No less than 700 Watts to run a Radeon RX 7900XTX at over 3.3 GHz

Written by Guillaume
Publication date: {{ dayjs(1684684804*1000).local().format("L").toString()}}
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This article is an automatic translation

Always more powerful, always more powerful, graphics cards are also always more energy consuming.

The marketing of the latest generation of graphics cards has enabled new records to be broken, whether we are talking about models signed by AMD or NVIDIA products. NVIDIA is the one that currently holds the prize by marketing the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition, its most powerful non-professional card (although...). This GeForce is what you might call an ultra high-end model that has no equivalent at AMD. When the company headed by Lisa Su released its first RDNA3s, it did not want to compete with NVIDIA on this ground. However, this does not mean that the Radeon RX 7900XTX has nothing in the belly and the exploits performed by some overclockers are there to confirm that the Navi 31 GPU is capable of going well beyond the official specifications.

On Reddit, one after the other, two "gentle fools" have indeed presented absolutely amazing results for what remains the most powerful Radeon RX. Last March, it was the well-known Der8auer who pushed a Radeon RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil signed by PowerColor to its limits. Real name Roman Hartung, the overclocker pushed the GPU of the card from 2680 MHz in "unleash" mode to 3390 MHz. To do this, he had increased the operating voltage of the GPU from 1.030 volts to 1.142 volts. Needless to say, such changes are not to be applied without a minimum of care/experience. Der8auer obviously took advantage of its overclocking to measure the performance of the beast, which was then breaking records on 3DMark: we prefer to remember that the card was breaking records for power consumption at around 650 Watts compared to 380 Watts in "normal" use.

An absolutely frightening consumption that did not impress a certain Jedi95. On Reddit, the user decided to go even further with his Radeon RX 7900XTX, in this case a TUF Gaming RX 7900XTX signed by ASUS associated with a Quantum Vector cooling system from EK. Jedi95 says that the GPU of his graphics card reached 3333 MHz on 3DMark's TimeSpy test and even 3467 MHz in peak. These frequencies are even higher than those of Der8auer, which logically allowed to break performance records with 36,971 points on Time Spy, 18,335 points on Time Spy Extreme, 20,492 points on Port Royal and 7,690 points on Speed Way. Perhaps most impressively, the modified TUF Gaming card also set a new benchmark for power consumption: 696 watts were consumed. While we talk more and more about energy efficiency, these graphics cards fortunately have a much more favorable performance/watt ratio in "normal" use.