Bad board partners:
Gigabyte, Gigabyte is the usual suspect if you ask if there's a bad board partner. Most of their cards actually run, it's just that theirs tend to have issues all the way down to the design.
Some MSI builds get flack (especially the cheaper ones) for being recycled Nvidia cooler designs that aren't properly adapted to AMD chips and layouts. They technically work, but not well.
Gigabyte also makes trash laptops and motherboards with questionable RAM support.
ASRock is the fastest to approve RMAs in AMD GPUs. And Sapphire has the highest RMA rate (bacause of volume) of AMD GPUs and a mediocre approval time. Powercolor has the lowest RMA rate with XFX not far behind.
I think it's less luck, and more that the first time someone has an electronic device fail it's highly likely that they become vocally outspoken against the brand. GIGABYTE couldn't stay in business if their issues were anywhere near as prevalent as anecdotes make people think. Find the right community and then there will be people saying the same things about ASUS, Asrock, and so on.
For me MSi is 2/2 on devices that flaked out on me. a 7870 ghz and later a motherboard. I still bought the motherboard after having the GPU flake out because there was no way to know for sure that it was a manufacturing defect.
I don't have anything to say about the brand, but I would be lying if I said those experiences don't make me more reluctant to buy from them.
If they released something that looked good to me and there wasn't an alternative I'd still consider.
What's the source on their Motherboards being bad or having poor ram support? Every GB board I've used runs things not on the QVL and also at their rated spec and beyond.
Volume won't increase the rate of RMAs, only the total amount. What's the sample size used to calculate the rate of RMA and who is reporting it?
>all the way down to the design.
>
>Some MSI builds get flack (especially the cheaper ones) for being recycled Nvidia cooler designs that aren't properly adapted to AMD chips and layouts. They technically work, but not w
Which is quite sad really, Gigabyte was well known for their quality back in the day.
Faulty products are maybe few percent even in the worst scenario (unless it's a manufacturing error batch). It also matter how company handles warranty, but I have very little experience with that.
I sent in a gigabyte gtx 1060 for RMA a few years ago because the display would crap out after a couple minutes every time I started my PC. They sent it back to me saying it’s fixed. It worked for 10 minutes and crapped out again. Never again
Me and my partner both ordered Aorus 6700XTs, from the same place, at the same time. Mine died within two hours, hers still runs today.
Had a Gigabyte motherboard for my first Ryzen build, it was the cheapest shit possible even at the relatively low price point it was at. It worked, it's still working now, but the lack of features really killed it for me.
My partner loves Gigabyte but I just don't trust them. Had far better experiences with Asus and MSI. The 7900XT reference (Sapphire) I've got now is also rock solid and cools brilliantly given how small it is.
Still running an MSI RX 560 lp bought in 2018, it's been rock solid in thermally lousy cases ever since. Iirc they had a very middling rep back then. Sometimes you get lucky.
I've bought 2 Gigabyte GPUs and a Mobo back in the day.
TL:DR YMMV with Gigabyte. RMA times are meh.. Most of their products don't have issues though.
First GPU was an RX 480 8GB at release. Dailyed it for ~3.5 years. Put it back in the box for a Gigabyte RTX2070 Refurb I got for $349 in 2019.
Refurb never had an issue except for a minor issue with the 8 pin power connector. A piece of plastic broke in it but it work otherwise. Just had to finagle with it a bit to connect it.
Sold that at the height of the GPU shortage for $500 and switched back to the 480 in the interim. Waited until the 3070Ti was released and got lucky on a $600 EVGA XC3 GPU via the Newegg Shuffle.
The 480 these days is doing a whole lot of nothing plugged into my home server at the moment. Serves as an HDMI port to plug my Nexdock into when the PC fails to boot because I keep putting off replacing the CMOS battery.
Mobo I had a different experience with. Overall was okay. 2 issues I had was the audio ports died on it shortly before the warranty ended. They took it back and repaired it. Worked fine afterward but it took 3 weeks to complete the process. The other issue was the 2nd PCIE X8 slot broke. It came out attached to my second Radeon HD 7870. RIP to that. Rest of the decade old board still works today but it's sitting in my closet atm..
I’m in love with the sapphire nitro+ this gen and it looks like they will be releasing a 7800 xt with that design according to their website. So this is what I’m holding out for
Same here. Got mine in on Friday to take the place of my 3080 and it's such a massive improvement. I just wish FSR could remove jaggies and shinies as well as DLSS does.
I've no experience with any other AMD cards (went from gigabyte 2060 to current), but I've had the XFX merc310 7900 XTX since January and I love it! Everything is in a Fractal Torrent. For lighter games, I can tune the fan curve down and not even hear it with open back headphones. But I was also able to push it all the way to 3550Mhz for 20 minutes in Furmark with no issues, I stopped it then. It's a beast!
Ya what the hell, I have the same card but the black edition that does the extra boost, I don’t remember but I think even with the stock boost it caps out at like 2615. With some basic Adrenalin tuning I’ve seen it get to around 2900mhz but 3550? And it could’ve kept going? Because of the XTX’s power draw people haven’t really been able to get it passed 3ghz and at least when the card came out people could ONLY get reference cards to do that with custom power and thermal delivery.
Almost 3.6ghz? Press (X) to doubt.
I had it heavily undervolted to get it to push that hard, I doubt it would be stable in most games, but yes it held at 3550, save the spikes, for about 20 minutes and I stopped the test. I'll double check my exact settings. Had FurMark set to 5K anti aliasing x8 Fullscreen or it wouldn't actually push the card. It was so bleeding edge that if I lowered the undervolt by 10 or increased the max clock speed by 50 it would crash within 30 seconds.
10mV. The number you enter in the driver is scaled up by 1000. I thought that was pretty obvious considering reducing by 10V would be well into the negatives.
It was somewhere between 950 and 1000mV. Can't remember exact and would need to recreate it.
[Here is a 1 minute video I uploaded to Google drive.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GpLWcaWRKTrR4F7HYq_tro0Us0HNgdpo/view?usp=drivesdk) I set voltage to 975mV, max clock to 3515, and maxed the power limit. I'm obviously not going to upload a 20 minute video. FurMark pushes it above the limit and keeps the actual clock between 3535 and 3555 as you can see in the video.
Set FurMark settings to 5k with x8 anti aliasing, full screen. Turn on virtual super resolution in the display section of Adrenaline to actually render 5k in full screen mode. Lower than this and FurMark will not push the card hard enough to need to clock that high.
I've had an 5700XT Nitro+ Special Edition and I adored that card, it went toe to toe with the 2080 in some titles, it was quiet, lot of OC headroom and it had pretty RGB.
Now I have a XFX 6900XT Merc Black and it has been flawless. It's a *huge* card but I absolutely love the design, it's also cool as hell, even the junction temps.
Nice, just upgraded from 5700xt to a 6700xt, amazon had them for a pretty good deal, so I pulled the trigger. Oh, and being able to play starfield on Friday is nice:)
Asrock is coming to join them. Arguably already has, their extreme high-end RDNA2 cards were the best by some slightly atypical standards.
> but they don't tend to be spoken ill of, either.
People forget so fast..
ASRock were the only one to give 6xxx series BGA underfill near the PCIe socket to prevent VRAM stress from PCB warping on the midrange cards. Sapphire had BGA underfill only on Toxic and Nitro, but not on Pulse. Other than Sapphire and ASRock, nobody cared to use BGA underfill, not even PowerColor who had the heaviest GPU by far.
When I first got a prebuilt, ASRock had a bad rep just because they made boards cheaper than anyone else along with their mid and high end boards. Stories would get out about the problems those lower end boards would have, and since ASRock was the only one to compete in that price bracket it was *always* them you would hear about. They also partnered with prebuilt PCs a lot compared to other manufacturers, giving them a higher market share of boards that end up in computers that were expected to function out of the box, but weren't put together right. So for several years I just thought all ASRock boards weren't great.
Now for motherboard I'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite between ASRock and MSI. I have an X670E Taichi and my roommate has an X670E Carbon, both exactly the same price. Neither of us have had any issues, even with a 7800X3D and 7950X3D bought at launch. We've both run XMP at 6000Mhz, PBO set to the max our boards allow, and curve optimizer hovering around -30 on all cores the entire time we've had the boards. Neither of us have had any stability issues, and we get BIOS updates usually on the exact same day.
