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It’s been a time of glorious bounty in the PC hardware universe unlike any other. We’ve seen powerful new CPU architectures from both Intel and AMD launched within weeks of each other. We also witnessed the unabashedly potent RTX 40-series launch. It’s been an exciting time to be a PC gamer.
Now there’s just one more highly anticipated arrival that will effectively wrap up the party: AMD’s next-gen GPUs. These will truly be something special: the first chiplet-based GPUs for consumers. The 7900X was an obvious product, but the existence of a second, more-powerful GPU is the big news here. It seems AMD is following Nvidia’s strategy of launching two high-end cards first. As you recall, Nvidia “unlaunched” the third 40-series GPU previously.
The latest rumors indicate AMD will be launching the RX 7900 XTX and the RX 7900 XT this week. Yes, that is a lot of Xs. It’s also surprisingly bringing back the XTX moniker, which it hasn’t used since 2006 for the X1900 XTX. Both GPUs will seemingly take on the RTX 4090 at the top of the stack for RDNA3. Both GPUs will be Navi31, which is the big die of the family. The XTX version will be the full version of the chip, with the XT version being slightly cut-down. The flagship should come with 24GB of 20Gb/s memory on a 384-bit memory bus, which aligns with previous rumors. This should give it almost a terabyte of memory bandwidth. That number doesn’t include the benefits of its infinity cache.
This fan-made render of the flagship Navi31 GPU looks tantalizing. (Image: @Technetium)
It’s expected to offer up to 96MB of cache this time, according to TechSpot. That’s a small reduction from the 128MB it offered on the 6900 XT. However, it could be using its V-Cache technology to vertically stack some of it too. It was previously rumored it might offer as much as 384MB, which would be truly nuts. The XTX card is reported to boast 12,288 streaming processors. That’s more than double the 5,120 found in the previous flagship; the Radeon RX 6900 XT. Its power consumption is still a big unknown here. Previously AMD stated it’ll be going up this generation. Since the 6900 XT was a 300W card, we can comfortably predict it’ll be 375W or so.
The cut-down XT version will use 20GB of GDDR6 memory across a narrower 320-bit bus. It’ll allegedly offer 800GB of memory bandwidth, which is more than the RTX 4080 16GB, not accounting for infinity cache benefits. It’s possible this card could land in between Nvidia’s top GPUs though. It’ll offer 10,752 stream processors, more than double that of the 6800 XT’s 4,680.
Notably, neither GPU will be using the newfangled 12VHPWR connector. Instead, it’s using the tried-and-true eight- and six-pin connectors we all have now. This will come as good news for those who have been following GPU news. Nvidia is currently embroiled in a controversy concerning its 4-into-1 PCIe power adapters melting. It’s supposedly caused by a suboptimal soldering job on the wires inside the plug that goes into the card. The hullabaloo caused an AMD executive to confirm on Twitter it wasn’t using the 12-pin connector.
Sadly, we must report that although AMD is announcing these GPUs on Nov. 3, it might be another month before they reach retail. Noted tipster Greymon55 recently posted that they won’t go on sale until December. They were originally supposed to be offered two weeks after the reveal, in late November. Pricing and board power are still TBD, but we shall find out soon enough.
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