The new Aorus Radeon RX 7900 XTX Elite 24G is currently cheaper in our country than a number of much less equipped Radeons from the competition. For a favorable price, you will get superior equipment including a powerful cooler with a large reserve and high overclocking directly from the manufacturer, probably the only downside is the associated higher consumption.
Conclusion
Aorus Radeon RX 7900 XT Elite received a large and very powerful cooler from the manufacturer. Paradoxically, the price in stores does not differ from the previously tested and modestly conceived Pulse Radeon RX 7900 XTX from Sapphire with a half cooler without LEDs. The manufacturer used the huge reserve of the cooler to significantly increase the cycle times and thus the performance. Unfortunately, the consumption of the card has also increased with this, and the result is that in terms of noise, the card with a top cooler is practically no different from the basic, minimalistic, inexpensive model from Sapphire.
It’s not really clear to me why Gigabyte didn’t make better use of having two BIOSes on the card. Both have the same power limit set at a high 406W, so the cooler has to spin something to keep the chip temps at the regulator’s liking. With Radeons, it’s even worse because the speed of the fans is controlled by the hottest spot on the chip, the temperature of which is usually around 90 °C. Even though the average temperature of the chip is at a low 62°C, the fans run like hell due to the high temperature of the hotspot.
The consequence is that for a card with an extreme cooler you can (by default driver settings) not choose between silent mode and powerful OC mode, but between two practically equally powerful BIOSes, one of which is only slightly better than average in terms of noise and the other already extremely noisy.
One can surmise that the motivation was to make the card stand out in performance tests in both modes, but from a user perspective it would certainly be better to be able to switch between modes with a quiet 350W card that only does 62 fps in games instead of 65 fps and a noisy and roaring 400W beast for those who need the three extra frames for a better feeling.
The consumption then increased almost to the level of the RTX 4090. The Radeon is only 15-25 W below it, but the same cannot be said about the performance. Where cards are not held back by the processor, the RTX 4090’s advantage is not much smaller than against 350W models. If you want an answer to why Radeon RX 7900 clocks aren’t higher, I wouldn’t look for it so much as some bugs in the chip and problems with reaching frequencies over 3 GHz, but rather that with higher clocks, the power consumption jumps up by tens of watts, while the performance increases by percentage units.
A great choice for Radeon fans
Radeons are mostly bought by gamers who prefer a better price/performance ratio, with the understanding that they will have to take care of their card a bit more than when buying a GeForce, and they have no problem with that. Someone wants to play and not worry about anything around them, and someone else likes to play with the card itself. And it is for such individuals that this card is ideal.
In the default state, due to the extreme consumption, it is rather average in terms of operational characteristics, and even in silent mode it does not give the impression of a top product – next to the 320-340W GeForce RTX 4080, it is at least not enthusiastic about the same large coolers, in terms of operational characteristics, it is at least a class worse.
But the surcharge is not high compared to the basic RX 7900 XTX models, it is less than is usual for premium models and, paradoxically, it is now the cheapest RX 7900 XTX with the second model from the same manufacturer.
At the same time, it offers a huge and powerful cooler with a large reserve, a significantly increased power limit to 406 W (with the possibility of increasing it by another 15%), and thus also gives a lot of room for manipulation both for clocking upwards and for optimizing consumption downwards. Basically, you will get a card whose noise will not excite you, but you just need to fiddle around a bit in the control panel and with your own help you will already get a result that suits a card with a similarly monstrous cooler.
And I still have to mention the still unresolved problem with card consumption on the desktop in less common combinations of resolution and refresh rate or on different combinations of monitors. At 120 Hz at 4K, the memory still runs at maximum 3D clocks and the power consumption of the card itself is around 90 W, at 144 Hz at 900 MHz and the power consumption is around 65 W. But AMD promised a fix a month ago, so hopefully we will see it soon.
| Aorus Radeon RX 7900 XTX Elite 24G | |
| PROS | CONS |
| High performance, in rasterization similar performance to RTX 4080 several thousand cheaper | Extreme consumption, only slightly lower than the more powerful RTX 4090 |
| 24 GB of memory | significantly higher consumption than and worse performance/watt ratio than RTX 4080 |
| Significantly increased power limit and thus wide tuning possibilities, increase in performance compared to non-overclocked models | Due to the high consumption, the noise is only average even in quiet mode, very noisy in OC mode |
| Top cooler with a large reserve at a good price | Requires a well-ventilated cabinet |
| DisplayPort 2.1 | Averagely noisy coils |
| Recommended price with VAT: CZK 29,150 | |
The Aorus Radeon RX 7900 XTX Elite 24G is currently one of the cheapest RX 7900 XTX available here. At the same time, he got an excellent cooler with a large reserve. In terms of equipment and the price you pay for it, it is therefore extremely advantageous. However, the operational characteristics suffered because Gigabyte drove the clocks too high and the result is a rather average noisy card with high consumption, so due to the worse operational characteristics we will only give it a silver award. But it offers a lot of manipulation space for further tuning both towards higher performance and towards quieter cooling and higher efficiency, so you can win with it and work towards better results.
