Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is the ASRock Taichi 7900 XTX The Best GPU Bang for your Buck?”.
Foreign yourself to buy a thousand dollar ish, graphics card and you’re sort of not really sure, what’s the safest thing to buy. First, we had power connector gate where, if you use the wrong kind of power connector on your graphics card – and you don’t insert it all the way it catches on fire and then we had Vapor chamber gate where the reference design from AMD. You know maybe wasn’t super well quality controlled because there’s a lot of people that seem to be making it there’s a lot of posts and attention around defects. So it’s manufacturing defect after manufacturing defect after manufacturing defect, but you resigned to spend a thousand dollars on graphics card and you don’t want any headache. Will you get one? That’S got a defective Vapor chamber. Well, I’ve got the bulletproof solution for you get a design.
That’S not a reference Design. This is the Tai Chi 7900 XTX that I’m going to lovingly call the 7900 XTX three gigahertz Edition, but first, let’s unbox. What do you get in the Box? Well, this is the Tai Chi version, three cooling fans, stylish metal, backplate polychrome. Sync, that’s RGB: it has a reinforced metal frame, dual bios, quiet and performance and a super alloy graphics card for capacitors, and you know all kinds of generic marketing speak. This is a 7900 XTX, but ASRock has had time to put their experience into it, so that maybe you don’t run into weird things. Okay, in the Box, you get a tiny installation manual, Itachi postcard enough packing foam to insulate your house and the graphics card. What to wait here and a Tai Chi retention bracket? What even, is this there’s so many parts to it? Well, that’s pretty cool, certainly going to handle any retention situation that you find yourself in all right.
So we have three display port outs, one HDMI, so HDMI 2.1 DisplayPort 2.1 ish, although not the full bandwidth, but more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Three eight pin power connectors. Yes, this is a card and a half in addition to the BIOS control switch. We also have an LED on off switch. This is a true triple slot card, meaning that you’ve got a little bit of margin on your third slot. So it would be breathable if you had a motherboard that had a three slot layout or a three slot configuration, and you can see that we’ve got this integrated support bar, which is connected to our back plate. So if you’ve got adequate screw support on the back plate, this bar is going to provide physical support to the end of the GPU so that it won’t sag or warp or anything like that. Although it is good to mechanically support it and if you notice at the end, these are actually pretty industry standard.
You see these for oems ASRock. Does this so that OEM system, Builders or volume system Builders could integrate gpus like the tai chi in their build? And these screws means that the mechanical mounting options for those oems for shipping uh means that it’s screwed in on both ends basically, and that makes it a little safer to ship when we’re talking about ups. But you know this is a physically very attractive card. Let’S actually get to the benchmarks: well, the results are in for the 7900 XTX non-reference design from ASRock now, first off ASRock have really done it here. I’M honestly very surprised by the performance of this card. It is substantially more higher performance than the reference 7900 XTX. It’S it’s basically in a whole other performance class. I don’t think we’ve seen this much performance uplift between reference and non-reference design in uh, two three, maybe four GPU Generations, but first the bad news for Ray tracing.
It is too much of a gap to make up. The 4080 from Nvidia is a significantly better card for Ray tracing without any upscaling Technologies in most games. However, FSR 2.1 that’s sort of a new thing. I got a chance to take a look at the Callisto protocol and F1 2022 and the upscaling technology. There is pretty significant but breaking down the performance. It comes at a cost, a power cost when we use the kilowatt meter.
This thing is pulling more than 100 Watts more at Peak than the reference design as well. I mean we’ve got this true three slot cooler, so it’s not substantially larger, although it is longer and it will breathe through the back of the card, then the reference design, but it is significantly faster in terms of non-ray Trace titles. It’S pretty handily beating the 4080. In most scenarios for older games like Borderlands 3 and of course you know the reference, the good old shadow of the Tomb Raider we’re actually pulling ahead, especially around 1440p. Now, that’s not always true. At 1080p, 1080p gaming, at a really insane frame rate, is a little bit of a weakness of the the overall architecture, but at 1440p you’re talking about better performance than a 4080 closing in on the 4090 in some scenario, goes again at a little bit.
