Famed overclocker Der8auer has pushed PowerColor’s newest flagship AMD graphics card to its limits and shown just how power-hungry the card can get when overclocked in its “Unleashed” mode. Teased and then announced in February, the PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil features a full-cover water block designed by EK combined with a custom PCB from PowerColor. Power delivery is achieved with 3x 8-pin connectors along with a 12+3+2 phase GPU VRM design and a 2+2 phase design for its VRAM.
OC and Unleashed BIOS Settings
The PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil has two BIOS settings, OC and Unleashed. The OC mode has a factory overclock of 2615 MHz and was seen boosting upwards of 2.7 GHz while consuming 355 Watts in the Time Spy benchmark, which is the same board power rating as the reference model. As the name implies, the Unleashed mode allows the RDNA 3-based Navi 31 GPU to really stretch its legs. It is with this setting that the factory clock setting goes to 2680 MHz and the card was seen using 410W with GPU-Z while boosting another 30 to 40 MHz on top of that. Der8auer’s testing also shows how this custom card adheres to AMD’s (Made by AMD/reference) design in that it maintains the same temperature even when using 60W additional power and that a power limit is enforced via BIOS.
Overclocking in Unleashed Mode
In Unleashed mode, the card was able to be overclocked to roughly 2.8 GHz which is 7% higher than the reference model. However, at this point, its appetite for power reaches new levels and was seen consuming 463 Watts with GPU-Z while using the same Time Spy benchmarking tool. Despite this, and observing a considerable amount of coil whine, Der8auer calls this “The best RX 7900XTX you can get“. Currently, the PowerColor RX 7900 XTX Liquid Devil is available overseas for around €1,700 or ~$1811.52. By comparison, the reference model RX 7900 XTX debuted with an MSRP of $999. Brent’s review of that card can be seen here.