Radeon RX 7900 GRE overclocking concerns will be addressed

Hardware Unboxed published a third review of Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card.

The media was among the first to review the Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition), upon its original release in July 2023. Until now, AMD has kept this SKU exclusive to the Chinese market and only allowed a certain number of cards to be sold elsewhere through system integrators. However, the decision was made to bring this model to the worldwide DIY market and yesterday this card has officially hit the stores around the world.

The Radeon RX 7900 GRE serves as a gap filler between Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7800 XT. The card has 33% more cores than the Navi-32 based 7800XT model, but due to heavily limited power specs, the card does not perform much faster. This is especially true with reference design models or cards clocked at reference speed.

Hardware Unboxed decided to perform a retest of RX 7900 GRE but with a custom variant featuring higher board power. Models like Sapphire Pulse or NITRO+ should show up to 10% higher performance than RX 7800 XT. Some models like NITRO+ have much higher OC TGP limit of 305W and total board power of 351W.

TechPowerUP explain that although power limits are relatively high, Radeon RX 7900 GRE has artificial clock limit. The maximum configurable clock is 2803 MHz.

Overclocking the Radeon RX 7900 GRE is very similar to the other RX 7900 Series cards.

• To start, you have to raise the power limit to maximum, the slider ends at +15%
• Next, max out the memory clock slider, it’s rather short, topping out at 2316 MHz, definitely not high enough to use the full potential of the memory chips.
• Now, also increase “Max Frequency” to maximum, which is at 2803 MHz, not much higher than the default of 2530 MHz, another artificial limitation […]

With the artificial frequency limit out of the way, custom variants such as NITRO+ should perform much better. The good news is that this is now confirmed to be a bug that will be addressed by AMD:

AMD’s has told me that extremely limited overclocking of the GRE cards is a bug and it will be addressed shortly.

— Steve Walton, Hardware Unboxed

Hopefully, this will be tested again, but one should ask why this not has been fixed before the card’s release. After all, the RX 7900 GRE was introduced in July last year.

RX 7900 GRE overclocking, Source: TechPowerUP

Source: TechPowerUP , Hardware Unboxed:

Many thanks to Wasmachineman_NL for the tip!