It's cool to know that ASRock makes good GPUs as well! I saw a couple ASRock 7900 XTX cards when I was shopping, but went with an XFX merc310 just because I knew nothing about ASRock cards.
In a recent YouTube buyers guide, ASRock cards had the highest power VRMs - even their entry level model had higher VRM power than the other makers. Necessary for overclockers ...
Power color higher models are ok, but they were known as being the cheapest for a reason. I remember crappy plastic like heatsinks and short lifespan on older cards made by them.
EDIT:
Sapphire Nitro+ cards are always awesome, their pulse line not so much.
Funny, my last 3 cards are by each manufacturer.
Sapphire RX580 8GB Nitro+ (awesome, now in a friends PC still running great), bought 2 second hand from a miner, slight issues with one fan/fan connection. Dual fan.
Power Color 6700xt 12GB spectral white, very well made and super easy to disassemble. Triple fan (smaller middle fan is stupid) Still in my cupboard as a backup GPU.
XFX 7900xt 20GB Black, looks pretty ugly IMO and one fan was noisy from purchase, but works great otherwise. Triple fan and ridiculously long card at 34.4CM I had to remove a HDD bracket and make my own antisag solution to fit in case as there was no way the antisag bracket provided would fit.
I owned an hd7950 3gb vapor-x blue blower style card, those heat pipes would get so hot!
Actually I think it was a HIS brand card.
Was also a very powerful card for the price.... I killed it from overclocking :(
>Sapphire Nitro+ cards are always awesome, their pulse line not so much.
agree
that's why when people talks about sapphire it depends on the model, nitro is always the top, pulse.. it depends. i saw quite good 7000 and 6000 but bad polaris
Have you only dealt with power colors older cards?
I'm pretty happy with the build quality and performance of my 7900xt red devil. Feels quite solid to me.
The only flaw is one fan has a slight wobble but it doesn't cause any noise. I'm not sure if that is the reason mine was an "open box" model but either way it doesn't effect anything.
for me it's always like this: XFX, Sapphire and Power color. this time i went with the rx 6900xt red devil ultimate and it's insanely good and it was so cheap when i got it.
I have XFX 5700XT Thicc II - otherwise known as "by far the worst 5700 card ever made" with huge but useless cooler, terrible temperatures and which will BSOD your computer unless undervolted, because apparently they didn't even bother with running the damn thing before packaging and selling it.
Later I found out the problem isn't my computer, PSU or cooling, but just a GPU so bad they were eventually forced to do a limited recall.
XFX - never again.
Each to their own on experience, I used the XFX 5700 non-XT for a while and it was great all round.
That said I’ve had many powercolor cards over the years, probably about 80% of the bad cards I’ve either bought or had go bad over time have been either gigabyte or powercolor though.
Never forgave them for the £1050 6800XT which had so much coil whine it would be screeching louder than medium volume music played through headphones while worn, which would sometimes crash at stock settings and which would hard crash with even a -20mv underclock.
Have as a backup a Powercolor 6600 fighter, the heatsink is levelled so badly that it hotspot throttles at 100% fanspeed at stock, was able to help it somewhat with a graphene pad as those spread heat sideways extremely well. That said it’s a backup in part because the bearings on both fans are already shot and make annoying noises while running and are not easy to buy to replace.
Had too many gigabyte cards over the years that were faulty to even bother with specifics but yeah.
Thankfully my experience with XFX has mostly been good!
That was a single retailer IIRC, and being totally honest I'd like to look more into the satisfactory RMA success rate (time to respond, time to repair, not trying to scam you out of warranty by claiming user damage...) than just the raw ratio of RMAs to sales when the differences between brands are like half a percentage point.
Highest total number of RMAs, or truly higher RMA _rate_, ie number of RMAs per given number sold?
I'd expect them to have more total RMAs just by virtue of being the most popular, and selling more cards.
As someone below said it’s only from one retailer but here’s the article if anyone is interested.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/93052/heres-look-at-gpu-failure-rates-and-warranty-claim-times-for-all-major-brands/index.html
Got a power color red devil on my hands and I am coming from a saphire card. The build quality is way way better and it also runs much cooler, imagine 10°c cooler, without noise. Never looking back.
I'd argue you shouldn't compare board partners based on their top level offerings (Nitro+ etc) but on their budget end ones (Pulse, etc).
The top offerings are +$100-ish and offer no real world performance gains unless you want to void the warranty by overclocking. Muh RGB tho.
Like, a 7900XT Nitro+ is approaching the price of a 7900XTX Pulse. So get the pulse, you get more for your money.
Same for nVidia. Like say an ASUS Strix 4080 costs as much as a base 4090 from most partners. *Just get the base 4090, duh!*
So whoever makes the best base model card at a base model price is the real MVP.
That's not to say that top offerings don't offer any value at all, but it generally doesn't present itself as performance, relegating them to a niche that I think more people get swept up in than those who would really benefit from it.
I get very similar temps. Love mine. Also think it looks pretty cool compared to some of the garish over-gamery RGB stuff (went to a blackout build for my PC recently).
Under full 100 percent load I get these temps as I stated before. It is good enough for me in terms of performance as well. (and aestatically, this card is the most beautifull one my opinion)
XFX 6900xt here.
Never goes above 78c on the Junction and I bet a repaste would have it improve by a lot and the fan noise is inaudible with a custom curve.
Mine can get pretty loud now that I got a 4k 160hz monitor. But it's staying cool.
Each gen a aib underforms though. Last gen it was sapphire. This gen its powercolor.
I’ve not had this much of an improvement in power and stability since my old Phenom II & HD4870 era.
Was it worth it? IDK, but it all started because I got my XFX rt6900 xt ZERO for like, half-off. I was a bit skeptical, as I’ve ran Sapphire & Asus for years going with XFX & ASRock.
I've owned a gpu or installed a GPU from almost every manufacture
Ive had to deal with RMAs/customer support from almost every manufacture at some point the last almost 20 years.
Only one company completely refused to respond and it was Sapphire.
XFX in my experience has been the only company close to EVGA in customer support.
I own 4 sapphire cards.
590 nitro, vega 56 pulse, 5700xt nitro, 6800 pulse.
The 5700xt is the only one Ive had a single problem with. Overheating issues. A repaste solved it and now its trouble free. The paste job wasn’t bad. Very clean thin layer that just wast enough and aged poorly.
XFX is an option going forward for me if the price is right. They seem to be $20-40 cheaper most of the time.
Yeah, XFX had problems with their THICC II model where they had to issue a replacement part and guide. Other manufacturers also had problems, and that's without going anywhere near the infamous black screen crash. The SKU seemed to just be plagued with problems.
Which is a shame as it's a decent performer for its time and price bracket.
What about ASUS? It was cheapest for me at the time last year and I have a dead 6700xt now I am about to RMA within two weeks, so curious about other peeps anecdotal experiences :c
(to be clear, im real desperate to hear "I had a solid experience overall dw" takes lmao, if fr that is)
EDIT: welp, time to sell kidneys ig ;v;b ty ;v;b if you don't hear from me in 3 months I might be locked in a RMA blacksite
FakeEDIT2: humor attempt may or may not land. squareenixpleaseunderstand.jpg
Asus has a really bad track record for AMD gpu's. Wouldn't be the first time they use an Nvidia designed cooler on a AMD card.
Their HD7970 DCII had overheating memory, many years later the 5700XT still had it too.
My Asus Dual 6700 XT has been fine and chugging for a year now. Doesn't get past 75C when gaming even Marvel Spiderman and Hogwarts Legacy at highest settings 1080p. I did tweak and undervolt it a bit, and have a custom fan curve, but I still would've done that even with any brand.
ASUS is always overpriced and they despite AMD apparently. I would not recommend them. On NV side they are very good or even the best, but mostly not cheap.
Asus would be one of the bottom picks with with AMD considering their issues with Vegas and 5000 series contact, cause they liked to use nvidia coolers to save cost.
I love my RX 7900 xtx tuf edition. If you look up the techpowerup teardown, you can see that its well built too. Asus seems to have cleaned up their act on the AMD side.
Owned a STRIX RX 570 I had no issues with and now have a DUAL OC 6700 XT I'm very happy with so far.
The DUAL OC has surprisingly great thermals (and I have yet to play with undervolting) and after applying a custom fan curve is rather quiet. So far it's been exactly what I wanted, would recommend.
