Asrock Steel Legend RX 7900 GRE - Overview, First Impressions and comparison to XFX 6700 XT!

welcome back to the Casual tech review Channel and for today's uh overview first impressions of the ASRock 7900 gr steel Legend and a comparison to my previous graphics card an XFX 6700 XT so stick around so as I mentioned in my previous video I was on the hunt for a new graphics card I had put an XFX 6 700 XT into my PC and it was a great card uh but once I upgraded to an ultrawide 1440p monitor I realized that the 6700 XT was just kind of barely at the edge of performance where it was struggling to keep up with that higher resolution picture and I knew I wanted to upgrade the problem was is there was not a great choice in the price range I was looking at that that was a perfect fit for me I was basic basically looking at uh the 7800 XT and the 4070 super I also did briefly consider the 7900 XT but ultimately $700 or 750 uh just too much and I don't need that much graphics card but I wasn't happy having to choose between 78 XT and 4070 super the 470 super more expensive less vram 7800 XT just not quite enough of an improvement uh for the price so I was really stuck in the middle and I I didn't know what I was going to do well then out of nowhere came the 7900 gr dropped into my lap and I actually ordered this one uh the day that it became available on NewEgg it was white so as you can see it fits the color scheme it looks incredible um and the performance has been really good so I'm just going to talk about my first impressions of the card I've only had it for a couple of days working through getting it set up getting a couple visual bugs uh ironed out and kind of what I think about it and how it prepare excuse me how it compares performance-wise to my 6700 XT so let me just briefly go over some of the main specs of this card just so you kind of get an idea it is a 16 gigabyte vram card which was important to me that's something that I was really looking forward to having was a little bit of extra vram it's got 80 compute unit which puts it really close to a 7900 XT the area in which they look like they saved a little bit of money with this card is on the memory so the memory's actually been uh slowed down quite a bit the memory is going to come out to a clock speed of 2250 megahertz out of the box you can boost it a little bit um but that is one of the downsides of this card as it does run a little bit slower it's got a TDP of 260 Watts so you're going to want a 700 to 700 50 watt minimum uh power supply to run this thing I've got a 750 watt uh gold and I haven't had an issue so far I chose this one in particular because it's white I have a white themed PC as you can see here it looks tremendous in there and it was the only white one that was available the other one that was potentially uh going to be on the market is the sapphire pure I kind of just just wanted to to give this one a try the sapphire Pier hasn't become available yet and I've heard really good things about azrock cards particularly of late and you can see it looks really really great it's got some black and some gray mixed in a solid metal back plate RGB fans which you can turn the RGB off but I I don't mind it it doesn't bother me uh it's very thick and it has a very substantial cooler which I like that quite a bit the overall length of this card is 304 millim takes up about uh three slots in the back for the pcie covers um and it is pretty heavy so you probably will want some kind of support for it as well so as far as testing this card goes what I wanted to do was run it through or both of the cards through a series of Benchmark programs I don't do a lot of gaming so I don't have a lot of the modern fancy games uh to give you the benchmarks off of but I will use uh some of the more common benchmarking programs like cin bench 3D Mark fire strike and time spy as well as super position just to kind of give you an idea of how the cards stack up against each other and I'll also show you the thermal performance which is something that I'm always trying to stay on top of all right so the first Benchmark that we're going to talk about is C bench 2024 and I ran both cards through on uh the G GPU benchmark test in in the exact same system which is an i52 600k 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3600 cl16 memory and the 6700 XT managed a score of 7121 and the GRE got 10,972 so that is roughly only 65% of the performance of the 6700 XT so the the gr is is a whole one and a half times faster than the 6700 XT but what was really uh surprising to me was the efficiency of it as you can see here the temperatures on the 6700 XT the hot spot got up to 66 Dees and the GPU itself was 51.4 degrees during the 10minute test the GRE on the other hand uh The Hot Spot was only 56 de and the g puu a mere 43° which I thought that was incredible that it was so cool that that huge heat sink on the GRE really makes a big difference all right so let's jump over to 3D Mark fire strike you can see here the 6700 XT got a score of 26,990 and the uh GRE was 33,42 so obviously a much stronger score um and if you look at the pure graphic score it's tremendously better uh 56,2 66 to only 3397 again the GRE performs excellent on the thermal front you've got the 6700 XT with a Hots spot high temp of 80 and the GPU at 56.6 the GRE only 66 degrees on the hotspot and 48 degrees on the GPU all right let's have have a look at time Spy Next you can see 6700 XT total score of 13,112 the GRE 20,24 so a huge jump in performance on time spy directx12 for the GRE the temperature is again super impressive for the GRE 6700 XT had 89 degree hotspot 59 degrees at the GPU the GRE only 64 degrees on the hotspot 47° on the GPU and for the last Benchmark we're going to talk