AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB Review Featuring XFX MERC 319

Andy Ruffell / 8 months ago

1440p gaming has been getting more and more popular as of late but on the AMD side of things, there hasn’t been anything to cater for it with the stack seeming pretty lacklustre with just 3 models, the 7600, 7900 XT and 7900 XT but today that’s all about to change with the release of the 7800 XT and 7700 XT.

So what is the 7800 XT? Well, it’s a card that features 16GB of VRAM, aimed at 1440p max setting gamers, and for a price point of just $499 which puts it at the same price as the 4060 Ti 16GB though that has seen retail pricing drop as of late, though that aside, it didn’t exactly have the best launch and has continued to just dwindle with no one really snapping it up. So hopefully this could be a great opportunity for AMD to hit a price point that works and to offer great value for money, something that both team red and team green seem to have been missing the mark on lately.

So what do we get from the 7800 XT? 3840 shading units, 240 texture mapping units, 96 ROPs, 60 compute units, 60 RT cores and 64MB of L3 cache which all sounds somewhat impressive until you look at its predecessor, the 6800 XT; as this newer, shiny GPU actually has 17% less shading units, texture mapping units, compute units and RT cores. It also has 25% fewer ROPs and 50% less L3 cache so already, on paper, it’s not off to a great start gen to gen though things do change slightly in the configuration.

While it harnesses the same 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit memory interface, the bandwidth has been increased to 620GB/s which puts it 21% ahead of the 6800 XT, and 23% ahead of both the RTX 4070 and 4070 Ti but as we’ve seen in every major launch, numbers don’t necessarily equate to extra performance, and it’s more down to the architecture and how games are able to harness the power and potential of it, so I’ll reserve judgment until we’ve seen exactly how it performs.

Now another area that has been focussed on, as you’d expect, is efficiency, with the 7800 XT coming in with a TDP of just 263W which is a reduction from the 300W on the 6800 XT, though it’s a stark difference from the 200W TDP of the RTX 4070.

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT Review

Now I don’t actually have a reference card from AMD for this launch, and in fact have no MSRP-based cards, though the XFX MERC 319 model that we have is only a smidge over the MSRP at around $530, but as we’ve seen before from this range of cooler, that extra cost does get you a lot more bang for your buck with great cooling potential, silent operation and a robust design that is typically miles beyond the MBA design that AMD put out and we will be taking a look at the cooling potential a little later on in the review.