and RX 7800 XT are already on the market some Friday. However, the Radeon RX 7700 XT 12GB specifically suffers from the classic “AMD problem”, namely a very aggressive core boost combined with unnecessarily high core voltage and thus unnecessarily high consumption.
The Radeon RX 7700 XT is basically a partially locked and corrupted Radeon RX 7800 XT, it’s not a bad product at all, but many card manufacturers have decided to release different OC editions that paradoxically make the card worse. The Radeon RX 7700 XT is not very suitable for overclocking, but rather the opposite.
By reducing the core voltage and the power limit, you can easily remove 50 Watts from the consumption, depending on the situation, in addition, we practically do not lose power, and therefore there is almost no reason not to do this.
I received a card from GIGABYTE for testing GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC 12G, which is currently sold for some 12,800 CZK including VAT. In terms of price, it doesn’t deviate in any way, in addition, it is a larger card with three fans, which predetermines quiet operation, at least in theory.
In the package we only find the graphics card itself and a simple manual. The card itself is quite huge, effectively taking up three slots and stretching to a height. The dimensions of the card are 302 x 130 x 56 millimeters.
Of course, all three fans spin only under load, as has been the custom for a long time. However, during testing I ran into a strange problem with reading and controlling fan speed, but more on that later.
The card blows hot air primarily to the sides and then through a small hole on the back of the PCB, which is pretty much standard.
The side, which the user can see mounted in the case, also contains the GIGABYTE logo, which has an RGB LED backlight.
Furthermore, we can find the Silent and OC BIOS switch here, the OC BIOS is enabled by the manufacturer, which allows a standard power limit of 255 Watts, which is 10W more than the reference RX 7700 XT. We also find two good old PCIe eight-pin connectors for additional power.
The back cover of the card is metal, with only small holes for hot air flow.
In terms of outputs, the card has two DisplayPort 2.1 and two HDMI 2.1 ports, supporting up to four displays.
GIGABYTE Radeon RX 7700 XT GAMING OC 12G I tested first with OC BIOS with version 23.12.1 drivers, and since I have one RX 7700 XT in the past, it felt a bit like duplicate testing, for this reason I decided to play with overclocking, undervolting and comparing just a few games and some consumption tests.
Unfortunately, during attempts to overclock the card, I very quickly hit the ceiling in the form of the Hotspot temperature of the graphics core, which at one point climbed up to 110°C, which is not good at all, and the consumption of the card was also around 293W.
In combination with the overclocking, there was also a strange problem with the fans. The card sometimes reported strange values regarding fan speeds in the order of tens of thousands of RPM, which is of course nonsense. But the problem was that in such a situation the fans were spinning at maybe 500 RPM, while the third fan was not spinning at all.
I did not manage to solve this problem 100%, the card just decided once in a while to control the revolutions strangely and report them even more strangely. For my sanity I did a DDU and a fresh driver install on my test setup, plus I tried another RX 7700 XT which was OK. So I assume that this is some humorous trolling of this piece, or some bug in the VBIOS or in the drivers.
In the end I ended up trying to undervoltage the card, in the AMD drivers I reduced the card’s power limit by 10%, I further reduced the core voltage from the factory 1150 mV to 960 mV and reduced the maximum core frequency to 2600 MHz. Of course, the boost algorithm can increase the clock frequency above 2600 MHz depending on the power supply limits and temperatures, which is a bit confusing, but that’s how it works.
When I tried to increase the core frequency it managed to get close to 3GHz, but the VRAM was underclocked from 2250MHz to 1550MHz which reduced performance significantly, when I tried to add the power limit the card started to overheat which reduced performance even more. For these reasons, I threw the overclocking attempts in the trash.
In the graphs, you will find the card twice, once undervoltage so that it consumes a maximum of 200 Watts in game load and factory settings with OC BIOS when the card can take up to 255 Watts.
It is also worth noting the fact that we don’t lose almost any performance when undervolting, and the consumption of the card was lower than 190W in some games. I also saw a range of 170-185W, but it depends on the specific game and type of load. For example, such a Furmark causes a massive consumption even with undervoltage, the card used 230W in this type of load, while in games it takes easily under 200W.
I tested the graphics card on such a common computer that I prepared for testing rather common and older graphics cards, the ceiling here will probably be something like GeForce RTX 4070. The assembly is therefore not composed of the most powerful components on the market, but rather reflects such a common gaming computer.
The heart is thus an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 7700 processor, operated without any overclocking and cooled by a conventional Arctic Cooling Freezer 33 TR air cooler with one 120x120mm fan. Everything sits on the GIGABYTE AORUS B650 ELITE AX motherboard, it is a fairly decent AM5 board with the B650 chipset, but PCIe fifth generation support is only available within one M.2 slot.
Two 16GB DDR5-5600 modules from Kingston are used as memory here, namely the Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-6000 2x16GB kit. However, as part of building a “regular” setup, I decided to use the slower 5600 MT/s EXPO profile, reflecting more available hardware.
Also sitting on the board is a Kingston KC3000 1TB SSD, on which I installed Windows 10 Pro v22H2.
I just have the assembly on a table on a box in an air-conditioned room at about 24°C, while all components were powered by a GIGABYTE UD1000GM power supply (it natively supports the new 16-pin connector). I gently blow the graphics card with a 180x180mm slow-speed fan that I pulled out of an old Fractal Design Define XL Black Pearl case. The fan simulates a draft in the case and lightly blows the chipset and the board itself.
There are also some older graphics cards in the test, while I didn’t have time to test everything I wanted, I plan to add GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB, Radeon RX 580 8GB and some other cards.
I tested all AMD Radeon cards in the test with driver version 23.8.1, NVIDIA GeForce was then tested with driver 536.67, the exception is the older GTX 780 Ti, where the older driver version 474.44 was used.
2023-12-29 15:02:22
#Mini #review #Undervoltage #GIGABYTE #Radeon #GAMING #12G