Higher power costs a little bit higher uh Power demand. If you will, your power supply is going to squeal a little bit more, not to say that there’s coil line or anything like that, it’s a very solid design from ASRock, it’s very impressive. Actually, when we look at our other games like Deus Ex and cyberpunk, I always like to sort of try to do a deep dive with cyberpunk. So the non-ray tracing settings for cyberpunk here honestly very impressive, now at the lower resolutions, we’re hitting the engine limit, because this is a thousand dollar GPU and cyberpunk, not a multiplayer game, blah blah, but at 4K.
This is one of the best 4K results for this card for the 7900 XTX that we’ve seen for my first non-reference XTX. Looking at this in the performance over the XTX, it’s actually pretty impressive. Now this story doesn’t really hold up when you switch to Ray tracing. You can claw back some of the performance, some of the high frame rate and get get there get to the you know Promised Land of 60 FPS, but you’re going to be using an upscaling tank technology, DLS S3 and some of the stuff that Nvidia has still Is the overall Edge for that kind of stuff, but the performance from Nvidia and the work that that uh? That AMD has done to rise to the challenge of Nvidia? That also can’t be understated.
Nvidia’S got some good stuff, but AMD is moving faster and so their amd’s on a good trajectory. If they can pull this out on another couple of generations, we might see an upset, so that’ll be pretty fun. For me, those kinds of Ray tracing features aren’t really super important. I, like the fluid smooth gameplay. You know like 90 FPS on our OLED display uh, the most frustrating part of the gameplay experience is the load screens. I hate waiting for load screens when I click the game.
I want to launch into the game and it’s just ready to go love that on the steam deck it’s like, I’m going to turn the steam deck off, I’m going to turn it back on. Oh look. I’M right where I left off game designers could learn a thing or two from that. But overall the performance breakdown here is pretty good.
The artificial benchmarks show a very close grouping for all of the graphics cards that we’re testing the reference XTX, the 4080, the 4090 – and that is the Asus 48. It’S not even the reference 4080. So we’re talking about a little bit of an overclock for the 4080 and the Zotac 4090. That’S what I I’m using for my testing.
So those are a little faster than the the average 40 80 and the 40 90 that you have out there and still the Tai Chi 7900 XTX really closes the Gap here, pretty handily. Now, at the time that I’m filming this looks like the Tai Chi is going to cost twelve hundred dollars 200 more than the reference version of this cart. I have some reservations about that.
I’M not sure 200 versus the 4080 performance is you know it’s neck and neck? Can you actually get the Asus 4080 for around twelve hundred dollars? No, it actually cost me fourteen hundred dollars. So maybe in that scenario, 1200 makes sense, but I think that’s too much for the performance. Would I rather have the Tai Chi at 1200 or the reference version.
I think honestly I’d probably go for the reference version. If I was going to spend a thousand dollars on a GPU, but the Tai Chi is very good and to you it may be worth the performance difference at two hundred dollars more because it does split the difference between a thousand and fourteen hundred dollars that you Have between what this literally, what I paid for the Asus 4080 1400 versus a thousand dollars for the 7900 xdx, which you could get on amd.com and even Newegg and blah blah. But that is the reference design, which also maybe had the vapor chamber defect, which is really unfortunate for AMD, especially coming on the heels of you know: power connector gate from from Nvidia. It’S just not a great time to be buying a thousand dollar graphics card unless you’ve got time to fuss around with it with an RMA. I don’t know what to tell you. No that’s, not gon na be a problem.
If you buy the Tai Chi, the Tai Chi is not a reference design. It doesn’t it’s not going to suffer from those kinds of issues because it doesn’t do that ASRock did their own thing. So maybe that’s worth a couple extra 100 bucks and you get that in performance. You know you can look at it.
That way. Me I’m looking forward at the you know, middle of the road gpus that are coming whatever the the 6700 or the 6750 equivalent is going to be, or maybe even the 6600 equivalent in the Seventh Generation. I think those are the gpus maybe to be excited for something in that three to six hundred dollar price point, because if you can get 85 percent of the performance at around six hundred dollars, that’s probably what I would do if it was me unless I was Looking to build a really super high-end system – and this card is the best performing 7900 XTX that I have seen to date – good design, solid design, solid cooling, it doesn’t run at a billion degrees, good power, connector, design, good physical design of the car to prevent sagging And it comes with supports no complaints there, I’m little. This is level one I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums .