Introduction

XFX Radeon RX 7800 XT Speedster Merc 319 is a slick premium custom-design graphics card based on AMD’s latest performance-segment GPU. The company is releasing two custom-designs based on the RX 7800 XT—the Merc 319 we’re reviewing today, and the Qick 319 positioned a notch below. The company’s RX 7700 XT series has just the Qick319. Today’s dual launch from AMD fills a vast performance gap that exists between the mainstream RX 7600 and the enthusiast-segment RX 7900 series. Both the RX 7700 XT and RX 7800 XT have the same design goals—to offer maxed out AAA gaming at 1440p, with the latter offering more memory, and a few more shaders for a bit more future-proofing.

The Radeon RX 7800 XT is as contemporary as it gets, being powered by AMD’s latest RDNA3 graphics architecture, and being built on the 5 nm EUV foundry process for the most part. The RX 7800 XT debuts the new Navi 32 GPU, which is AMD’s second one to incorporate the chiplet architecture. AMD segregated the components on the GPU between those that benefit from the switch to the new 5 nm node, such as the GPU’s main graphics rendering and number crunching machinery; and those that don’t, such as the Infinity Cache and GDDR6 memory controllers. The logic heavy components are located on a larger 5 nm die called the Graphics Compute Die (GCD), while the memory-heavy components are spun off into tiny chiplets called the Memory Cache Die (MCDs). There are four of these on the Navi 32, each with a 16 MB segment of the GPU’s 64 MB Infinity Cache, and a 64-bit portion of the GPU’s 256-bit memory interface.

The Navi 32 is equipped with 60 RDNA3 compute units on the GCD, which translate to 3,840 stream processors, 120 AI accelerators, 60 Ray accelerators, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The RX 7800 XT maxes out this GPU, enabling all 60 CU, and all four MCDs. This means the full 64 MB of Infinity Cache, and 256-bit memory bus width, which drives 16 GB of 19.5 Gbps GDDR6 memory, with 624 GB/s of bandwidth on tap.

The RDNA3 graphics architecture debuts several new generational changes for the hardware, including dual-issue rate compute units that more efficiently utilize idle hardware resources; the new AI accelerator component that lends them matrix math capabilities; the new multi-draw indirect accelerator, a hardware component that accelerates multi-draw indirect calls from the DirectX 12 API, offering significant speedups for applications that support it. AMD also deployed AV1 hardware encode and decode acceleration, as well as given the GPU its latest Radiance Display Engine that supports DisplayPort 2.1.

The XFX Speedster Merc 319 spices things up with a slick premium custom design that has a design focus on maximizing the ventilation of the large aluminium fin-stack heatsink without much of the cooler shroud and backplate getting in the way; a vapor-chamber plate that’s only found in a couple of other custom RX 7800 XT models; and a triple fan ventilation design. Among its enthusiast-class features include a 14-phase VRM, dual-BIOS, and factory overclocked speeds. XFX tuned the RX 7800 XT to run at speeds of 2254 MHz, compared to 2124 MHz reference Game clocks, while leaving the memory untouched at 19.5 Gbps. XFX is pricing the RX 7800 XT Speedster Merc 319 at $540, a small premium over the $500 MSRP.

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.