have preferred higher temperatures, as a temperature increase by a few °C makes absolutely no difference, especially when you're starting from 59°C. Still, the noise levels are really impressive, good job ASRock!

In our apples-to-apples heatsink test, which runs all cards at the same noise and power levels for a fair cooler comparison, the Taichi heatsink does very well, too. It conclusively beats AMD's reference design cooler, and is roughly 8°C better than the XFX thermal solution. Only the Sapphire Nitro+ and ASUS TUF coolers, which are both quad-slot, are marginally cooler, by an insignificant 1-2°C. Just like all other modern graphics cards, the ASRock RX 7900 XTX Taichi comes with the idle fan-stop feature, which turns off the fans during idle, desktop work and Internet browsing.

One of AMD's goal with RDNA 3 has been to improve power consumption, and they achieved that. While their cards are not as energy-efficient as NVIDIA's new Ada series, it's pretty close. In order to achieve their performance, frequency and binning goals, ASRock bumped their card's voltage quite a bit. We measured 1.033 V on average during gaming, the AMD reference XTX ran at only 0.934 V, ASUS TUF at 1.015 V, XFX Merc 310 at 1.017 V, Sapphire Nitro+ at 1.023. In return for that voltage bump you get the highest factory-overclocked performance, but pushing gaming power consumption from 361 W to 421 W seems quite a bit, especially considering that this 17% increase only turns into 4% real-life performance gain. The good thing is that ASRock has installed an awesome heatsink on their card, so this power draw increase doesn't compromise on the card's thermals or acoustics.

Overclocking is better on the ASRock Taichi than on the AMD reference design. What definitely helps here is the 3x 8-pin power inputs. While the AMD reference card very quickly ran into its power limit, even at the +15% power setting, the ASRock board has more headroom, which allows higher overclocks. The actual mechanics of overclocking are fairly complicated, just follow what I wrote and you'll have a good starting point. Seeing all the pieces come together to unlock a large overclock with 10% real-life performance gained is pretty fun.

Many Radeon RX 7900 XTX models have been sold out since launch, and all their prices are considerably higher than the $1000 MSRP price point that AMD promised. The cheapest card right now is the XFX Merc 310 for $1050 (discounted from $1200), the next-cheapest card is the ASRock Taichi from this review, selling for $1120. The Sapphire Pulse is $1130—that's it. Everything else is super overpriced or out of stock. Unless you can find a card for MSRP, the Taichi is a pretty reasonable deal. It's one of the most affordable cards, but has one of the best cooling solutions, with a fantastic low-noise option. On the other hand, the cheapest RTX 4080 is just $1200, so not even +$100 away, which will be tempting to many, because RTX 4080 offers higher ray tracing FPS, with better energy efficiency overall.