Overclocked AMD RX 7900 XTX beats Nvidia RTX 4090 performance

2 years ago 2

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The owner of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX has managed to modify and overclock their graphics card to exceed its power limit and beat the performance of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card, the most powerful consumer GPU on the market.

Reddit user Jedi95 used an EK Quantum Vector Waterblock, 10°C coolant, and a small hardware modification to push the Asus-model Radeon card to nearly double its thermal design power of 355W.

“The hardware mod involves connecting the EVC2SE to the I2C bus on the GPU PCB,” Jedi95 explained.

“With this mod implemented, it’s possible to adjust the power consumption and current draw that the VRM controller reports to the GPU using the EVC2SE software.”

“This is similar to what a shunt mod would do on an Nvidia GPU, but it’s configurable in software.”

Jedi95 said the card was “fun” to overclock without the power limits.

“RDNA3 [the architecture on which the card is built] is capable of very impressive clock speeds when power isn’t a limitation,” they said.

Jedi95 achieved a peak power draw of 696W, compared to the maximum of 600W on high-end overclockable RTX 4090s.

Combined with a clock speed of 3.33GHz, the card hit 18,335 points in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark, exceeding the scores of some RTX 4090 benchmarks.

PCGamer’s tests of the RTX 4090 Founders Edition saw it recording 16,654 points, for example.

Tom’s Hardware pointed out it also matched the best 7900 XTX benchmark results in Time Spy Extreme. The publication said the competing cards were likely cooled with liquid nitrogen.

AMD’s top-end card is substantially cheaper than Nvidia’s, with a recommended retail price of $999 compared to $1,599 in the US.

In South Africa, the RX 7900 XTX can currently be bought for R23,199 through Wootware, while the RTX 4090 starts at R35,999 from the same retailer.