Is the ASRock Taichi 7900 XTX The Best GPU Bang for your Buck?

foreign [Music] yourself to buy a thousand dollar ish graphics card and you're sort of not really sure what's the safest thing to buy first we had power connector gate where if you use the wrong kind of power connector on your graphics card and you don't insert it all the way it catches on fire and then we had Vapor chamber gate where the reference design from AMD you know maybe wasn't super well quality controlled because there's a lot of people that seem to be making it there's a lot of posts and attention around defects so it's manufacturing defect after manufacturing defect after manufacturing defect but you resigned to spend a thousand dollars on graphics card and you don't want any headache will you get one that's got a defective Vapor chamber well I've got the bulletproof solution for you get a design that's not a reference Design This is the Tai Chi 7900 XTX that I'm going to lovingly call the 7900 XTX three gigahertz Edition but first let's unbox what do you get in the Box well this is the Tai Chi version three cooling fans stylish metal backplate polychrome sync that's RGB it has a reinforced metal frame dual bios quiet and performance and a super alloy graphics card for capacitors and you know all kinds of generic marketing speak this is a 7900 XTX but ASRock has had time to put their experience into it so that maybe you don't run into weird things okay in the Box you get a tiny installation manual Itachi postcard enough packing foam to insulate your house and the graphics card what to wait here and a Tai Chi retention bracket what even is this there's so many parts to it well that's pretty cool certainly going to handle any retention situation that you find yourself in all right so we have three display port outs one HDMI so HDMI 2.1 DisplayPort 2.1 ish although not the full bandwidth but more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4 three eight pin power connectors yes this is a card and a half in addition to the BIOS control switch we also have an LED on off switch this is a true triple slot card meaning that you've got a little bit of margin on your third slot so it would be breathable if you had a motherboard that had a three slot layout or a three slot configuration and you can see that we've got this integrated support bar which is connected to our back plate so if you've got adequate screw support on the back plate this bar is going to provide physical support to the end of the GPU so that it won't sag or warp or anything like that although it is good to mechanically support it and if you notice at the end these are actually pretty industry standard you see these for oems ASRock does this so that OEM system Builders or volume system Builders could integrate gpus like the tai chi in their build and these screws means that the mechanical mounting options for those oems for shipping uh means that it's screwed in on both ends basically and that makes it a little safer to ship when we're talking about ups but you know this is a physically very attractive card let's actually get to the benchmarks well the results are in for the 7900 XTX non-reference design from ASRock now first off ASRock have really done it here I'm honestly very surprised by the performance of this card it is substantially more higher performance than the reference 7900 XTX it's it's basically in a whole other performance class I don't think we've seen this much performance uplift between reference and non-reference design in uh two three maybe four GPU Generations but first the bad news for Ray tracing it is too much of a gap to make up the 4080 from Nvidia is a significantly better card for Ray tracing without any upscaling Technologies in most games however FSR 2.1 that's sort of a new thing I got a chance to take a look at the Callisto protocol and F1 2022 and the upscaling technology there is pretty significant but breaking down the performance it comes at a cost a power cost when we use the kilowatt meter this thing is pulling more than 100 Watts more at Peak than the reference design as well I mean we've got this true three slot cooler so it's not substantially larger although it is longer and it will breathe through the back of the card then the reference design but it is significantly faster in terms of non-ray Trace titles it's pretty handily beating the 4080 in most scenarios for older games like Borderlands 3 and of course you know the reference the good old shadow of the Tomb Raider we're actually pulling ahead especially around 1440p now that's not always true at 1080p 1080p gaming at a really insane frame rate is a little bit of a weakness of the the overall architecture but at 1440p you're talking about better performance than a 4080 closing in on the 4090 in some scenario goes again at a little bit higher power costs a little bit higher uh Power demand if you will your power supply is going to squeal a little bit more not to say that there's coil line or anything like that it's a very solid design from ASRock it's very impressive actually when we look at our other games like Deus Ex and cyberpunk I always like to sort of try to do a deep dive with cyberpunk so the non-ray tracing settings for cyberpunk here honestly very impressive now at the lower resolutions we're hitting the engine limit because this is a thousand dollar GPU and cyberpunk not a multiplayer game blah blah but at 4K this is one of the best 4K results for this card for the 7900 XTX that we've seen for my first non-reference XTX looking at this in the performance over the XTX it's actually pretty impressive now this story doesn't really hold up when you switch to Ray tracing you can claw back some of the performance some of the high frame rate and get get there get to the you know Promised Land of 60 FPS but you're going to be using an upscaling tank technology DLS S3 and some of the stuff that Nvidia has still is the overall Edge for that kind of stuff but the performance from Nvidia and the work that that uh that AMD has done to rise to the challenge of Nvidia that also can't be understated nvidia's got some good stuff but AMD is moving faster and so their amd's on a good trajectory if they can pull this out on another couple of generations we might see an upset so that'll be pretty fun for me those kinds of Ray tracing features aren't really super important I like the fluid smooth gameplay you know like 90 FPS on our OLED display uh the most frustrating part of the gameplay experience is the load screens I hate waiting for load screens when I click the game I want to launch into the game and it's just ready to go love that on the steam deck it's like I'm going to turn the steam deck off I'm going to turn it back on oh look I'm right where I left off game designers could learn a thing or two from that but overall the performance breakdown here is pretty good the artificial benchmarks show a very close grouping for all of the graphics cards that we're testing the reference XTX the 4080 the 4090 and that is the Asus 48 it's not even the reference 4080 so we're talking about a little bit of an overclock for the 4080 and the Zotac 4090 that's what I I'm using for my testing so those are a little faster than the the average 40 80 and the 40 90 that you have out there and still the Tai Chi 7900 XTX really closes the Gap here pretty handily now at the time that I'm filming this looks like the Tai Chi is going to cost twelve hundred dollars 200 more than the reference version of this cart I have some reservations about that I'm not sure 200 versus the 4080 performance is you know it's neck and neck can you actually get the Asus 4080 for around twelve hundred dollars no it actually cost me fourteen hundred dollars so maybe in that scenario 1200 makes sense but I think that's too much for the performance would I rather have the Tai Chi at 1200 or the reference version I think honestly I'd probably go for the reference version if I was going to spend a thousand dollars on a GPU but the Tai Chi is very good and to you it may be worth the performance difference at two hundred dollars more because it does split the difference between a thousand and fourteen hundred dollars that you have between what this literally what I paid for the Asus 4080 1400 versus a thousand dollars for the 7900 xdx which you could get on amd.com and even Newegg and blah blah but that is the reference design which also maybe had the vapor chamber defect which is really unfortunate for AMD especially coming on the heels of you know power connector gate from from Nvidia it's just not a great time to be buying a thousand dollar graphics card unless you've got time to fuss around with it with an RMA I don't know what to tell you no that's not gonna be a problem if you buy the Tai Chi the Tai Chi is not a reference design it doesn't it's not going to suffer from those kinds of issues because it doesn't do that ASRock did their own thing so maybe that's worth a couple extra 100 bucks and you get that in performance you know you can look at it that way me I'm looking forward at the you know middle of the road gpus that are coming whatever the the 6700 or the 6750 equivalent is going to be or maybe even the 6600 equivalent in the Seventh Generation I think those are the gpus maybe to be excited for something in that three to six hundred dollar price point because if you can get 85 percent of the performance at around six hundred dollars that's probably what I would do if it was me unless I was looking to build a really super high-end system and this card is the best performing 7900 XTX that I have seen to date good design solid design solid cooling it doesn't run at a billion degrees good power connector design good physical design of the car to prevent sagging and it comes with supports no complaints there I'm little this is level one I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 40,652

