XFX QUICKSILVER 309 RX 7600 XT Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

XFX hasn’t gone overboard with the QUICKSILVER 309 design, it’s a large after-market model and features a pretty big cooler, but they’ve kept the aesthetics pretty toned down and gone with a mostly black plastic shroud that looks presentable, but it’s nothing too crazy.

XFX have three main series for their graphics cards, the MERC (Mercury), the QICK (Quicksilver), and the SWFT (Swift), and this new GPU is part of the QICK series, which is their mid-range option promising “a high-performance model for mainstream gamers) which means it comes with most of the premium performance features, but without the more expensive materials seen in the MERC series, keeping costs down and performance up, which is something I can totally get on board with.

It’s also the 309, which is their very simple numbering system, as 210 would mean two 100mm fans, and in this case, it means three 90mm fans. They’re pretty big fans too, 90mm fans can move a lot of air even at lower RPM, but that does mean that this card is pretty large.

It measures 302mm long, 114mm wide and 50mm deep (2.5 slots), so while it’s not the largest graphics card on the market, it’s pretty big relative to where it sits in the price and performance ratios.

Down the side of the card, you’ll find a pair of 8-pin PCIe connectors, making it easily compatible with last-gen power supplies and suitable for haters of the 12VHPWR (which honestly, I like using, but to each their own).

At the back of the card, there are four display connections, comprising of three DisplayPort and a single HDMI port, making it easily suited to multi-monitor configurations. There’s also a dual BIOS configuration built-in which can of course be flashed to a new or custom BIOS, and can easily be recovered using the other BIOS should something go wrong.

The card does feature a full backplate, which features additional ventilation and a cool XFX logo is cut into the middle of it too. There’s a large cut-out towards the rear of the card too, allowing the rearmost fan to push airflow right through the card, which should help significantly improve the overall cooling performance.

Tearing down the card was very easy, as it only required four screws around the GPU and four in the backplate to remove it, making it easy to strip, clean, and reassemble the card when required.

The XFX QICK 7600 XT uses a fully digital PWM 6+2 phase power delivery design, which XFX say allows it to reach 15W over the reference specifications, as well as an additional 44 MHz boost clock out of the box.

The GPU has four 2GB memory ICs surrounding it along with another four on the rear of the card, giving us the 16GB GDDR6 total, which should be better for higher texture settings and higher resolution gaming, at least in theory.

The heatsink uses a nickel-plated solid copper cold plate, which features a larger raised surface just for the GPU die, but also a surrounding surface that cools the memory ICs, and a further wide strip separate from this to cool the power delivery hardware, all of which feed into a large aluminium heatsink.

The heatsink is split into a few sections but features five 6mm heatpipes to ensure the heat is evenly distributed so that those three 90mm fans can do their job.

Taking a quick look at the back of the backplate, you can see there are three more thermal pads here, ensuring the capacitors and the PCB behind the VRAM are cooled too.