AMD Radeon VII 7nm Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

When I first wrote about this GPU design, I said that it looked like an unfinished block of aluminium and a bit half baked. However, now that I’ve had it in my hands and got a closer look at it without the crowds, I take (some) of that back. It’s much higher quality in real life. While a little featureless, there’s a lot of fine detail in there that wasn’t immediately apparent.

The matte finish aluminium looks great, if a little bland. However, it’s those beautifully machined edges that I really like, giving a bit of shine to all the edges, and smoothing out what would otherwise be a rather sharp cornered lump of metal.

2 x 8 Pin Power

Up on the top corner, you’ve got this lovely inset Radeon R design. Again, all the edges here are machined out of a single piece of aluminium, giving the card impressive flow. It reminds me of when Apple launched their laptops milled from a single piece of metal, the quality is hard to fuss about.

Down the side, there’s ventilation milled into the aluminium, allowing the heatsinks to breath through the side of the GPU. There’s also a nice inlayed Radeon logo running down the side.

RADEON

You can see a large copper block sitting on the PCB too, acting as one of the main heatsinks.

Around the back, you’ll find more ventilation, as well as a trilogy of DisplayPorts, and a single HDMI port.

Backplate

The back plate looks superb too, also milled out of aluminium and offering plenty of cooling and ventilation for the PCB. The whole card is very rigid and quite heavy, but that just gives it an air of quality.