Graphics Cards

AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT 12GB Graphics Card Review Featuring XFX QICK 319

AMD hasn’t had much to compete with team green since the 6000 series RDNA2 lineup, which has for the most part been pretty successful with arguably the best cards in terms of value for money being around the 6700 series. Perfect for 1440p gaming including high-refresh gamers alike and with today seeing the launch of both the 7800 XT at $499 and the seemingly cut-down 7700 XT at $449, it opens up an interesting proposition considering the 4060 Ti 16GB which launched for $499 has been a bit of a flop and in response to AMD has seen prices tumble closer to match that of the 7700 XT, but at $50 cheaper than the 7800 XT, do we lose an equal amount of performance or is this a simple bait and switch move from AMD in the hope of selling the slightly expensive older brother? Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.

Now normally in the past, we’ve seen AMD make some shady moves with refreshes upon refreshes, but it does seem like they’re slowly getting better and channelling their inner consumer and seeing it from a typical gamers perspective, so due to this, when I heard they were announcing two GPUs aimed at the relatively same market, I was a bit perplexed. Was the lower-tier card going to be a GPU core that didn’t make the cut and would be palmed off as something else, or was there a bit more to it than that?

Luckily there is a bit more to it than that. Though both the 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based upon the Navi 32 GPU, it’s a slightly different variants with the 7700 XT sporting the XL, and the 7800 XT utilising the XT variant, though both come in with the same 346mm2 die size but that’s where a lot of the similarities end.

Packing 3456 shading units, 216 texture mapping units, 96 ROPs, 54 compute units and the same for RT cores and 48MB of L3 cache, the specs look to be pretty impressive, and only slightly under the 7800 XT’s specs and 35% higher in shading units, texture mapping units, compute units and RT cores when compared to the 6700XT along with 50% more ROPs though strangely, it actually features 50% less L3 cache, though as we’ve seen before, generation to generation sometimes sees a change in the subsystem and architecture which allows lower amounts of cache.

Another key area that has seen a change which has been one of the biggest hot topics as of late is the memory, where the 7700 XT still features 12GB of GDDR6 like its predecessor, and on a 192-bit bus, but the bandwidth has been increased by 12% from 384GB/s up to 432GB/s.

One thing that is interesting though is that generally we would see a lot of work being done on efficiency, but compared to its RDNA2 counterpart, the 7700 XT’s TDP has actually been increased from 230W on the 6700 XT, up to 245W, which in a world of ever-rising electricity costs, it seems to be a bit of a weird move.

AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT

Now for the 7700 XT, AMD aren’t actually sampling MBA models from what I can tell, and instead have relied on their AIB partners to help seed samples, which is where the likes of XFX, Sapphire and Gigabyte all came through with cards for us to look at and as we know, in terms of raw performance, they will all perform within a margin of each other, so for the purposes of this review, we’ll be putting our focus on the QICK 319 model from XFX, but do have full written reviews on the other two cards and their cooling performance, so definitely check that out.