Packaging

The Card

The XFX Mercury OC Magnetic Air uses the same design theme that we saw introduced with the RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air. It's a very clean look, with some red highlights around the fans and along the top edge of the card. On the other side you'll find a metal backplate that has a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 35.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 1701 g.


Installation requires four slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 70 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1a and a HDMI 2.1b.

With RDNA 4, AMD put effort to improve its standing with game streamers and creative professionals. It's done this by giving Navi 48 a dual VCN solution, so the GPU has two concurrent hardware accelerators for encoding and decoding. Perhaps the biggest changes at the silicon level is that AMD improved the encoding quality of its hardware H.264 and HEVC codecs. This was a niche complaint streamers had with AMD GPUs, and would avoid the brand altogether. The company also updated its AV1 hardware acceleration with support for B-frames, which are frames that lack image information, but math data that let the decoder reconstruct image data by comparing with the image data from adjacent I-frames containing it. This technique vastly improves streaming bitrates since half the frames lack image data.


The card uses three 8-pin power connectors, which allow a total power consumption of 450 W, plus 75 W from the PCIe slot.


XFX has installed an RGB lighting zone along the top edge of the card.


This BIOS switch lets you toggle between the default performance BIOS and a second BIOS. While other vendors offer a "quiet" BIOS here, XFX is shipping the same BIOS on both switch settings, which feels like a lost opportunity to me.


One of the highlights of this card are the magnetically attached fans. They plop right in, impossible to get it wrong. Removing them is just as easy, the force required is exactly right. With this feature it will be super easy to replace the fans, should they break in the future, also it's extremely easy to remove dust and dirt from the card.

Teardown

The XFX cooling solution uses eight heatpipes. The heatsink provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also for the memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate protects the PCB against damage during handling and installation.