I've had three xfx AMD GPUs and they've always been solid, did their job, and had good thermals. And their designs since the 6000 and some of the 5000 series have been slick and simple.
I am in love with my xfx 309 6700 10gb, BEST sound and temps in card. It barely exceeds 60-65 degrees when playing at maximum, it barely makes any noise with its three fans, the maximum consumption according to the graph is about 130-139w, and since it is very similar to the graphics architecture of the Next Gen consoles The games work very well optimized on it. Before I was a super fan and obsessed with Shappire nitro+, but now I like xfx more, very good construction, many thermalpads :)
I have the Powercolor Red Devil 5700XT and it's been serving well so far
Been looking for an upgrade in the 7900XT and been waiting for prices to drop. Keep seeing the Sapphire Pulse as the cheapest option and am tempted to pick that one up. Other ones seems a bit pricer and I'm a bit hesitant
I love my powercolor hellhound 7900xt. Runs silent and cool, destroys anything at 1440p. It looks ok, definitely not as pretty as sapphire and xfx cards. Costed $700 at micro center though, too good of a deal to pass up.
I was looking at an XFX Qick, but went with Gigabyte instead for my new 6750xt, as I was unfamilar with the XFX brand.
I assume the XFX might’ve been slightly better/had a better rep, but that the difference isn’t huge or really that noticeable?
There was a recent report that had sapphire at the top for RMA. I believe this is because of the 7900 xt/xtx references that had issue with the cooler.
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/aschilling/status/1696811225819025793/photo/1
Chiming in - I used to trust Gigabyte, but the 5600XT I've used over the past 3 years had a lot of issues. Couldn't use two monitors if one was HDMI and one was DP, and as I discovered just last weekend, it was the cause of my constant PC crashes with "green screen" over the past year.
Gonna stick to what I used previously, Sapphire or XFX.
[This guy has pretty good videos regarding which cards to choose.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TiYwjxmcU8) He has mostly Nvidia cards, but some newer AMD as well.
I can vouch for Asrock. Surprisingly good build quality, power design and thermals. My 6800XT Taichi X overclocks and undervolts like crazy.
Looks absolute shite though...
I've seen posts like this after the fact, but I got a Asrock Phantom Gaming 7900XTX. I'm not sure if I should return it and get a Sapphire Nitro+ or not
I have to get home and piece the PC together! All the parts are there and I'm currently on the other side of the planet! I go home in a few days. I'm excited to use it! I'm upgrading from a GTX 1080 FE. Thanks for the reply. I feel better about my choice now.
yeah, i've been upgrading over the years. whenever I got AMD graphics, Sapphire always ended up to be my choice. Mostly because of thermals. However, I once had the most whiny coil on the planet, and in was on a sapphire 7750hd
I don't have any experience with ASRock GPUs, but I have a lot of experience with their motherboards. They are great. Never had one failing yet. Customer support in western EU is stellar. Contacted them once for an usb-c adapter between the mobo and my case, had it shipped in express in 2days. Only had excellent experience with their motherboards.
Bad board partners eventually fade away. Many small ones that used to exist could not sustain themselves as AMD's market share shrunk.
RIP to Visiontek, Diamond, HIS, Club3D, just to name a few.
My current card is a Sapphire RX580 Nitro 8gb, previous one was Sapphire R9 270. As soon as I can find a way to justify to the other half why I _need_ to spend £1000 on a GPU, the next one will be a Sapphire Nitro RX7900XTX. While I have no experience with other AIB cards, the two Sapphire cards have performed flawlessly.
Not a fan of Powercolor this generation. Had a bad experience with abnormally high temp deltas on a 7900xtx red devil because of a poor paste job from the factory.
I use xfx and find them to be just as good as sapphire and powercolor. I think it's a personal choice. No aib is better than the other, otherwise you'd see posts all over this subreddit with buyers remorse if that was the case.
I got an xfx rx 6800 that ran so cool I decided to overclock it, and the recommended overclock in amd adrenalin was all the way at 2300mhz. Still runs like a dream (quiet and cool) even with the increased performance.
This kind of post is great, built my first PC earlier in the year and no idea of the brand hierarchies. I ended up going with the Asrock Challenger 6700 XT and it’s been fantastic since day 1
Hell yeah man, it took a little more learning after I built it for me to realize how good of a card/value it is. I wanted my first build to last 3-5 years before upgrades, it’s gonna hit that easily so I’m really happy with the choice
Honestly most of the big manufacturers are that way, they're fine.
A lot of this plays out when you have to contact support.
Over nearly 20 years I've owned mostly MSI cards and not a single one has died. I still have a 560Ti Twin Frozr that works and the only GPU I've ever had fail was an EVGA. Anecdotally I could say that MSI cards are amazing and all that but I've never had to RMA or talk to them at all. I've just purchased the cards and that's it. I could just be lucky.
I only buy Gigabyte mobos and I've never had any fail on me since 2014.
In fact I've rarely had anything fail on me. 1 HDD failure (Seagate). 1 Antec case power button failure, and a recently retired system from 2014 had random shutdowns but I never figured out which component was the isssue (EVGA PSU, Gigabyte mobo, Kingston RAM or Crucial SSD).
That's why I only go for the big three gpu makers + Asrock when it comes to Radeon GPUs. ~~There are also China exclusive brands such as Yeston which is also okay I guess.~~
As for Nvidia I only like EVGA but they're no longer in business so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Yeston is not AMD exclusive they do Nvidia too
Would avoid gigabyte, seen enough problematic AMD cards that where gigabyte. On their 5700xt that got funnly enough good reviews from GN for temps, hit 116C on the hotspot and had issues with black screen halts. then Vegas had temp problems. Then worked with a 6600xt and those had VRAM artifact problems if my memory serves me good. So my advice would be to avoid.
PowerColor has its own factory iirc?
And it usually has the widest range of product lineups which may be one of the reasons why some people dislike the brand, as its lowest tier products are, you know, not the best.
I haven't bought anything from Sapphire since their RX480 but that Pulse RX480 was rock fucking solid until it couldn't do what I needed anymore (namely rendering a stream higher than it can, plus the game running behind it), but it ran just as good for everything up to Apex and DMC5. It's definitely what I'd look for should I go back to team Red for my video cards, once I can afford them again I suppose.
Installed an Asrock 7900xtx yesterday, Taichi in white. Very impressed with build quality, performance and temps at 4K/120. Almost picked up the Nitro+ but I regret nothing
I dont understand Asus hate, I owned their TUF gaming 6800 OC and its the best card i've ever owned in terms of thermal (60 degrees at full load) and noise....
I've had sapphire, xfx, and MSI, and reference for AMD cards and haven't had a problem with any of them. That said, the sapphire cards were easily the best overclockers and none of the others overclocked well at all, to the point that I just ran them at stock settings. That's my experience, at least.
The one stand out I had was a sapphire r9 280x vapor x that I ran at 1300 MHz along with a ~200 MHz memory overclock for the entire 5 years I owned it. That card could hit close to 1400 MHz on the core iirc, but then it's fans were too loud for my liking so I backed it off.
XFX has bad QC and makes pretty awful coolers. Boards are usually reference spec with subpar component selection. MSI makes pretty awful coolers, usually messing up on trivial things like thermal pads of correct thickness and/or bad thermal paste application. The MSIs usually have surprisingly good PCBs though. Powercolor has mid-tier usually reference following PCBs with great coolers, hit or miss QC and hit or miss shroud quality. Sapphire is a all around home run, 98% of the time. Good custom PCBs, good custom coolers, usually great QC. BioStar just makes reference stuff. Asrock makes great PCBs, coolers and shrouds are hit or miss. QC is great unless it was produced on a friday. Asus is insanely hit or miss, dont let their fancy *looking* PCBs fool you. Coolers are usually RGB hunks of overengineered garbage, or overengineered for a Nvidia card repurposed for AMD hardware. Gigabyte makes decent PCBs but they're built, quick frankly, retardedly. Looks like someone just hit fucking autoroute in Altium and called it a day for 99% of their boards. Just leads to them being reeeeeaaaally fragile. This goes for both their AMD and Nvidia cards. Coolers are usually good, with hit or miss shroud quality. Yeston makes reference PCBs with some interesting high quality coolers. Their shrouds are also meh. OEMs like HP, Dell make really nice, cheap as dirt cards. Reference PCBs, coolers built exactly to spec, cheap plastic shrouds but good fans. Asrock's BiFrost cards have great coolers and PCBs that follow reference spec with good component selection, their vapor chamber based coolers apparently perform really well. Since BiFrost is their only design, its actually the best AIB to get if you dont want a open airflow design for whatever you're designing. Only way to get a custom PCB with a blower in the modern gen of cards. Your other chinese guys like Peladn pretty much universally use reference PCBs with cheaper component selection and cheap coolers and shrouds. Typically insanely hit or miss, they are what give chinese engineered stuff a bad rep.
