ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Review: AMD Almost Hits The Sweet Spot
ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE: The Golden Rabbit Edition Storms The U.S.
| ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend: MSRP $549 The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE originally launched in China, but recent changes in the GPU market spurred the "legendary" release of this great new GPU option from ASRock and others..
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In late July of last year, AMD announced the Radeon RX 7900 Golden Rabbit Edition, or GRE, at the ChinaJoy expo. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE was originally meant to be exclusive to the Chinese market, but that strategy has since shifted, and AMD is releasing the card into additional markets today, including the U.S.
If you missed the original announcement, the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is the most affordable entry point of the RX 7900 series, and the card slots in just below the Radeon RX 7900 XT. It features a pared-down Navi 31 GPU and memory sub-system relative to the RX 7900 XT, with a reduction in shader cores, as well as a cut-down memory interface and reduced total board power, but we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Instead of a tell-all introduction, let's first take a look at the Radeon RX 7900 GRE’s spec sheet. Then we’ll follow up with a look at the swanky ASRock Steel Legend card we received for testing, and finally get into some benchmarks and overclocking.
AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Specifications
The Radeon RX 7900 GRE has 80 Compute Units (CUs), 5,120 Stream Processors (Shader Cores), 80 Ray Accelerators, and 160 AI Accelerators. The Navi 31 GPU at the heart of the card is comprised of roughly 54 Billion transistors, and according to AMD’s reference specs, it offers a 1,270MHz Base Clock, 1,880MHz Game Clock, 2,245MHz Boost Clock and a TBP of 260W. 16GB of 18Gbps GDDR6 memory are linked to the GPU via a 256-bit wide memory interface, which equates to 576GB/s of raw memory bandwidth, but factor in the effects of 64MB of Infinity Cache and effective memory bandwidth jumps to 2,265GB/s.
Compared to the Radeon RX 7900 XT, the GRE has lower frequencies, less memory bandwidth and memory capacity (16GB vs. 20GB), and hence lower compute performance, etc. The card is designed to do battle with the GeForce RTX 4070, and offers all of the features of AMD’s top-end cards. We should also mention, that since the initial release of the Radeon RX 7900 series, AMD has added a number of features to its software suite, that give gamers the ability to further tweak performance. AMD Hypr-RX and AMD Fluid Motion Frames are available for Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 series cards, which brings frame generation technology to a multitude of DirectX 11 and 12 games.
The ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend Debuts In Clean White
When AMD launched the Radeon RX 7900 GRE in China, it showed off a reference card that looked just like the company's own Radeon RX 7900 XT. Board partners, however, will also be offering custom Radeon RX 7900 GREs, like the model we have from ASRock here.
The card you see pictured is the ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend OC Edition. Save for its triple fan setup, the ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend looks nothing like AMD’s own Radeon RX 7900 GRE. ASRock’s card is longer, taller, and wider, and ultimately requires three slots when installed in a system.
In addition to the larger overall dimensions, the other obvious standout feature is the white colorway, with pseudo UCP-patterned black and silver camo elements. The ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend also features RGB lighting, but if you’re not feeling it, the lighting can be shut off with the flick of a switch that’s situated along the top edge, right next to its dual 8-pin power connectors.
We haven’t tested a reference Radeon RX 7900 GRE, but relative to the similarly-designed AMD reference Radeon RX 7900 XT, this card is quieter and runs a bit cooler as well, but more on that later.
In terms of its specifications, the ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend OC Edition doesn’t stray too far from AMD’s reference spec, but it is technically hot-clocked. The CU count and features are identical, but its base clock is increased to 1,500MHz and its max boost clock comes in 100MHz higher, at 2,345MHz. The 16GB of GDDR6 memory on board has the same 18Gbps effective data rate as reference cards, however.
ASRock has outfitted the Steel Legend multiple heat pipes that snake through a massive heatsink array that effectively covers the entire front side of the PCB. There’s a nickel-plated copper plate that makes direct contact with the GPU, and the VRMs get their own heatsink segment as well. Three dual ball bearing fans sit atop the cooling assembly. Those fans will spin down completely when the GPU temperature is below 60°C and spin up as necessary when temps increase.
The card’s output configuration is just like other Radeon RX 7900 cards, and consists of a trio of DisplayPorts (DP 2.1) and a single, full-sized HDMI port (v2.1).
And with all of that covered, let’s get to some benchmarks...
