Introduction

The ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 7600 OC is the company's most premium custom-design graphics card based on the recently announced mid-range GPU from AMD. This is also the first ROG Strix product based on the RX 7000 series from ASUS, even the enthusiast-segment RX 7900 series top out at TUF Gaming products. The card debuts a new custom cooler design that resembles that of previous-generation ROG Strix coolers (found with RTX 30-series and RX 6000 series graphics cards). Still, this is paired with an all new, feature-rich PCB that's geared for overclocking. The cooler also gets RGB elements, such as an illuminated ROG Strix logo. The card has ASUS's top factory-overclock for the RX 7600.



The AMD Radeon RX 7600 is designed for nearly maxed out gaming at 1080p, you can also game at 1440p with medium-high settings, or take advantage of features such as FSR 2.0 or Radeon Boost. The RX 7600 is very much a new-generation GPU by AMD, and is based on its latest RDNA 3 graphics architecture, which introduces new Dual-Issue Rate Compute Units that offer a 17% IPC improvement over RDNA2, new AI Accelerators that accelerate matrix math, and 2nd generation Ray Accelerators with a 50% increase in ray intersection performance. All this comes in a typical power value of just under 170 W, so AMD decided to stick with the older 6 nm DUV foundry node for the Navi 33 monolithic silicon powering the RX 7600, which should give it some headroom for price-wars against its competitors.

The RX 7600 maxes out the Navi 33 silicon that it is based on, and AMD intends for it to be seen as a successor to the RX 6600 (and not the RX 6600 XT or RX 6650 XT), and so technically, there is a generational increase in shaders, even though the shader-count on the silicon itself hasn't changed. The RX 7600 comes with 32 RDNA 3 compute units, which work out to 2,048 stream processors, 64 AI Accelerators, 32 Ray Accelerators, 128 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The chip features a 128-bit GDDR6 memory interface, and AMD is using faster 18 Gbps memory chips, combined with a faster 32 MB second generation Infinity Cache.

The ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 7600 OC comes with a powerful cooling solution and a dual-BIOS feature, which runs a more relaxed fan curve. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector. ASUS is pricing the ROG Strix RX 7600 OC at $340, a steep 26% jump from the $270 AMD MSRP.

Architecture

AMD Radeon RX 7600 is based on the Navi 33 silicon that the company chose to build on the older 6 nm (DUV) foundry node that significantly lowers 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

The ASUS ROG Strix RX 7600 comes with a distinctive cooling solution design that clearly looks like a "Strix" design, however, its aesthetic is "last gen" and matches the look of ASUS RX 6000 Series cards. The ASUS GeForce 40 Strix cards come with a different look.


Dimensions of the card are 28.0 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 917 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.


A single 8-pin PCIe power connector draws power, together with 75 W PCIe slot power, this configuration is rated for 225 W max.


The dual BIOS feature lets you switch between the default "Performance" BIOS and a "Quiet" BIOS, which runs a more relaxed fan curve.

Teardown

An aspect of the ROG Strix RX 7600 cooler that we really liked is that the cooler shroud and fans come off without disturbing the heatsink underneath, so the cooler is easy to clean without having to redo the TIM and thermal pads. Disassembling this is fairly straightforward.


The cooler uses a nickel-plated copper baseplate that makes contact with the GPU, VRM, and memory.


The cooler uses an impressive five heatpipes that distribute heat to two large aluminium fin-stacks, which are ventilated by the two Axial-Tech fans.


The backplate is made of metal, and has a cutout for some of the airflow from the second fan to flow through.

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).