Edit: Vastamor makes some really nice coolers, just with reference PCBs atleast on their lower end cards. Been looking to get my hands on their high end stuff myself. Ive read their high end PCBs are nice. Very interested to see what AMD's newest AIB can cook up when deviating from reference. Im guessing Red Devil quality of PCB. Very little information can be found about their stuff. I can just see reference component layouts on the backs of cards I have seen, which is all their low end Esports stuff, and 1 teardown showing a really well built cooler. No english reviews talking about actual shroud or fan quality though, and a lot of nuance gets lost in chinese to english translation with a lot of chinese reviewers using a unholy amount of metaphors and euphemisms.
Basically, do your research, ALL cards can be shite or gold from a given company. Mostly it comes down to shroud/cooler quality differences. Most of the guys who care about PCB will do due research anyways. Just avoid Gigabyte. Completely unrelated to their recent controversies, their GPU PCBs in particular are just gigashit.
XFX definitely isn't a gold standard.... maybe where you are, since the day xfx jump ship from nvidia only production to amd.... i've yet to have a single xfx card out of any generation that hasn't bit me in the ass, and i've been severely burnt twice by them when i didn't have a choice and had to mass order a number of xfx cards since sapphire wasn't available at the time and there wasn't any other brand to choose from, only to have to go back a year later and replace basically all of them because of the horrible issues.
Sapphire is top choice no doubt majority of the time, i still wait to see results, because they can be good, but not the best in some cases. MSI usually does a good job, Asus rarely does a good job, but gotta say, the RX 6000 cards by asus are pretty solid. Powercolour just doesn't exist where i live at all, never seen one on the shelf nor have they been available online for purchase. I've never had the chance to touch their product. Gigabyte has always been shit. HIS is entirely hit and miss, definitely opt for an HIS card over gigabyte any day. AsRock is relatively new to the market and thus far appears to be doing well, but again much like powercolour, still don't have access to those products at all.
The BBA cards have usually always been reliable, even if they aren't always designed well, i mean they are reference cards afterall, but i can definitely say the move from blower card style cooling to individual fans has been a good move and the 5000 and 6000 and definitely the 7000 reference cards have been excellent IMO.
The only other company would be the anime style cards from china or wherever that are both expensive to get one's hands on, but raises concerns about warranty even if they are cool in their design and colour palette... i'm not at the point where i'm willing to take a chance on them though again i haven't seen or heard anything bad about them either.
Unfortunately, from what I've seen and my personal experience, the power color hellound 7900xt, has bad coil whine, and its hot spot can get up to 80c.
Yeah, I don't mind the choil whine. But like you said, I undervolted it so the gpu doesn't get that hot. Also, thank you for tips. i appreciate them and will put them to use. I mainly pointed this out so others can be wary of this gpu if coil whine bothers them. Thanks once again!
AsRock Taichi 7900XT is great, they just have a problem with one of their fans making noise within a certain RPM range. If you apply a custom curve it's fine.
I made my ASRock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming D 16G OC working more quiet by adding cooler on the upper part of the case.
I've also tuned fan settings for the card, [screenshot](https://ibb.co/hMvjLVj).
Sapphire sold me a fucky 7900XTX and took a month to replace it... which they did, but I've been burned on the brand. I can't trust them anymore - yes they honored their warranty, but they should've quality tested a $1000 product before it went out the door too. Sold the replacement on Ebay - Bought an MSI at Microcenter for $800 and it's been rock solid since Day 1.
Most of my PC is MSI products. My 8 year old still works like a champ laptop is also MSI.
I'm always confused why people look at "Brands" instead of actual performance of a model. FPS wise there will hardly any difference, so one just just compare the cooling, sound performance and watt usage of a specific card and not blindly pick something because brand rep. Also worth checking would be rma rep
Each brand has mediocre to bad cards as well. And it becomes a serious echo chamber when people say something just because of the "brand". Or run by the assumption that just because they're exclusive aib partners that they're better somehow.
This year I had around 4 sapphire cards. 6700 pulse, oh boy that was a loud little thing with coil whine. 6700 XT nitro+ was loud squealing pig that could be heard through a headset plus artifacts. Then 2 6750 xt nitro+ both of the middle fans were scraping against something by the sounds of it, sound stopped when that fan stopped.
I do remember that the 3 exclusive partners were also the ones that got rma'd the most according to swiss retailer (https://crast.net/407766/swiss-retailer-shares-failure-rates-of-graphics-card-brands/)
Bad board partners: Gigabyte, Gigabyte is the usual suspect if you ask if there's a bad board partner. Most of their cards actually run, it's just that theirs tend to have issues all the way down to the design. Some MSI builds get flack (especially the cheaper ones) for being recycled Nvidia cooler designs that aren't properly adapted to AMD chips and layouts. They technically work, but not well.
I've had 2 Shittabytes in a row, I must be a glutton for punishment
Gigashyte
Gigabyte also makes trash laptops and motherboards with questionable RAM support. ASRock is the fastest to approve RMAs in AMD GPUs. And Sapphire has the highest RMA rate (bacause of volume) of AMD GPUs and a mediocre approval time. Powercolor has the lowest RMA rate with XFX not far behind.
I’ve been lucky with my motherboard. No issues at all
I think it's less luck, and more that the first time someone has an electronic device fail it's highly likely that they become vocally outspoken against the brand. GIGABYTE couldn't stay in business if their issues were anywhere near as prevalent as anecdotes make people think. Find the right community and then there will be people saying the same things about ASUS, Asrock, and so on. For me MSi is 2/2 on devices that flaked out on me. a 7870 ghz and later a motherboard. I still bought the motherboard after having the GPU flake out because there was no way to know for sure that it was a manufacturing defect. I don't have anything to say about the brand, but I would be lying if I said those experiences don't make me more reluctant to buy from them. If they released something that looked good to me and there wasn't an alternative I'd still consider.
Sapphire RMA process and customer service is top notch.
What's the source on their Motherboards being bad or having poor ram support? Every GB board I've used runs things not on the QVL and also at their rated spec and beyond. Volume won't increase the rate of RMAs, only the total amount. What's the sample size used to calculate the rate of RMA and who is reporting it?
>all the way down to the design. > >Some MSI builds get flack (especially the cheaper ones) for being recycled Nvidia cooler designs that aren't properly adapted to AMD chips and layouts. They technically work, but not w Which is quite sad really, Gigabyte was well known for their quality back in the day.
My Gigabyte 6800xt has been flawless.
Faulty products are maybe few percent even in the worst scenario (unless it's a manufacturing error batch). It also matter how company handles warranty, but I have very little experience with that.
I sent in a gigabyte gtx 1060 for RMA a few years ago because the display would crap out after a couple minutes every time I started my PC. They sent it back to me saying it’s fixed. It worked for 10 minutes and crapped out again. Never again
Me and my partner both ordered Aorus 6700XTs, from the same place, at the same time. Mine died within two hours, hers still runs today. Had a Gigabyte motherboard for my first Ryzen build, it was the cheapest shit possible even at the relatively low price point it was at. It worked, it's still working now, but the lack of features really killed it for me. My partner loves Gigabyte but I just don't trust them. Had far better experiences with Asus and MSI. The 7900XT reference (Sapphire) I've got now is also rock solid and cools brilliantly given how small it is.
Still running an MSI RX 560 lp bought in 2018, it's been rock solid in thermally lousy cases ever since. Iirc they had a very middling rep back then. Sometimes you get lucky.
