Introduction

ASRock Radeon RX 7900 XTX Taichi is the company’s flagship air-cooled graphics card powered by AMD’s fastest RDNA3 GPU. An established player in the motherboard space, ASRock entered the graphics card business as an AMD partner just two generations ago, and now leads the space with some of the most powerful custom graphics card designs. The RX 7900 XTX Taichi retains the high-quality industrial product-design language of the brand, and serves up a powerful cooling solution, paired with an overclocker-grade PCB for the RX 7900 XTX. In particular, it has a third 8-pin power connector that expands the power-limit, letting the the flagship GPU stretch its legs better, and offer better overclocking.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX debuts the RDNA3 graphics architecture, with silicon-level innovation that’s as profound as the company’s Ryzen 3000 desktop processors–disaggregation. AMD is maximizing its allocation of the TSMC 5 nm EUV node, by building a centralized die that contains only those components that benefit the most from the switch to 5 nm– the GPU’s main number-crunching and graphics rendering machinery. The company identified two key components that don’t benefit that much with 5 nm, namely the memory controllers, GDDR6 PHY, and the Infinity Cache memory, and split them out into separate dies called MCDs (memory cache dies), built on 6 nm. There are six of these on the “Navi 31” GPU powering the RX 7900 XTX, each with a 64-bit wide GDDR6 memory path, and a 16 MB slice of the GPU’s 96 MB of Infinity Cache. These make up the GPU’s 384-bit memory interface, and AMD could carve out SKUs such as the RX 7900 XT that have a narrower 320-bit bus, by simply disabling one of the six MCDs.

The new RDNA3 graphics architecture introduces a faster dual-issue rate compute unit that supports new math formats, comes with AI acceleration hardware besides 2nd Gen Ray Accelerators that support 50% higher ray-intersection performance. AMD claims a 17.5% IPC gain for its RDNA3 CU, which when combined with the 20% higher CU count, higher clock-speeds, and 87% higher memory bandwidth, adds up to a 51% generational performance/Watt uplift, making the RX 7900 XTX competitive with some of NVIDIA’s fastest GPUs, such as the GeForce RTX 4080, which it undercuts in pricing by as much as $200 (at least when looking at MSRPs).

The most surprising aspect of the RX 7900 XTX is its power configuration, with a stock power limit of just 350 W, that’s open to be increased on custom-design cards such as the ASRock Taichi we’re reviewing today. It’s possible to build cards with just two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, without the need for a fancy power adapter. The ASRock Taichi features three 8-pin connectors for a 525 W maximum power input capability. This enabled ASRock to increase GPU clock speeds from 2300/2500 MHz reference, to 2510/2680 MHz.

The ASRock RX 7900 XTX Taichi debuts the company’s latest Taichi 3X cooling solution that uses three massive 110 mm fans, a heavy dual aluminium fin-stack heatsink, eight heatpipes, and a dedicated memory heatpipe. The card offers a powerful 22-phase VRM that draws power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors; and offers goodies such as dual-BIOS, addressable RGB headers, etc. ASRock is pricing the card at USD $1120, a $120 premium over the $1000 baseline price.