SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB GDDR6

It has great performance for the size which was an issue for me. Most high end card are very large but this was powerful and smaller.

I like the card and given the cost of them lately I can’t speak of the value all that much I suppose. Its just coming from a 6700xt I was expecting a bigger jump for the price! I’m going to keep it as I really want A1 Encoding and Nvidia isn’t getting a dime! But I guess its just how things are nowadays! Its a value Because the alternatives is just SUCH a ripoff!

I upgraded from my old RX 5700 XT to this, the old GPU was super silent wouldn’t even notice if the system was running it was that silent but with this GPU on, the fan noise level is comparatively way too high. I will eventually adapt to this noise/fan humming sound but wished the fan noise wasn’t that obvious. Other than that, I gained 166% better performance based on the 3DMark report I ran on both cards. My current free sync monitor is tapped at 165 Hz but when I tested this on my favorite game COD MW2, the FPS was constantly pushing over 200 FPS on ULTRA (everything at max) settings which was mindblowing. My old card was good and was a champ no doubt about it but with this GPU I am now able to see the DMZ terrain with extreme clarity that before plus the water shadow and weather effects are unbelievable. This was the first ever high-end graphics I spent my money on otherwise I always went for mid-range GPUs in the past, and glad I made this jump for the high-end GPU this time. I am sure this price ($1000) will go down more than half the price in a couple of years but right now, this offers the top tier graphics. I have 3060 ti on another machine, wasn’t impressed by RT or should I say I didn’t really notice any difference on the screen. If you are like me that can’t notice subtle visual differences, buying Nvidia cards for RT is wasting your money to go down the drain.

I am giving only 4 stars because of the noise level otherwise this card deserves 5 stars.

Let’s start with the pro. The size is compact when compared to the RTX 4080 or any other non-reference 7900XTX , so it is way easier to manage in smaller cases. 3 x 8pin so no need to deal with the 12 pin adapters. Raw rasterization performance is comparable if not better than RTX 4080, and it does it for $200 less. For games that work, everything runs smoothly.

Now the Cons, Noise level is meh, fans need to run constantly above 80% to keep temperature under control at full load. It is tolerable but you definitely want to put on a pair of headphones. The deal breaker for me however, are the DRIVERS!!, for some games (ie Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3-DX12 ), it just constantly crashes with driver time out. A simple google search will show you that this is a very common issue. After trying to trouble shoot for almost 2 weeks, (tried all sorts of things like clean installing GPU and Chipset drivers, rolling back to older version drivers, installing driver without AMD Adrenaline, updating bios, running GPU, CPU and memory in stock settings, etc.) nothing works. AMD is improving their drivers with each update, but I just don’t want to deal with these issues and keep hoping that the next AMD driver update will be the fix..

I ended up returning this and ate additional $200 cost for a RTX 4080 (no crashes anymore). I really wanted this AMD GPU to work since Nvidia pricing is just horrible, but right now, unless you are willing to wait for AMD to gradually fix their drivers, I would say go with Nvidia to avoid the headaches.