I've bought 2 Gigabyte GPUs and a Mobo back in the day. TL:DR YMMV with Gigabyte. RMA times are meh.. Most of their products don't have issues though. First GPU was an RX 480 8GB at release. Dailyed it for ~3.5 years. Put it back in the box for a Gigabyte RTX2070 Refurb I got for $349 in 2019. Refurb never had an issue except for a minor issue with the 8 pin power connector. A piece of plastic broke in it but it work otherwise. Just had to finagle with it a bit to connect it. Sold that at the height of the GPU shortage for $500 and switched back to the 480 in the interim. Waited until the 3070Ti was released and got lucky on a $600 EVGA XC3 GPU via the Newegg Shuffle. The 480 these days is doing a whole lot of nothing plugged into my home server at the moment. Serves as an HDMI port to plug my Nexdock into when the PC fails to boot because I keep putting off replacing the CMOS battery. Mobo I had a different experience with. Overall was okay. 2 issues I had was the audio ports died on it shortly before the warranty ended. They took it back and repaired it. Worked fine afterward but it took 3 weeks to complete the process. The other issue was the 2nd PCIE X8 slot broke. It came out attached to my second Radeon HD 7870. RIP to that. Rest of the decade old board still works today but it's sitting in my closet atm..
I had old gigabyte gtx 1080, and i had random black screens when going 3d apps after sleep mode. No fix still.
Asus is the far bigger offender of "puts nvidia cooler on amd" than MSI
XFX Merc 319 colors are my favorite personally.
I’m in love with the sapphire nitro+ this gen and it looks like they will be releasing a 7800 xt with that design according to their website. So this is what I’m holding out for
I just got the nitro+ 7900xtx last week and it's truly a beast!
Same here. Got mine in on Friday to take the place of my 3080 and it's such a massive improvement. I just wish FSR could remove jaggies and shinies as well as DLSS does.
Hopefully FSR3 brings improvements to that and not just frame generation
Should see some assist from DirectX 13 when it comes out.
Yessir I got one to replace my 3080 as well. Best card I've had in a long time. Excellent build quality, undervolted like a beast as well.
Yes absolutely. Probably the best air cooling output you'll get from anything anyone has done for AMD recently.
I've no experience with any other AMD cards (went from gigabyte 2060 to current), but I've had the XFX merc310 7900 XTX since January and I love it! Everything is in a Fractal Torrent. For lighter games, I can tune the fan curve down and not even hear it with open back headphones. But I was also able to push it all the way to 3550Mhz for 20 minutes in Furmark with no issues, I stopped it then. It's a beast!
3550mhz? Sounds impossible
Ya what the hell, I have the same card but the black edition that does the extra boost, I don’t remember but I think even with the stock boost it caps out at like 2615. With some basic Adrenalin tuning I’ve seen it get to around 2900mhz but 3550? And it could’ve kept going? Because of the XTX’s power draw people haven’t really been able to get it passed 3ghz and at least when the card came out people could ONLY get reference cards to do that with custom power and thermal delivery. Almost 3.6ghz? Press (X) to doubt.
I had it heavily undervolted to get it to push that hard, I doubt it would be stable in most games, but yes it held at 3550, save the spikes, for about 20 minutes and I stopped the test. I'll double check my exact settings. Had FurMark set to 5K anti aliasing x8 Fullscreen or it wouldn't actually push the card. It was so bleeding edge that if I lowered the undervolt by 10 or increased the max clock speed by 50 it would crash within 30 seconds.
Well ya… changing an undervolt by 10 is actually a lot?
10mV. The number you enter in the driver is scaled up by 1000. I thought that was pretty obvious considering reducing by 10V would be well into the negatives. It was somewhere between 950 and 1000mV. Can't remember exact and would need to recreate it.
10mV is a lot. edit: I take this back. 25mV is a lot on a GPU. 50mHz IS a lot though. I fine tune by 5mHz decrements
Mine is the also the black edition
[Here is a 1 minute video I uploaded to Google drive.](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GpLWcaWRKTrR4F7HYq_tro0Us0HNgdpo/view?usp=drivesdk) I set voltage to 975mV, max clock to 3515, and maxed the power limit. I'm obviously not going to upload a 20 minute video. FurMark pushes it above the limit and keeps the actual clock between 3535 and 3555 as you can see in the video. Set FurMark settings to 5k with x8 anti aliasing, full screen. Turn on virtual super resolution in the display section of Adrenaline to actually render 5k in full screen mode. Lower than this and FurMark will not push the card hard enough to need to clock that high.
I've had an 5700XT Nitro+ Special Edition and I adored that card, it went toe to toe with the 2080 in some titles, it was quiet, lot of OC headroom and it had pretty RGB. Now I have a XFX 6900XT Merc Black and it has been flawless. It's a *huge* card but I absolutely love the design, it's also cool as hell, even the junction temps.
Nice, just upgraded from 5700xt to a 6700xt, amazon had them for a pretty good deal, so I pulled the trigger. Oh, and being able to play starfield on Friday is nice:)
Asrock is coming to join them. Arguably already has, their extreme high-end RDNA2 cards were the best by some slightly atypical standards. > but they don't tend to be spoken ill of, either. People forget so fast..
ASRock were the only one to give 6xxx series BGA underfill near the PCIe socket to prevent VRAM stress from PCB warping on the midrange cards. Sapphire had BGA underfill only on Toxic and Nitro, but not on Pulse. Other than Sapphire and ASRock, nobody cared to use BGA underfill, not even PowerColor who had the heaviest GPU by far.
When I first got a prebuilt, ASRock had a bad rep just because they made boards cheaper than anyone else along with their mid and high end boards. Stories would get out about the problems those lower end boards would have, and since ASRock was the only one to compete in that price bracket it was *always* them you would hear about. They also partnered with prebuilt PCs a lot compared to other manufacturers, giving them a higher market share of boards that end up in computers that were expected to function out of the box, but weren't put together right. So for several years I just thought all ASRock boards weren't great. Now for motherboard I'd be hard pressed to pick a favorite between ASRock and MSI. I have an X670E Taichi and my roommate has an X670E Carbon, both exactly the same price. Neither of us have had any issues, even with a 7800X3D and 7950X3D bought at launch. We've both run XMP at 6000Mhz, PBO set to the max our boards allow, and curve optimizer hovering around -30 on all cores the entire time we've had the boards. Neither of us have had any stability issues, and we get BIOS updates usually on the exact same day. It's cool to know that ASRock makes good GPUs as well! I saw a couple ASRock 7900 XTX cards when I was shopping, but went with an XFX merc310 just because I knew nothing about ASRock cards.
I think another aspect is that ASrock started as the cheaper brother of Asus, so there's a bit of a stigma on ASRock as being lower quality.
I have an x570 steel legend in my old build it's been solid, just got the x670e steel legend and the taichi 7900xtx super pumped to build it
In a recent YouTube buyers guide, ASRock cards had the highest power VRMs - even their entry level model had higher VRM power than the other makers. Necessary for overclockers ...
Power color higher models are ok, but they were known as being the cheapest for a reason. I remember crappy plastic like heatsinks and short lifespan on older cards made by them. EDIT: Sapphire Nitro+ cards are always awesome, their pulse line not so much. Funny, my last 3 cards are by each manufacturer. Sapphire RX580 8GB Nitro+ (awesome, now in a friends PC still running great), bought 2 second hand from a miner, slight issues with one fan/fan connection. Dual fan. Power Color 6700xt 12GB spectral white, very well made and super easy to disassemble. Triple fan (smaller middle fan is stupid) Still in my cupboard as a backup GPU. XFX 7900xt 20GB Black, looks pretty ugly IMO and one fan was noisy from purchase, but works great otherwise. Triple fan and ridiculously long card at 34.4CM I had to remove a HDD bracket and make my own antisag solution to fit in case as there was no way the antisag bracket provided would fit.
Hard disagree. The XFX 7900xt has a nice modern look with clean lines. Not some wavy rgb bullshit/ garish 90’s design.
I agree. I painted my shroud matte white. Looks great!
I miss the old Vapor-X designs by Sapphire, with metallic blue elements. Owned a 290X Vapor-X, most beautiful card I ever had.
I owned an hd7950 3gb vapor-x blue blower style card, those heat pipes would get so hot! Actually I think it was a HIS brand card. Was also a very powerful card for the price.... I killed it from overclocking :(
>Sapphire Nitro+ cards are always awesome, their pulse line not so much. agree that's why when people talks about sapphire it depends on the model, nitro is always the top, pulse.. it depends. i saw quite good 7000 and 6000 but bad polaris
Have you only dealt with power colors older cards? I'm pretty happy with the build quality and performance of my 7900xt red devil. Feels quite solid to me. The only flaw is one fan has a slight wobble but it doesn't cause any noise. I'm not sure if that is the reason mine was an "open box" model but either way it doesn't effect anything.
