Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSo far so good. Very quiet with excellent performance even in silent mode. LEDs are annoying.
Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2024
I got the "Red Devil" version because the silent mode BIOS switch uses clocks that don't go lower than official 7800XT specifications (in fact, they're still above.) I'm hoping this also uses a slightly lower voltage and should last longer in general, but it does also help ensure the fans will last longer. And it is definitely accurate to say that the "silent" mode is indeed very quite. Not silent if you push it really hard but even at maximum it seems to be extremely quiet. It probably helps that it has a huge heatsink and three fans on it (versus the reference design using a smaller card and two fans.) This does also make it harder to fit into a case though! It goes a little bit into the area of my drive bay, so I had to move one thing to make room for it. This actually helped with the support though as I couldn't really get the support bar to fit well (there are no instructions btw, so maybe I was doing it wrong.) I just used a mount to hold the card up better than any support bar can do and feel more confident in it anyway.
So far in my testing the performance has been excellent, as have temperatures. I'm using the silent mode with its lower fan speeds, but I never saw the temperature even get at all hot even when I tested games and StableDiffusion settings that made it use 99-100% of the GPU. The clock speed differences between OC and silent mode are so small as to be completely pointless (except, again, I'm kind of hoping that means it's just using a slightly lower voltage. I don't have the means to check that right now though.) I stepped up from a Geforce RTX 3060Ti with 8GB of VRAM and can say that things I've had issues with that were likely due to being VRAM starved do indeed seem to be handling better on this card, but then again, just about everything I can throw at it is handling quite considerably better. I haven't really tested raytracing or FSR, but actual quality settings for running 1080p60 more or less max out in most games except Starfield (which can still be set at least to medium for most things when set to render at 100%.)
I did test StableDiffusion a bit out of curiosity and found out that, firstly, you really have to run it under Linux because AMD's ROCML support is Linux only right now (no Windows support at all.) There is an "OpenML" build of StableDiffusion that uses shader cores (so should be more compatible with everything) at the expense of considerably worse performance versus RT/AI cores, so isn't really recommended. My experience with ROCML in Linux was that firstly, the Linux version of StableDiffusion requires a tad bit more VRAM per pixel even with the -lowvram parameter (this was also true for my nVidia card) thus maxing me out at roughly 2.6 megapixels max on this one versus maybe 2.8 on the 3060Ti with its 8GB of VRAM (yeah, this makes no sense.) Secondly, without the nVidia-only xformers, high resolution (resolutions > 768) performance is about 3x worse than the nVidia card (though maybe close to the same without xformers.) Standard/low resolution performance (which doesn't need the lowvram parameter so performs better all around) is probably roughly on par with the 3060Ti, but I did not compare these two thoroughly.
Of course, no one buys an AMD card for AI really, but it is nice that it is an option and has at least some ability to run at decent rates. I'm hoping that AMD will make better open ML standards as nVidia should not own the entire system for this and needs more competition besides, but really, what you buy this card for is gaming performance. And AMD is definitely coming out ahead there right now while nVidia focuses entirely on AI stuff. (So much so that at this point I wonder if it wouldn't be better for them just to make AI cards completely separate from gaming GPUs.)
UPDATE: It has now developed coil whine within only a few months. Mostly only if I push it. High end games or AI generation. Apparently coil whine is considered normal and acceptable in most of the industry, but it bothers my ears when I'm positioned wrong and hear it. (My case is fairly well sealed against noise, but at certain angles enough escapes to bother me.) A family member has my previous GPU, so now even if I try to go through the RMA process (assuming they'll even take it for that) I'll be completely without a computer for an unknown length of time.
It has performed great otherwise, but coil whine just shouldn't be so accepted in the industry as perfectly ok. They should pad them or etc to prevent it -- or just use better coils.