ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend Review

Source: Tech Power Up added 04th Mar 2024

Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend is a premium custom design graphics card based on the not-so-new RX 7900 GRE, which is seeing a wider launch today. The RX 7900 GRE was originally launched as a China-exclusive product back in July 2023. It stayed in the market over the months, and AMD has found a new mission for it—competing with the GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and so it was just a matter of scaling up the production of this card, and having it shipped to certain markets outside China. The January 2024 introduction of the RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4070 Ti Super, and their impact on the real-world prices of the RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti, is what set the ball in motion for today’s wider launch of the RX 7900 GRE.

AMD carved the RX 7900 GRE out of the Navi 31 silicon powering the other RX 7900 series cards, such as the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX, but this is the compacted Navi 31 package AMD originally designed for the mobile RX 7900 series GPUs. This package has a lower pin-count, with pins for just a 256-bit wide memory bus; and fewer power pins. We could be wrong, but the compact Navi 31 and Navi 32 could be sharing a pin-map, which makes the former compatible with PCBs AMD and its partners originally designed for the RX 7800 XT, which are simpler, and hence more cost-effective.

To create the RX 7900 GRE, AMD enabled 80 out of 96 compute units (CU) present on the Navi 31 graphics compute die (GCD), to result in 5,120 stream processors, 160 AI accelerators, 80 Ray accelerators, and 320 TMUs—somewhat similar counts to the RX 6950 XT, but on a newer architecture. 160 out of 192 ROPs are enabled. The memory sub-system sees a 256-bit memory bus drive 16 GB of 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory for 576 GB/s of bandwidth on tap—same as the RX 6950 XT. What sets the RX 7900 XT apart from this card is the wider 320-bit memory bus driving 20 GB of faster 20 Gbps memory for 38% more bandwidth; besides 4 extra CU.

The RDNA 3 graphics architecture powering the RX 7900 GRE introduces new dual-issue rate compute units, with vastly improved idle SIMD resource utilization, and support for new math formats. The company claims generational IPC uplifts over the RDNA2 compute units to the tune of 17%. Taking advantage of the newer 5 nm node, AMD is also running the shader engines at higher clock speeds than the previous generation. The company also introduced Ray Accelerator, a component inside the CU that accelerates matrix math functions by utilizing the SIMD units, which should accelerate AI DNN building and training. The second generation Ray Accelerator is designed to provide a 50% generational improvement in ray intersection performance. Another interesting change introduced with RDNA 3 is that the GPU’s front-end operates at a 10-15% higher clock speed than the shader engines.

The ASRock RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend is a slick new white-themed trim. In its product stack, the Steel Legend is positioned between the Challenger OC and Phantom Gaming SKUs. Besides a triple-slot cooling solution, you get multicolor LED lighting for the card’s trio of fans; and a slight factory overclock. ASRock hasn’t given out a price for the RX 7900 GRE yet, but given the $550 AMD MSRP, we assume a $580 price, given the other cards we’re testing today.

AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE Super Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 3070	$310	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$350	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$450	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 7700 XT	$430	3456	96	2171 MHz	2544 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 32	26500M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 6800 XT	$500	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$450	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 4070	$525	5888	64	1920 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7800 XT	$500	3840	96	2124 MHz	2430 MHz	2425 MHz	Navi 32	28100M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6900 XT	$650	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6950 XT	$630	5120	128	2100 MHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$800	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 4070 Super	$590	7168	80	1980 MHz	2475 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RX 7900 GRE	$550	5120	160	1880 MHz	2245 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
ASRock RX 7900 GRE Steel Legend	~$580	5120	160	1972 MHz	2333 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 4070 Ti	$720	7680	80	2310 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD104	35800M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 192-bit
RTX 4070 Ti Super	$800	8448	112	2340 MHz	2610 MHz	1313 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 7900 XT	$700	5376	192	2000 MHz	2400 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	20 GB, GDDR6, 320-bit
RTX 3090 Ti	$1050	10752	112	1560 MHz	1950 MHz	1313 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 4080	$1200	9728	112	2205 MHz	2505 MHz	1400 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RTX 4080 Super	$1300	10240	112	2295 MHz	2550 MHz	1438 MHz	AD103	45900M	16 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 7900 XTX	$910	6144	192	2300 MHz	2500 MHz	2500 MHz	Navi 31	57700M	24 GB, GDDR6, 384-bit
RTX 4090	$1850	16384	176	2235 MHz	2520 MHz	1313 MHz	AD102	76300M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

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