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: O-LRefQ5IZM

Length: 10min 19sec (619 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Trivo3]

No it's not... "Bang for Buck" or "performance for price" is a metric, the top cards for which are all below 400$

There, I've saved you people 10 minutes of L1T bs.

Edit: added a comma after "metric" because otherwise it's soooooo hard to make sense of my awful grammar and my sentence doesn't make sense otherwise.

[u/amam33]

To all the people who don't want to watch the video, but still downvote based on the title: Wendell is asking that question in the context of 7900 XTX AIB models (with the reference model being a no go, because of QC issues and the performance and price span being pretty big between it and the AIB cards). There's really nothing controversial about it. It's literally a review of the GPU in the thumbnail...

[u/MrBob161]

How is an 1199 7900 XTX good bang for the buck?

[u/spacev3gan]

I checked some retailers websites and this is one of those highly overpriced 7900 XTX. Which is to be expected, Taichi cards are the higher-end SKU from AsRock, comparable to the Nitros, the Red Devils, the Aoruses, you get the idea.

For $1,200 it is a tough sell, regardless of how it performs. The RTX 4080 was mocked (rightfully so) for its MSRP of $1,200 which is too close to the 4090. A 7900XTX for $1,200 is no different, arguably even worse.

Still, this is the only Taichi 7900XTX video on Youtube. That is cool.