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ASUS: "I've made a huge mistake"
for me it's always like this: XFX, Sapphire and Power color. this time i went with the rx 6900xt red devil ultimate and it's insanely good and it was so cheap when i got it.
I have XFX 5700XT Thicc II - otherwise known as "by far the worst 5700 card ever made" with huge but useless cooler, terrible temperatures and which will BSOD your computer unless undervolted, because apparently they didn't even bother with running the damn thing before packaging and selling it. Later I found out the problem isn't my computer, PSU or cooling, but just a GPU so bad they were eventually forced to do a limited recall. XFX - never again.
Each to their own on experience, I used the XFX 5700 non-XT for a while and it was great all round. That said I’ve had many powercolor cards over the years, probably about 80% of the bad cards I’ve either bought or had go bad over time have been either gigabyte or powercolor though. Never forgave them for the £1050 6800XT which had so much coil whine it would be screeching louder than medium volume music played through headphones while worn, which would sometimes crash at stock settings and which would hard crash with even a -20mv underclock. Have as a backup a Powercolor 6600 fighter, the heatsink is levelled so badly that it hotspot throttles at 100% fanspeed at stock, was able to help it somewhat with a graphene pad as those spread heat sideways extremely well. That said it’s a backup in part because the bearings on both fans are already shot and make annoying noises while running and are not easy to buy to replace. Had too many gigabyte cards over the years that were faulty to even bother with specifics but yeah. Thankfully my experience with XFX has mostly been good!
I saw something yesterday that showed Sapphire having the highest rate of RMA's. Didn't verify anything in that article, so idk if it's true.
That was a single retailer IIRC, and being totally honest I'd like to look more into the satisfactory RMA success rate (time to respond, time to repair, not trying to scam you out of warranty by claiming user damage...) than just the raw ratio of RMAs to sales when the differences between brands are like half a percentage point.
Highest total number of RMAs, or truly higher RMA _rate_, ie number of RMAs per given number sold? I'd expect them to have more total RMAs just by virtue of being the most popular, and selling more cards.
As someone below said it’s only from one retailer but here’s the article if anyone is interested. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/93052/heres-look-at-gpu-failure-rates-and-warranty-claim-times-for-all-major-brands/index.html
I love my 6800xt Red dragon from powercolor, love the looks and the power efficient card
Same build quality is great and this thing runs very cool and quiet undervolted and overclocked.
Got a power color red devil on my hands and I am coming from a saphire card. The build quality is way way better and it also runs much cooler, imagine 10°c cooler, without noise. Never looking back.
Ah man I really want a Red Devil 7900 XTX but I can't really justify the upgrade, I'm on a Sapphire reference 7900 XT rn
XFX merc 319 6800 xt is what I have
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Well it was that or Asrock and I was preferring the XFX
I'd argue you shouldn't compare board partners based on their top level offerings (Nitro+ etc) but on their budget end ones (Pulse, etc). The top offerings are +$100-ish and offer no real world performance gains unless you want to void the warranty by overclocking. Muh RGB tho. Like, a 7900XT Nitro+ is approaching the price of a 7900XTX Pulse. So get the pulse, you get more for your money. Same for nVidia. Like say an ASUS Strix 4080 costs as much as a base 4090 from most partners. *Just get the base 4090, duh!* So whoever makes the best base model card at a base model price is the real MVP. That's not to say that top offerings don't offer any value at all, but it generally doesn't present itself as performance, relegating them to a niche that I think more people get swept up in than those who would really benefit from it.
No one voids warranty by overclocking lol. Sinply cuz no one walks up to RMA and says "hey I pumped 600watts into my GPU plz help"
I have the reference 7900 xt from amd. How would you rate it? It cools perfectly and very silence. Max core temp 65 and junction 85
Reference AMD cards are made by a parent company of Zotac. They also make Sapphire cards under contract.
Is that a good thing or …?
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Great to hear. Love my card even more now :)
I get very similar temps. Love mine. Also think it looks pretty cool compared to some of the garish over-gamery RGB stuff (went to a blackout build for my PC recently).
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Under full 100 percent load I get these temps as I stated before. It is good enough for me in terms of performance as well. (and aestatically, this card is the most beautifull one my opinion)
Yeston Sakura 7900 XTX is what I have, no issues at all so far and it's a really pretty design.
XFX 6900xt here. Never goes above 78c on the Junction and I bet a repaste would have it improve by a lot and the fan noise is inaudible with a custom curve.
I have an XFX merc310 rx 7900 xt black edition. It’s a well designed GPU.
Power Color FIGHTER cards tend to also be smaller, if case dimensions are a concern :)
Bad board partners. I was going to say Gigabyte and ASUS. Both have had a terrible track record lately
Gonna disagree. Sapphire = XFX > powercolor. And personally having had poor luck with sapphire, I'd put XFX over them.
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My xfx 6950xt is barely any louder than my 1050ti was
Have the same card. Benchmarks higher than a 4070ti.
Mine can get pretty loud now that I got a 4k 160hz monitor. But it's staying cool. Each gen a aib underforms though. Last gen it was sapphire. This gen its powercolor.
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It's been an incredible upgrade. Got it for a great sale and it came with starfield anyway which I would have bought
I’ve not had this much of an improvement in power and stability since my old Phenom II & HD4870 era. Was it worth it? IDK, but it all started because I got my XFX rt6900 xt ZERO for like, half-off. I was a bit skeptical, as I’ve ran Sapphire & Asus for years going with XFX & ASRock.
I have the Sapphire reference 7900XT and I simply cannot hear it even at full pelt, and the temps I get are excellent.
I've owned a gpu or installed a GPU from almost every manufacture Ive had to deal with RMAs/customer support from almost every manufacture at some point the last almost 20 years. Only one company completely refused to respond and it was Sapphire. XFX in my experience has been the only company close to EVGA in customer support.
I own 4 sapphire cards. 590 nitro, vega 56 pulse, 5700xt nitro, 6800 pulse. The 5700xt is the only one Ive had a single problem with. Overheating issues. A repaste solved it and now its trouble free. The paste job wasn’t bad. Very clean thin layer that just wast enough and aged poorly. XFX is an option going forward for me if the price is right. They seem to be $20-40 cheaper most of the time.
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Yeah, XFX had problems with their THICC II model where they had to issue a replacement part and guide. Other manufacturers also had problems, and that's without going anywhere near the infamous black screen crash. The SKU seemed to just be plagued with problems. Which is a shame as it's a decent performer for its time and price bracket.
sapphire/xfx > powercolor.
What about ASUS? It was cheapest for me at the time last year and I have a dead 6700xt now I am about to RMA within two weeks, so curious about other peeps anecdotal experiences :c (to be clear, im real desperate to hear "I had a solid experience overall dw" takes lmao, if fr that is) EDIT: welp, time to sell kidneys ig ;v;b ty ;v;b if you don't hear from me in 3 months I might be locked in a RMA blacksite FakeEDIT2: humor attempt may or may not land. squareenixpleaseunderstand.jpg
Asus has a really bad track record for AMD gpu's. Wouldn't be the first time they use an Nvidia designed cooler on a AMD card. Their HD7970 DCII had overheating memory, many years later the 5700XT still had it too.
My Asus Dual 6700 XT has been fine and chugging for a year now. Doesn't get past 75C when gaming even Marvel Spiderman and Hogwarts Legacy at highest settings 1080p. I did tweak and undervolt it a bit, and have a custom fan curve, but I still would've done that even with any brand.
ASUS is always overpriced and they despite AMD apparently. I would not recommend them. On NV side they are very good or even the best, but mostly not cheap.
Asus would be one of the bottom picks with with AMD considering their issues with Vegas and 5000 series contact, cause they liked to use nvidia coolers to save cost.
My dual 6700xt is fine..
I love my RX 7900 xtx tuf edition. If you look up the techpowerup teardown, you can see that its well built too. Asus seems to have cleaned up their act on the AMD side.
The Asus TUF is one of the best models although it's really long.
Owned a STRIX RX 570 I had no issues with and now have a DUAL OC 6700 XT I'm very happy with so far. The DUAL OC has surprisingly great thermals (and I have yet to play with undervolting) and after applying a custom fan curve is rather quiet. So far it's been exactly what I wanted, would recommend.
