Custom Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU Reaches 3.5 GHz with Blender

There’s a structured review of AMD RDNA3 and NVIDIA Ada Lovelace-based architecture frequency analysis. This technology allows both architectures to easily boost up to 3 GHz, but such clocks are not all that common.

When the RDNA3 and Ada GPUs were tested in 3D rendering Blender benchmark, the clock speed was reported to be higher on the custom Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU, offering an average of 3455 MHz.

These clocks can go as high as 3548 MHz, but the overall performance of the cards is not stable.

This frequency required 374W power, with an upper limit of 500W. Hence, the GPU was not power throttled, since the card is actually a custom design with a modified vapor chamber for cooling.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU TDP is 13% higher than the AMD reference model, but it does consume 21% more power. Its GPU clock is also 24% higher than the last-gen RX 6900 XT, which operated at 1825 MHz.

While playing video games, the frequency drops quite a lot. The average clock of the reference AMD RX 7900 XTX GPU is 2554 MHz, while the optimized Sapphire Nitro card can go up to 2832 MHz on average. This is the limit of the custom Navi 31 graphics card in games, but it can reach 3155 MHz in some tests.

AMD has promoted the RDNA3 architecture as the first to exceed the 3 GHz limit. This claim is mostly true, except it does not always stand true in games.

Navi 31 is just one of the three planned GPUs. Smaller RDNA GPUs tend to be faster when considering clock speeds, so it is highly possible that custom models based on Navi 33/32 will cross an average 3.0 GHz easily in games.

About Advanced Micro Devices

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company headquartered in Santa Clara, California.

AMD develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. AMD’s main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations, personal computers and embedded system applications.