The AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU is the baby brother to the recently reviewed RX 7900 GRE card. The card slots in just under the 7900 GRE (read that review here) and across the board, include slightly weaker specs. But that doesn’t make this card weak by any means. It is another great 1440p card you can consider when shopping around for components. Especially in 2024. This specific model is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT Gaming OC model.
Watch the Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC review
It includes an overclocked boost clock out of the box to 2565MHz compared to the reference 2430MHz. The Game Clock is also overclocked to 2254MHz compared to the reference card of 2124MHz. It comes with 3840 Stream Processors, 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, a 256-bit memory bus and the memory clock speed is 19.5 Gbps out of the box.
On paper, this Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC is stiff competition for 1440p GPUs. Essentially, with the help of AMD FSR, you should be able to push out some 1440p 60FPS games and at times, even 4K games once you tweak the settings here and there.
Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC Design
Similar to Gigabyte’s other Gaming OC GPUs, the Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC features an all-black design with a triple-fan layout. It includes three 90mm fans with alternate spinning to produce the wind force cooling system. The card also comes with Gigabyte’s larger copper plate design and screen cooling pulls heat from across the card and sends it out the back end.
The card itself is quite a chunky piece of hardware. It comes in at 302mm by 130mm and is 56mm thick. You’ll need a 700W power supply to power this GPU and all of its tech. When it comes to the ports, it includes two HDMI 2.1 ports alongside two DisplayPort 2.1 ports. This port spec can support up to 4K at 480Hz or 16K at 60Hz with HDR.
Setting the card up was pretty simple. There’s no motherboard mount on this unit so it just gets plugged into your motherboard and screwed into the case. It uses two 8-pin PCI-E power cables and is quite easy to get going.
The card itself is a Gigabyte Gaming OC card. This lineup has looked the same for a while now and this model doesn’t change anything. Gigabyte has even stuck to the single RGB light on the logo situated on the side of the card. I am a fan of the lineup and the clean design fits into most PCs. I do think the screen cooling hole is a bit smaller than it should be but we’ll test that out.
Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC Performance
When it comes to the performance of the Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC, I ran a few benchmarks on the card across 4K and 1440p titles.
Thermals were also quite good. After 30 minutes of testing, I measure only 58C on the GPU with a hot spot heat of 80C when using the OC Bios setting on the card. When enabling the Silent BIOS, these temperatures did increase slightly. I measured 67C on the GPU and 90C on the hot spot.
I usually tell people not to use the Silent BIOS on GPUs because nowadays, these cards are quite silent. However, this Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC is actually the opposite. The card’s acoustic levels were some of the highest I have measured on an AMD GPU in a while now. I measured 42dBA when using the OC BIOS and 36dBA when using the Silent BIOS.
These measurements were with the fans running at around 40% which is around 1700RPM on the OC BIOS and 30% on the Silent BIOS. Usually, these Silent BIOS tests result in you know, a near-to-silent acoustic reading but in this card’s case, it didn’t. It kind of renders the Silent BIOS useless if it is going to make a noise. Might as well just use the OC BIOS.
When it comes to the power usage on the card, the Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC peaked at just under 300W during tests. I never saw the GPU reach higher than 299W when testing out games. This resulted in an average clock speed of 2500MHz on the OC BIOS and 2485MHz on the Silent BIOS.
Of course, you can also overclock this card further which will enable it to perform slightly better. Given the great cooling on the OC BIOS, I would suggest a 15% increase in the GPU and Memory Frequency. That should be enough to boost performance without worrying about thermals. You’ll also see an increase in power draw as well. My tests showed a 40W increase over the standard clock speeds. All of this resulted in a 10-12% increase in performance across games.
Overall, the Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC does offer some great value for those looking at a new AMD GPU. The Gigabyte card especially comes with a much-needed overclocked frequency that helps across games. It also has a lot of breathing room for further tweaks.
It is one of the louder GPUs I have reviewed which may put you off. So much so that the harder this card works, the harder it will be to ignore the fans. You’ll often hear the fans over your PC case fans which can be a problem.
At the moment, you can pick this card up for under R14,000 which is a great asking price for the performance you’re getting. However, you need to keep in mind that the closest competition, the RX 7900 GRE is only a thousand rand more. So it the current lineup makes it a bit difficult to decide what to invest in.
This Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC review is based on a unit sent to us by Gigabyte. You can find the card on Wootware.
Summary
The Gigabyte AMD RX 7800 XT Gaming OC GPU is a robust 1440p card that performs great out of the box. It is a little louder than we wanted it to be and the 7900 GRE is priced slightly higher with more performance which makes this card a tough sell.