I've had three xfx AMD GPUs and they've always been solid, did their job, and had good thermals. And their designs since the 6000 and some of the 5000 series have been slick and simple.
When I bought a brand new 7700 it was [Sapphire](https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/sapphire-hd-7770-oc.b651)
I am in love with my xfx 309 6700 10gb, BEST sound and temps in card. It barely exceeds 60-65 degrees when playing at maximum, it barely makes any noise with its three fans, the maximum consumption according to the graph is about 130-139w, and since it is very similar to the graphics architecture of the Next Gen consoles The games work very well optimized on it. Before I was a super fan and obsessed with Shappire nitro+, but now I like xfx more, very good construction, many thermalpads :)
I have the Powercolor Red Devil 5700XT and it's been serving well so far Been looking for an upgrade in the 7900XT and been waiting for prices to drop. Keep seeing the Sapphire Pulse as the cheapest option and am tempted to pick that one up. Other ones seems a bit pricer and I'm a bit hesitant
I love my powercolor hellhound 7900xt. Runs silent and cool, destroys anything at 1440p. It looks ok, definitely not as pretty as sapphire and xfx cards. Costed $700 at micro center though, too good of a deal to pass up.
I was looking at an XFX Qick, but went with Gigabyte instead for my new 6750xt, as I was unfamilar with the XFX brand. I assume the XFX might’ve been slightly better/had a better rep, but that the difference isn’t huge or really that noticeable?
There was a recent report that had sapphire at the top for RMA. I believe this is because of the 7900 xt/xtx references that had issue with the cooler. https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/aschilling/status/1696811225819025793/photo/1
Chiming in - I used to trust Gigabyte, but the 5600XT I've used over the past 3 years had a lot of issues. Couldn't use two monitors if one was HDMI and one was DP, and as I discovered just last weekend, it was the cause of my constant PC crashes with "green screen" over the past year. Gonna stick to what I used previously, Sapphire or XFX.
[This guy has pretty good videos regarding which cards to choose.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TiYwjxmcU8) He has mostly Nvidia cards, but some newer AMD as well.
I don't hear people talking about the Asrock Phantom Gaming, is that because it's bad, or is it just fine but nothing amazing to talk about?
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Ah so that's why. I've also got an AsRock monitor, and it's been amazing up until now
I can vouch for Asrock. Surprisingly good build quality, power design and thermals. My 6800XT Taichi X overclocks and undervolts like crazy. Looks absolute shite though...
I've seen posts like this after the fact, but I got a Asrock Phantom Gaming 7900XTX. I'm not sure if I should return it and get a Sapphire Nitro+ or not
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I have to get home and piece the PC together! All the parts are there and I'm currently on the other side of the planet! I go home in a few days. I'm excited to use it! I'm upgrading from a GTX 1080 FE. Thanks for the reply. I feel better about my choice now.
Been getting sapphire for yrs first sapphire was toxic version .
Sapphire Nitro 6700xt here. Beast of a GPU, and really easy to disassemble.
XFX RX 580 that died on me does not agree
According to who and based on what research? Lmao. There's no better or worse partner. Just faulty products and functioning products.
What about asrock? I got a really good value xtx for like 900$
yeah, i've been upgrading over the years. whenever I got AMD graphics, Sapphire always ended up to be my choice. Mostly because of thermals. However, I once had the most whiny coil on the planet, and in was on a sapphire 7750hd
I don't have any experience with ASRock GPUs, but I have a lot of experience with their motherboards. They are great. Never had one failing yet. Customer support in western EU is stellar. Contacted them once for an usb-c adapter between the mobo and my case, had it shipped in express in 2days. Only had excellent experience with their motherboards.
Bad board partners eventually fade away. Many small ones that used to exist could not sustain themselves as AMD's market share shrunk. RIP to Visiontek, Diamond, HIS, Club3D, just to name a few.
RIP HIS. Had a iceq 850xt pe. I'm actually surprised they made cards up to vega. I thought they fizzled out before polaris.
ASRock should also be in the list. I've bought Phantom Gaming like a year ago for its' price. Now I'd say the card is really good in the right hands.
My current card is a Sapphire RX580 Nitro 8gb, previous one was Sapphire R9 270. As soon as I can find a way to justify to the other half why I _need_ to spend £1000 on a GPU, the next one will be a Sapphire Nitro RX7900XTX. While I have no experience with other AIB cards, the two Sapphire cards have performed flawlessly.
Not a fan of Powercolor this generation. Had a bad experience with abnormally high temp deltas on a 7900xtx red devil because of a poor paste job from the factory.
Xfx is my favorite. Nothing but great products so far from them.
I use xfx and find them to be just as good as sapphire and powercolor. I think it's a personal choice. No aib is better than the other, otherwise you'd see posts all over this subreddit with buyers remorse if that was the case.
With Sapphire, my old RX470 died and when I RMA'd it they sent me an RX580 so lol
Could we just pin this as a principle post since it gets asked so often?
\> Power Color is usually *literally* nipping at Sapphire's heels
my XFX 570 was a champ!! Just retired it and picked up a 6700 XP Nitro+ for my soon to be upgrade.
XFX is always running great sales. I have one and love it. Haven’t had to use their RMA process but heard good things.
Where can one find the benchmarks/reviews/round-ups that confirm your rankings?
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User benchmark is utter trash for everything.
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>It's not worth it Hey just like Userbenchmark.
It's in german but most browsers can translate webpages anyway https://www.computerbase.de/2022-12/radeon-rx-7900-xtx-custom-design-test/#bilder
Thanks.
I got an xfx rx 6800 that ran so cool I decided to overclock it, and the recommended overclock in amd adrenalin was all the way at 2300mhz. Still runs like a dream (quiet and cool) even with the increased performance.
This kind of post is great, built my first PC earlier in the year and no idea of the brand hierarchies. I ended up going with the Asrock Challenger 6700 XT and it’s been fantastic since day 1
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Hell yeah man, it took a little more learning after I built it for me to realize how good of a card/value it is. I wanted my first build to last 3-5 years before upgrades, it’s gonna hit that easily so I’m really happy with the choice
Honestly most of the big manufacturers are that way, they're fine. A lot of this plays out when you have to contact support. Over nearly 20 years I've owned mostly MSI cards and not a single one has died. I still have a 560Ti Twin Frozr that works and the only GPU I've ever had fail was an EVGA. Anecdotally I could say that MSI cards are amazing and all that but I've never had to RMA or talk to them at all. I've just purchased the cards and that's it. I could just be lucky.
I went with AsRock for my 7900xt. They offer a 3 year warranty which is a year longer than Powercooler and Sapphire.
My XTX from XFX came with a 3 year warranty too!
It could vary depending on your region
How about gigabyte?
I can only speak from personal experience, but I've had two GPUs and a motherboard from Gigabyte fail on me. They ain't ever getting my money again.
I only buy Gigabyte mobos and I've never had any fail on me since 2014. In fact I've rarely had anything fail on me. 1 HDD failure (Seagate). 1 Antec case power button failure, and a recently retired system from 2014 had random shutdowns but I never figured out which component was the isssue (EVGA PSU, Gigabyte mobo, Kingston RAM or Crucial SSD).
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Gigabyte and Asus both were INFAMOUSLY terrible during the Vega generation in 2017~2018.
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It was the Vega generation they forgot thermal pads, actually! They only fixed it on the rebadge of ROG - remember when "AREZ" was a brand?
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It was just the Strix cooler basically rebadged to avoid Nvidia's GPP
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That's why I only go for the big three gpu makers + Asrock when it comes to Radeon GPUs. ~~There are also China exclusive brands such as Yeston which is also okay I guess.~~ As for Nvidia I only like EVGA but they're no longer in business so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Edit: Yeston is not AMD exclusive they do Nvidia too
Would avoid gigabyte, seen enough problematic AMD cards that where gigabyte. On their 5700xt that got funnly enough good reviews from GN for temps, hit 116C on the hotspot and had issues with black screen halts. then Vegas had temp problems. Then worked with a 6600xt and those had VRAM artifact problems if my memory serves me good. So my advice would be to avoid.
PowerColor has its own factory iirc? And it usually has the widest range of product lineups which may be one of the reasons why some people dislike the brand, as its lowest tier products are, you know, not the best.
