Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+... one heck of a card!

all right guys Dominic here for kick Guru and today we are back with our first look at a custom RX 7900 XTX graphics card info review today is the sapphire Nitro plus model featuring a 420 watt power limit a boost clock of 2680 megahertz and I must say a pretty jaw-dropping design today then we're gonna find out exactly how well this card Stacks up against amd's reference design looking at Thermals gaming overclocking and more so without further Ado let's Dive In foreign [Music] starting with a look at the design of the car then I do have to give Sapphire big credit here this is without doubt one of the best looking graphics cards that I can remember Sapphire has opted for a gray shroud that curves beautifully around both ends of the card before meeting the gray metal backplate on top although made from plastic the Shroud does feel pretty rigid in the hand perhaps in part thanks to the internal aluminum magnesium alloy that Sapphire claims is designed to improve structural stiffness a long RGB diffuser can also be found on either side of the Shroud and this is a new design feature for the Nitro plus I have to say that the RGB is very well done the light itself is very evenly diffused with no hot spots but it doesn't look overly Gordy either Sapphire does also include a 5 volt argb header on the card itself so you can synchronize the lighting with your motherboard though do note that for this to work you need to download the trick software and set the LED setting to external Source a 4 pin pwm fan header is even placed next to the argb connection to allow a chassis fan to be controlled based on the gpu's own fan curve speaking of the fans we obviously get three here and these use Sapphire's angular velocity fan blade design with the company claiming up to 19 more airflow compared to the previous generation each fan measures approximately 98 millimeters across and they continue to feature Sapphire's Quick Connect feature so they can be individually removed after taking out just a single screw per fan we can't get away from the fact that this is a big graphics card though much bigger than a and B's reference design the Nitro plus measures in at 320 by 135.8 by 71.6 millimeters so it's pretty low long and over three and a half slots thick making it both longer and wider than the RTX 4090 Founders Edition it also weighs in at just under 1.94 kilos flipping the card over then we can note the gray metal backplate which perfectly matches the color of the Shroud the back plate itself doesn't quite extend to the entire length of the card instead leaving a small gap for airflow between the end of the back plate and the internal metal frame that wraps around the end of the card we can also see that a dual bio switch is placed on the back of the card as well and this is very close to the i o bracket technically this is a three-way switch as the setting furthest from the i o bracket engages the primary bios the secondary bios is in the middle and on the furthest left sitting Sapphire includes a software switch option and this simply lets you change between the two bios modes from within the trick software so there's no need to physically move that switch for the BIOS modes themselves bios 1 has a 420 watt total board power and it has a 2680 megahertz boost clock while bios 2 which is the secondary bios that has a lower 350 watt total board power and a boost clock of 2 500 megahertz we can also note triple 8-pin PCI power connectors so that's an extra eight pin compared to reference while Sapphire also includes two HDMI 2.1 and two DisplayPort 1.4 video outputs in terms of disassembly then we'll start off by taking a look at the PCB here Sapphire has opted for a 17 phase vrm for the GPU and we can see a three-phase vrm for the memory 70 amp Monolithic Power Systems mp87997 mosfets are used across the board with the GPU vrm controlled by a monolithic mp2857 and a monolithic mp2856 controller is used for the memory vrm as for the cooler than Sapphire has brought back Vapor X for the Nitro plus meaning a copper Vapor chamber is used to directly contact the GPU and memory modules while seven heat pipes draw heat out into the finstack that aluminum magnesium frame we already mentioned does also serve a dual purpose as it does contact the vrm to provide extra cooling via some thermal pads Sapphire also uses thermal pads on the underside of the back plates though they are quite thick at approximately four millimeters so I'm not sure how much thermal transfer there will be but I guess it's better than nothing foreign [Music] that is it for our look at the card though so it's time to move on to testing for this we are of course using our regular GP test system for 2022 which is powered by MSI this is based on Intel's I9 12900k CPU paired with the MSI Meg z690 unified motherboard and 32 gigabytes of a data xpg Lancer ddr5 memory all testing was also done using the MSI MBG 321 urqd 4k monitor kicking off with film performance then as this is the first aib card we've tested we've not got any other comparison points apart from the AMD reference design but we can see that the Nitro plus bios one mode does offer similar thermal performance to the NBA design it is important to note however that these are out of the box thermal results so noise levels are not taken into account bios 2 meanwhile runs about 5 degrees cooler than by else one as a result of its lower power limit these thermal results look even better when we do take noise levels into account the Nitro plus operates at just 35 decibels so that's a healthy six decibel reduction compared to amd's reference card interestingly noise levels are about the same between bios 1 and bios 2 with both modes peaking at 36 fan speed