Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 7800 XT NITRO+ is a no-holds-barred premium custom-design graphics card based on the latest performance-segment GPU by AMD. It maximizes the potential of the RX 7800 XT, and gives you the most premium-looking card among the ones we’re reviewing today, with the most enthusiast features its designers could cram. The RX 7800 XT, along with its sibling, the RX 7700 XT, fill a massive performance gap in AMD’s lineup, between the mainstream RX 7600, and the enthusiast-class RX 7900 series. Both the RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT are designed for maxed out AAA gaming at 1440p, with the RX 7800 XT giving a bit more memory and a few more shaders.

The RX 7800 XT is as technologically advanced as it gets from Team Red. It uses the latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, and the GPU is produced on the contemporary 5 nm EUV foundry node, at least where it matters. The RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT debut the new Navi 32 GPU, which is built on the same chiplet philosophy as the Navi 31 powering the RX 7900 series. AMD decided that rather than building monolithic 5 nm GPUs that reduce the number of dies it can cut out of its limited wafer allocation with TSMC, it could make the 5 nm die smaller, by identifying the specific components of the GPU that don’t quite benefit from the switch to 5 nm—stuff such as the Infinity Cache and GDDR6 memory controllers. These are spun off as tiny chiplets built on the older 6 nm process.

The 5 nm centralized die has the GPU’s main graphics rendering and number crunching machinery, and is hence called the Graphics Compute Die (GCD), which is surrounded by four 6 nm chiplets that each have a 16 MB segment of the GPU’s Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of its memory bus. This die is called the Memory Cache Die (MCD). The Navi 32 has four of these, compared to the six on the larger Navi 31 GPU. It hence has 64 MB of Infinity Cache memory, and a 256-bit wide memory bus.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT maxes out the Navi 32, enabling all 60 RDNA3 compute units physically present, and all four MCDs. This works out to 3,840 stream processors, 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. AMD has backed the 256-bit memory bus with 16 GB of memory that ticks at a generous 19.5 Gbps, giving the RX 7800 XT an impressive 624 GB/s of memory bandwidth. All this comes with a total board power of 263 W at reference speeds, which Sapphire has raised to 288 W on the NITRO+.

The Sapphire RX 7800 XT NITRO+ comes with a handy factory overclock of 2254 MHz compared to 2124 MHz reference Game clock. You get several enthusiast-class features such as dual-BIOS, voltage measurement points, plenty of RGB LED lighting and an external addressable-RGB header, a 4-pin PWM case fan header, a cooler shroud design that lets you detach the fans without disturbing the heatsink underneath, and a trio of Sapphire’s most advanced axial flow fans with double ball bearings. The card looks a lot like Sapphire’s RX 7900 series NITRO+ products. The card is priced at $550, a 10% premium over the $500 AMD MSRP for the RX 7800 XT.

Short 10-Minute Video Comparing 9x RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT

Our goal with the videos is to create short summaries, not go into all the details and test results, which can be found in our written reviews.