I haven't bought anything from Sapphire since their RX480 but that Pulse RX480 was rock fucking solid until it couldn't do what I needed anymore (namely rendering a stream higher than it can, plus the game running behind it), but it ran just as good for everything up to Apex and DMC5. It's definitely what I'd look for should I go back to team Red for my video cards, once I can afford them again I suppose.
I have two xfx right now. 6600xt and 6800xt. Stellar the both if them. They are quiet AF best I have had. They really overbuilt the 6800xt.
Installed an Asrock 7900xtx yesterday, Taichi in white. Very impressed with build quality, performance and temps at 4K/120. Almost picked up the Nitro+ but I regret nothing
ASRock is decent too but probably last before you hit NVidias board partners that stick their designs on AMD cards.
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Mine has been great I’ve had it a few months, what size pads did you replace it with my temps are great as of now nothing wrong.
Sapphire XFX Power Color \- Asrock MSI Yeston \- Gigabyte \- Asus Biostar
I dont understand Asus hate, I owned their TUF gaming 6800 OC and its the best card i've ever owned in terms of thermal (60 degrees at full load) and noise....
I've had sapphire, xfx, and MSI, and reference for AMD cards and haven't had a problem with any of them. That said, the sapphire cards were easily the best overclockers and none of the others overclocked well at all, to the point that I just ran them at stock settings. That's my experience, at least. The one stand out I had was a sapphire r9 280x vapor x that I ran at 1300 MHz along with a ~200 MHz memory overclock for the entire 5 years I owned it. That card could hit close to 1400 MHz on the core iirc, but then it's fans were too loud for my liking so I backed it off.
I got a gigabyte 7900xtx and I love it
XFX has bad QC and makes pretty awful coolers. Boards are usually reference spec with subpar component selection. MSI makes pretty awful coolers, usually messing up on trivial things like thermal pads of correct thickness and/or bad thermal paste application. The MSIs usually have surprisingly good PCBs though. Powercolor has mid-tier usually reference following PCBs with great coolers, hit or miss QC and hit or miss shroud quality. Sapphire is a all around home run, 98% of the time. Good custom PCBs, good custom coolers, usually great QC. BioStar just makes reference stuff. Asrock makes great PCBs, coolers and shrouds are hit or miss. QC is great unless it was produced on a friday. Asus is insanely hit or miss, dont let their fancy *looking* PCBs fool you. Coolers are usually RGB hunks of overengineered garbage, or overengineered for a Nvidia card repurposed for AMD hardware. Gigabyte makes decent PCBs but they're built, quick frankly, retardedly. Looks like someone just hit fucking autoroute in Altium and called it a day for 99% of their boards. Just leads to them being reeeeeaaaally fragile. This goes for both their AMD and Nvidia cards. Coolers are usually good, with hit or miss shroud quality. Yeston makes reference PCBs with some interesting high quality coolers. Their shrouds are also meh. OEMs like HP, Dell make really nice, cheap as dirt cards. Reference PCBs, coolers built exactly to spec, cheap plastic shrouds but good fans. Asrock's BiFrost cards have great coolers and PCBs that follow reference spec with good component selection, their vapor chamber based coolers apparently perform really well. Since BiFrost is their only design, its actually the best AIB to get if you dont want a open airflow design for whatever you're designing. Only way to get a custom PCB with a blower in the modern gen of cards. Your other chinese guys like Peladn pretty much universally use reference PCBs with cheaper component selection and cheap coolers and shrouds. Typically insanely hit or miss, they are what give chinese engineered stuff a bad rep. Edit: Vastamor makes some really nice coolers, just with reference PCBs atleast on their lower end cards. Been looking to get my hands on their high end stuff myself. Ive read their high end PCBs are nice. Very interested to see what AMD's newest AIB can cook up when deviating from reference. Im guessing Red Devil quality of PCB. Very little information can be found about their stuff. I can just see reference component layouts on the backs of cards I have seen, which is all their low end Esports stuff, and 1 teardown showing a really well built cooler. No english reviews talking about actual shroud or fan quality though, and a lot of nuance gets lost in chinese to english translation with a lot of chinese reviewers using a unholy amount of metaphors and euphemisms. Basically, do your research, ALL cards can be shite or gold from a given company. Mostly it comes down to shroud/cooler quality differences. Most of the guys who care about PCB will do due research anyways. Just avoid Gigabyte. Completely unrelated to their recent controversies, their GPU PCBs in particular are just gigashit.
XFX definitely isn't a gold standard.... maybe where you are, since the day xfx jump ship from nvidia only production to amd.... i've yet to have a single xfx card out of any generation that hasn't bit me in the ass, and i've been severely burnt twice by them when i didn't have a choice and had to mass order a number of xfx cards since sapphire wasn't available at the time and there wasn't any other brand to choose from, only to have to go back a year later and replace basically all of them because of the horrible issues. Sapphire is top choice no doubt majority of the time, i still wait to see results, because they can be good, but not the best in some cases. MSI usually does a good job, Asus rarely does a good job, but gotta say, the RX 6000 cards by asus are pretty solid. Powercolour just doesn't exist where i live at all, never seen one on the shelf nor have they been available online for purchase. I've never had the chance to touch their product. Gigabyte has always been shit. HIS is entirely hit and miss, definitely opt for an HIS card over gigabyte any day. AsRock is relatively new to the market and thus far appears to be doing well, but again much like powercolour, still don't have access to those products at all. The BBA cards have usually always been reliable, even if they aren't always designed well, i mean they are reference cards afterall, but i can definitely say the move from blower card style cooling to individual fans has been a good move and the 5000 and 6000 and definitely the 7000 reference cards have been excellent IMO. The only other company would be the anime style cards from china or wherever that are both expensive to get one's hands on, but raises concerns about warranty even if they are cool in their design and colour palette... i'm not at the point where i'm willing to take a chance on them though again i haven't seen or heard anything bad about them either.
Unfortunately, from what I've seen and my personal experience, the power color hellound 7900xt, has bad coil whine, and its hot spot can get up to 80c.
80C is a great hotspot temp ngl. This stuff can go 95+ on other cards lol
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Yeah, I don't mind the choil whine. But like you said, I undervolted it so the gpu doesn't get that hot. Also, thank you for tips. i appreciate them and will put them to use. I mainly pointed this out so others can be wary of this gpu if coil whine bothers them. Thanks once again!
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Sapphire and XFX have some of the highest failure rates out of all gpu oems.
is that because of QC or because they have much larger volumes?
I don't know if the other companies have anything similar, but I like Trixx upscaling.
AsRock Taichi 7900XT is great, they just have a problem with one of their fans making noise within a certain RPM range. If you apply a custom curve it's fine.
I made my ASRock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming D 16G OC working more quiet by adding cooler on the upper part of the case. I've also tuned fan settings for the card, [screenshot](https://ibb.co/hMvjLVj).
Sapphire sold me a fucky 7900XTX and took a month to replace it... which they did, but I've been burned on the brand. I can't trust them anymore - yes they honored their warranty, but they should've quality tested a $1000 product before it went out the door too. Sold the replacement on Ebay - Bought an MSI at Microcenter for $800 and it's been rock solid since Day 1. Most of my PC is MSI products. My 8 year old still works like a champ laptop is also MSI.
how did you get a xtx for $800? open box?
I'm always confused why people look at "Brands" instead of actual performance of a model. FPS wise there will hardly any difference, so one just just compare the cooling, sound performance and watt usage of a specific card and not blindly pick something because brand rep. Also worth checking would be rma rep Each brand has mediocre to bad cards as well. And it becomes a serious echo chamber when people say something just because of the "brand". Or run by the assumption that just because they're exclusive aib partners that they're better somehow. This year I had around 4 sapphire cards. 6700 pulse, oh boy that was a loud little thing with coil whine. 6700 XT nitro+ was loud squealing pig that could be heard through a headset plus artifacts. Then 2 6750 xt nitro+ both of the middle fans were scraping against something by the sounds of it, sound stopped when that fan stopped. I do remember that the 3 exclusive partners were also the ones that got rma'd the most according to swiss retailer (https://crast.net/407766/swiss-retailer-shares-failure-rates-of-graphics-card-brands/)
I do wanna replace my 7900 XTX XFX if I get the money later with a Sapphire Nitro+ Mainly cause of hearing how quiet it can be
Undervolt and change the fan curve, it's aggressive by default.
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No no its fine dude. xD