Conclusion
The XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air gaming graphics card is an amazing video card, let’s just start right there. It truly offers something new and unique in the industry, bringing something new to the table in video card design, function, aesthetics, and support. XFX is launching its new lineup of Magnetic Air video cards, with the ability to easily attach and detach fans magnetically.
In this lineup is the flagship AMD Radeon GPU-based card, the XFX Mercury AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air which will retail for $949.99 in North America under XFX’s MERC series of graphics cards. In addition, other Magnetic Air models consisting of the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, and Radeon RX 7800 XT (with two different color schemes) will also be offered.
The XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is XFX’s top-end SKU, and just offers absolutely the best performance and features you can get out of an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. The XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is a factory overclocked video card offering a Game Clock of 2455MHz and a Boost Clock up to 2615MHz. It utilizes 3x 8-pin PCIe power connectors for maximum power delivery and also has a dual-BIOS with a switch.
The main attraction is of course XFX’s 3x Magnetic Air Fan’s. These fans are easily detachable and re-attachable to allow for easy fan replacements if they fail. XFX is committed to replacing fans free of charge with no RMA required for the video card. You can simply be shipped the fans, and just pull off the old one and replace it with a new one. Magnetic Air is also a huge aid in keeping your fans and heatsink clean, by allowing easy access.
Performance
When it came to overclocked performance, the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air saw an average of 6% performance advantage from overclocking. This generally pushed it up to 10% faster than the made-by-AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in performance at 4K. This overclock also helped propel it well over the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER FE in performance. If 4K isn’t your cup of tea, BTW, we did do a bit of 1440p gaming on our own with it and quite simply the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air dominates 1440p performance. At 1440p Ray Tracing in the really tough games, is doable now without upscaling needed.
Overclocking, Power, and Temp
Let’s talk a bit about overclocking because this is where we felt the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air really had a lot of potential. Frankly put, the overclock we achieved is the highest we’ve achieved on any Radeon RX 7900 XTX to date in both core frequency and memory overclock, as well as power increase.
We were actually quite shocked at first how high the power draw was able to hit on this video card peaking at 454W. The highest power draw we’ve seen up to now on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX was 400W, so this exceeded that by 50W and just simply allowed the highest sustainable clock frequency and memory frequency while gaming.
We did a little test, just to see if we could push the core frequency alone even further, so leaving the memory clock speed alone we overclocked the GPU clock speed only in the graph. You can see in this graph that we managed to push it even more on GPU frequency alone with an average clock speed of: 2824MHz average, which is just amazing for a Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU. The board power with GPU Core only overclocked was 449W.
The impressive thing was the fact that the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air also runs so cool at default frequencies, and overclocked. The cooling technology on the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air really is impressive and keeps the GPU much cooler than a reference video card Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The fans were also quiet, and there were no signs or sounds of vibration. We saw the Voltage increase to 1.028V with the core only overclocked, and with fan speeds at 44% temps were 61c GPU and 81c Hot Spot, just really good temperatures for such power draw and Voltage on the RX 7900 XTX.
Final Points
No video card has impressed us this year so far in innovation as much as the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air has. Truly, the XFX Magnetic Air technology is a real innovation and a win for hardware enthusiasts.
The XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air supports three removable fans with magnetic technology that make replacing or cleaning them easy. The installation and removal is a two-second process, with a “snap-on” like motif. XFX’s commitment to the replacement of fans without the need to RMA your entire video card is impressive. Just ship some new fans, and pop them on yourself. We imagine a future where one would be able to buy different styles of fans, or color schemes, maybe in the next version? It’s an interesting idea.
As it stands, the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air is offering something new in the market, and XFX is making Magnetic Air available on Radeon RX 7900 GRE and Radeon RX 7800 XT video cards in their lineup as well. It is nice that you can get this on AMD’s flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX for performance, and also the more affordable Radeon RX 7900 GRE and Radeon RX 7800 XT cards. In our performance testing, the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air performed very well in 4K gaming and was competitive at a competitive price for what it offers.
With the XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air you get a highly factory overclocked video card that runs very cool and quiet and has the power headroom for enthusiast overclocking. Throw in the XFX Magnetic Fan and it’s a very appealing package overall. If you are in the market for a showstopper video card, check out the new XFX AMD Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XTX Magnetic Air.
Discussion (5 replies)
Join Discussion →Compared to the RX 7900 XTX versions we have already reviewed (AMD RX 7900 XTX and MSI RX 7900 XTX Gaming TRIO Classic) the overclocking and gameplay are nearly identical across the board. Given the time passed and driver improvements I would bet there is little difference. At present, the XFX model reviewed is just a few frames better in most games and could be attributed to a higher power limit setting. The XFX Merc models are exceptionally well made and have excellent cooling, there is no doubt about that. The fit and finish of a Merc is equal to the MSI SUPRIM or the ASUS ROG Strix models.
To me the fan is a gimmick to ressurect a model of video card that is just not selling. Realistically, when was the last time a fan went DOA in any of your video cards? Most of us are going to sell them off and upgrade well before the fans go out. The real advantage or draw to this would be swapping the fan out for aesthetic in a vertical orientation, but there are no alternatives. Cleaning? A little compressed air even with the fan in place is no problem.
Just playing the Devil's advocate here. I'm not sure this video card should get a "10" . Maybe for design and cooling, but if I had $1000 to spend on a video card I'd have to look hard at what this card can do with Ray Tracing compared to the competition.
The last time I owned MSI or Gigabyte GPUs. It's why I don't buy models from them anymore.
LoL, I own almost exclusively MSI gpus and have not had any problems. My only gpu issues ever were both with EVGA products......one fan and one memory issue.
I'm sure I just got unlucky with the ones I owned. I think I had around 5 or 6 of them over the last decade and all of them had fan failures. Gigabyte was about 50/50 in the half a dozen or so I owned around the same time. Mostly AMD cards for MSI, but Gigabyte was Nvidia cards. Most of the Gigabyte boards during that time failed on me as well so I don't buy them anymore either.
Only blemish in my mind on MSI is them changing warranty terms after the sale on some folks that were doing crypto mining with them. Changing the warranty after sale should be illegal.