about I ran uh unen superp position on both of these graphics cards and they have no 1440p uh test it just goes from 1080p to 4K so I ran it at 1080p extreme settings and you can see just a massive difference in performance the 6700 XT got a score of 6748 but take a look at the the frames there uh the the minimum was 40 the average was 5050 and the max was 60 now let's look at the GRE it's got a score of 12447 the minimum frames 68 average 93 Max 115 so the minimum frames achieved by the GRE is greater than the max frames achieved by the 6700 XT so at least in this test I mean these gpus are not even in the same zip code the GRE is highly Superior take a look at the temperatures it's the same story hotspot of 82 GPU of 58 on the 6700 XT the gr hotspot 66 and the GPU 49 degrees so just a tremendous showing for the 7900 gr so when I first got my 7900 gr installed after installing my new drivers for it one of the first things I wanted to do was get into the adrenaline software which is one of the reasons why I stuck with AMD over Nvidia is I really like how easy it is to tune the performance of your graphics card through the adrenaline software you can see it right here um it's really easy to get it exactly how you want it so I did what I did on my 6700 XT I went into the tuning section selected custom tuning and I made some changes to my clock frequency here and the voltage I like a a nice mild under volt keeps the temperatures down and doesn't impact the performance at all in a negative way I turn the clock speed up to 2650 on my vram I bumped up um the speed of the vram 2250 is what it's maxed out at out of the box goes all the way up to 2316 and that's one of the knocks against this card that I've read and heard about is the memory is a little bit gimped straight from the manufacturer that's part of the reason why it's so cheap so I want to give that as much of a boost as I can boosted it all the way up to 2316 megahertz and um adjusted from default to fast timing but what I noticed was when I made all my changes and uh started to try out some different programs I was getting some weird artifacting and just some straight up crazy uh uh visual issues so I rolled it back to default checked everything it ran all the benchmarks fine it was performing great so then I came back into adrenaline and I started to manually edit just one different thing at a time until I found out what the problem was and here is the problem so as you've already seen I ran the benchmarks on this thing and it worked great um however when you go down here to memory timing and you go from default to fast timing we're going to apply the changes is there and I'll just show you in heaven Benchmark it's really easy number one look you can see all of the weird artifacting on the screen here and then I'm going to run the Benchmark and you're going to just see some absolutely crazy visual stuff going on here I don't quite exactly know what that memory timing thing does but obviously it's causing issues here so we're going to quit get out of the Benchmark obviously it's not working right you can see we've got all these weird things going on we're going to go back into adrenaline I'm going to switch the memory timing back to default apply changes and get rid of those all right now watch this we're going to load up Heaven Benchmark again just ran it and I'll show you exactly what I mean runs just fine without a problem I don't have any idea what is the cause for that but clearly that was the problem and once I figured that out this card has been an absolute pleasure so overall I have absolutely really enjoyed my couple of days with the 7900 gr obviously I've done some testing with it with the benchmarks and things like that tweaked with the settings and overall I am just super super happy with it it looks tremendous it feels very high quality it's easy to tune and yeah the memory issue in Adrenaline that's very weird I know that AMD has said there are some bugs with it so they are aware and they're going to be changing it um I think some people might say well that right there is enough reason to switch to Nvidia I'm not convinced I still really like AMD software interface I love adrenaline and I know they're going to get it sorted out it it's an excellent card I don't think from what I can tell I don't have a 4070 super to compare it to but just looking at the different tests you can see online that the big guys have done uh the GRE just straight outperforms it in raster performance which is awesome um the the one AAA game that I do have is Starfield that came with the 6700 XT that's why I have it otherwise I wouldn't have it um and when I was playing it on the 6700 XT I was uh turning on frame generation once that was available turning on FSR upscaler and I was getting like 48 49 frames per second uh on my 1440p ultrawide with medium and high settings with the 7900 gr everything is on high as far as the settings goes and no FSR no frame generation and I'm getting 90 100 110 frames per second so it doesn't even need any of the assistance it just plows right through the game gives a great experience with absolutely no assistance no secondary programs or software running to help it out and and that's good enough for me this card absolutely does everything I need it to do I'm super happy with the price I paid $570 for it like I said the day that it came out from Newegg it is now available for 560 I believe there's a coupon code if you're on the fence about this card I say go for it I really really like it um and I highly recommend it to anybody else thanks for watching

Channel: CasualTechReview

Views: 4,890

Keywords: 7900 GRE, Steel Legend, Asrock, 6700 XT

Id: 4kTplGrvbDo

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2024