Sapphire RX 7900 GRE Edition Graphics Card Review

With so many releases of new GPUs and price cuts seemingly happening every week, things are starting to heat up in the space with AMD having one of the best value-for-money products in the segment in the form of the 7800 XT. However, they have one card that never saw the light of day outside of Asia. I’m talking about the 7900 GRE or Golden Rabbit Edition, which is now setting its sights on the Western world.

Sapphire

So the 7900 GRE is an odd one. Firstly, the naming. Last year was the year of the rabbit, and in Chinese culture, that stuff is taken very seriously so while some may love the name, others will hate it, but we’re going to refer to it as the GRE. What the card is, for those out of the loop, this is a card that sits between the 7800 XT and 7900 XT and is also a bit of a weird one. Firstly, it’s based on Navi 31 like the 7900 XT, but beyond that, it’s cut down in every single way including less memory, a smaller bus, less bandwidth, and fewer cores, but you’d expect that given the $549 price tag that it comes in at, but then things start to get weird.

Not only does it include the same 16GB GDDR6 that the 7800 XT comes with and on the same 256-bit but the throughput is less at 576GB/s compared to the 624GB/s on the 7800 XT and then the strangest thing, albeit we’re talking 3 Watts, but the 7900 GRE has a TDP of 260 Watts, compared to 263 Watts on the lower-end 7800 XT and quite a drop from the 300 Watts that the 7900 XT has.

RX 7900 GRE Edition

So it’s almost like certain things were an afterthought, and while AMD will market this as a “special edition” card, it comes across more like a binned 7900 XT that just didn’t quite make the cut, and based on those weird specs, it almost feels like 7800 XTX may have been the better marketing choice for naming this card.

So what about pricing? Well that’s where things get interesting, as when the GRE launched in Asia, the converted price came out to about $650, but with the launch in the Western market, it’s launching for $549. Now we have one model of the card here, in the form of the Sapphire Nitro+ which is an SKU that commands a premium over a reference spec and therefore comes in at $599, which in all honesty, is based on other Nitro cards we’ve looked at, I can honestly say is worth the extra premium.

Now as we all know, even highly overclocked models only offer up a small margin of error difference in performance, and the extra cost involved is more in regards to the cooler, design and overall cooling performance and that’s where the extra money goes.