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AMD Radeon RX 7900 Spotted With Similar Specs as XT Model
The card we thought might exist in a lab somewhere is an actual retail product and might even arrive in the US soon.
By Josh Norem July 24, 2023
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Radeon RX 7900
Credit: @Wxnod On Twitter
Recently it was revealed that AMD has two new GPUs in the pipeline for a September launch, with a possible third GPU being considered as well. The two GPUs we knew existed were the RX 7800 and 7700, and there was a rumor of there possibly also being an RX 7900 non-XTX/XT GPU. Now it's been confirmed this card does exist, and it's essentially a cut-down Radeon RX 7900 XT. It has the same core count but with some parts disabled and detuned. This SKU appears to be heading to the Chinese market for now, but a US launch could also be imminent.

The card's box art was revealed on Twitter by a user named @wxnod, and it shows it's a 16GB GPU compared with the 20GB of the Radeon RX 7900 XT. It reportedly has the same number of compute units (CU) as the XT card, though, with 84. This is an interesting revelation, as it was thought the 7900 would offer 70 CPUs to leave a bit of a gap between it and the XT, but that's not the case. Aside from that one similarity, the two GPUs are quite different. The 7900 has a narrower 256-bit memory bus compared with the 320-bit bus used on the XT. That narrower bus also means it'll have 64MB of infinity cache compared with 80MB on the XT, as noted by Wccftech. It will also likely offer lower game clocks, resulting in å lower TDP.

Radeon RX 7900
Credit: @Wxnod On Twitter
For power consumption, the RX 7900 XT is rated at 315W, and the card this GPU will likely compete with—the RTX 4070 Ti—has a TDP of 285W, so we can see the 7900 landing in that ballpark. Otherwise, it uses dual eight-pin power connectors, as AMD is holding steady on the older ATX standard to make the upgrade process easier for people. The card is still a monstrosity, though, with a 3.5-slot cooler and a three-fan design, the same as current Sapphire Nitro Radeon cards.

One fascinating detail is that when comparing the backside of the GRE card, which stands for Golden Rabbit Edition, to the existing Radeon RX 7900 XT, you can see the underbelly of the die and the retention bracket are a bit smaller on the new GPU. This is odd since both models use the same Navi31 die. However, the mystery could be solved by a new leak showing AMD has developed a smaller package for Navi31 that is designed to let its partners create dummy boards for the incoming Navi32 GPUs. According to Videocardz, the smaller Navi31 has been shipping to partners for months to let them prepare their Radeon 7800 and 7700 boards without having the actual dies.

Sapphire Nitro Radeon RX 7900 XT
The existing version of this GPU is a big boy Credit: Sapphire
Regarding pricing, though the RX 7900 XT launched at $899, it's now fallen to $849. That means this non-XT version will likely be in the ballpark of $749 to undercut the $799 price of the RTX 4070 Ti. That Nvidia board also has just 12GB of memory, so if AMD could come close in performance while offering more memory, it could have a compelling GPU. That is, assuming this model comes to the US market, which is currently unknown.