Packaging

The Card

ASUS is reusing the same design philosophy that we've seen on the company's RTX 4090/4080 TUF. The main color theme is gray and black with metallic highlights. I have to say I really like the sleek looks of the card, and the matte metal surface. Both the main cooler shroud and backplate are made from thick metal.


Dimensions of the card are 35.5 x 18.05 cm, and it weighs 2135 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system.


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

AMD has upgraded their encode/decode setup. It now comes with two independent hardware units that can encode and decode two streams of video in parallel, or one stream at double the FPS rate. There's support for VP9, H.264, H.265 and AV1 decode, and encoding is supported for H.264, H.265 and AV1.


The card uses a classic triple 8-pin power input config, rated for 525 W maximum power. NVIDIA on the other hand uses the new 12+4 pin ATX 12VHPWR connector, which is rated for up to 600 W of power draw.


This dual BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default "performance" BIOS and a "quiet" BIOS, which runs the fans at slower speed.

Teardown

The main heatsink provides cooling for the GPU chip, memory chips and VRM circuitry. Unlike most Radeon RX 7900 Series designs, the baseplate is not a vapor-chamber design. Seven heatpipes move heat away from the GPU surface to the cooling fins.


The backplate is made from thick metal and of excellent build quality. It protects the card against damage during installation and handling.