or around 1480 RPM in our testing I did however unfortunately notice some coil wind during my testing it's not the worst I've ever heard but take a listen for yourself with this quick sound test foreign normalized thermals to produce 40 decibels of Noise We had to increase fan speed to 48 or about 1950 RPM this saw the Nitro plus run comfortably cooler than the AMD reference design offering a 7 degree reduction in terms of GPU thermals but a 12 degree reduction when looking at the hotspot this is also while operating at a higher power limit as well as noise normalized thermals don't take power into account making the overall design even more impressive that's because Sapphire has actually pumped up the power significantly with the Nitro plus as we saw the car drawing 440 watts in our testing that does however mean the overall efficiency of the card is significantly reduced with performance per watt down by 17 compared to the reference card in cyberbank 2077 but let's take a look at what that means in terms of the clock speed Headroom as it turns out the extra power budget afforded to the Nitro plus directly translate into significantly raised clock speeds bios 1 averaged 2751 megahertz over our 30 minute stress test making it about 170 megahertz faster than the reference design now bios 2 does run noticeably slower as a result of its reduced power limit but even then overall performance closely matches amd's reference card despite that factory overclock though our game benchmarks only show limited gains for the Nitro plus when compared to amd's reference design we saw at most a four percent boost to frame rates in Horizon zero Dawn but typically the figure was just two percent as shown in cyberpunk 2077 and Resident Evil Village as ever the factory overclock alone is not a real reason to buy one card over the other as the differences of very minor finishing with a look at overclocking lens if you've already seen our launch day review of the 7900 XTX you will know that we had very limited success here so it was an area where I wanted to spend a bit more time with the Nitro plus one key change I made was adjusting the voltage slider and undervolting really does help with this GPU I lowered this by 60 millivolts down from 1150 to 1090 millivolts while setting a maximum GPU clock of 3050 megahertz the memory clock was adjusted to 2720 megahertz with the power limit maximized at plus 15 now this overclock did actually net relatively decent gains in our testing far better than what we saw on launch day with improvements coming in around eight percent above the Nitro plus running its default settings in some cases the 7900 XTX was not too far off the RTX 1490 City though of course it never fully caught up the downside to pushing a custom card like this to its limit is that power draw did increase significantly we measured just under 490 Watts power draw in cyberpunk 2077 at 4K though as you can see here we even exceeded 510 watts in Resident Evil Village considering this 7900 XTX was still always slower than a stock RTX 4090 that is a heck of a lot of juice after all of that then I think it's fair to say the sapphire Nitro plus is one of the best AMD based graphics cards that I have reviewed over the last few years for starters I really think that Sapphire has nailed the design for me the gray color looks fantastic and the subtle curves and RGB light bar really adds a level of sophistication the cool also performs very well and granted we can't say how much better or worse it is than any other custom card as this is our first aib review it still managed to be seven degrees cooler than amd's reference design while also drawing over 80 Watts more power so that is pretty impressive there's also a solid dual bios implementation reasonable overcoming Headroom once you bring undervolting into play and it is a very quiet graphics card but just a touch of coil wine that was present on my sample the one thing giving me cause for concern then is of course going to be pricing while it is currently out of stock here in the UK it launched at 1300 pounds making it actually a hundred pounds more expensive than some RTX 4080s right now in the UK I have to say this was a worry for me when the 7900 xdx first came out for me this GP you absolutely has to be cheaper than the RTX 4080 to offer any meaningful value as good as Sapphire's design is if you can get a 4080 offering similar overall performance but with dlss and Superior Ray tracing for a hundred pounds less than well I just think these 7900 XTX becomes very hard to justify to be clear Sapphire's custom Nitro plus design is absolutely fantastic but for me the 7900 XTX just cannot demand a price premium over the RTX 4080 as just doesn't make sense anyway guys that is going to do it for this review so if you liked it please do toss me a thumbs up and let me know your thoughts on this card down in the comments below please do like and subscribe if you haven't already and why not come carry on the conversation in our Discord server which is linked in the description while there you can also find a link to our brand new merch store where you can see a couple cool designs on screen now and lastly if you're feeling particularly generous you could also consider backing us on patreon that's it for this one though guys I'm Dominic forkick Guru and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: KitGuruTech

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Keywords: kitguru, video, technology, news, interviews, reviews, exclusive, kitguru membership, join kitguru, rdna 3, sapphire nitro+, sapphire 7900 xtx, 7900 xtx review, nitro+ 7900 xtx, best rdna 3 card, best amd gpu, graphics card review, 7900 xtx benchmarks, vapor-x

Id: XaEWPgPDF7U

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2022