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

A Closer Look

So first things first, in typical MERC 319 fashion, we have a very large card and something we’ve grown to expect from that particular line-up, coming in at 335mm long, 116mm high and 50mm thick and weighing in at 1665 grams so not the heaviest GPU we’ve seen but is certainly on the upper-end of the scale.

Beyond the size, it’s a nice design that looks more professional than gamery with its triple fan design that breaks the mold a little with varying sizes as the outer fans are 100mm while the middle fan is slightly smaller at 90mm but all incorporate 13 blades and utilise fan stop technology once the card’s temperature drops below 50 degrees C.

In terms of the shroud, it’s nice and quite simplistic in the grand scheme of things, with the only part that puts me off is the stickers in the middle of the fans, which I’ve made my thoughts clear on before, but for something you’re unlikely to see, it’s not exactly a deal breaker.

The side you will see is the backplate, and this is thick. I mean, really thick at 2.4mm meaning that it’s around double what you’d expect from a conventional backplate and is made from die-cast aluminium and definitely has an industrial look and feel to it which serves a purpose as along with the thermal pads on the rear of the PCB, it does act as a heatspreader and isn’t just for show.

For the I/O, we have three DisplayPort connectors and a single HDMI along with plenty of ventilation for heat to escape from.

Now when we drill down a little further, the PCB is large, especially by today’s standards and the influx of small PCB designs from team green, but AMD have kept things much larger, though layout-wise, things are pretty well segmented.

We have two 8-pin power connectors in the top right, which help to power the 15 digital PWM power phases which are split between 8 for the GPU core, 2 for the memory and the other five for the SOC and I/O.

XFX have kept with a nickel-plated vapor chamber cooler that draws heat directly away from the GPU core and into the five 6mm heatpipes that span the whole of the large heatsink while the GDDR6 modules make contact with an aluminium cooling plate to kept each part of the GPU independent temperature-wise from each other.

There’s also a large amount of thermal pads on the card covering various components including the phases, the memory and circuitry on the rear of the card to help dissipate heat and provide the very best temperatures.

As you can see, the radiator is split into multiple sections, with three large heat pipes helping distribute the heat to the front, mid and rear sections of the radiator. Plus, there’s a thick thermal material that covers the VRM and the RAM, with a nice and clean application of thermal paste for the chipset.