AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT Review: Stuck in the Middle

XFX Radeon RX 7700 XT QICK 319

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As noted already, there's no AMD reference RX 7700 XT. We received the XFX RX 7700 XT QICK 319 for this review, which should be fairly representative of what we'll see from baseline 7700 XT models.

One thing that immediately stands out is the size of the XFX card, especially as we've been testing the reference RX 7800 XT at the same time. It's very large for a "mainstream" card, probably larger than it needs to be. But if you're not using a compact case, what else are you going to do with all that space?

XFX goes the standard route with packaging as well, which means lots of empty space in the box. That should keep the card safe during shipping, but we definitely think the toned-down AMD and Nvidia packaging on reference models should be more commonly used by the AIB partners.

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The XFX RX 7700 XT measures 339x129x50 mm, almost into RTX 4080/4090 as far as dimensions go. Even so, the card isn't particularly heavy, weighing just 1111g — 4g more than the 7800 XT reference card, if you're keeping score. Basically, XFX is using a lot of volume and triple fans to provide more than sufficient cooling, which means the card should generally run cool and quiet — and it does.

XFX has three fans, with two 94mm fans on the outside, and an 84mm fan in the center. The fans don't have integrated rims, which tends to be a higher quality design, but they're large enough and the card's 245W TBP (total board power) is low enough that it shouldn't matter too much.

Like the RX 7800 XT, the 7700 XT comes with dual 8-pin power connectors. That's not strictly necessary as an 8-pin plus 6-pin combination, combined with the PCIe slot, should be able to provide up to 300W of power. Still, 8-pin connectors are pretty ubiquitous now, and it's safer to not inadvertently end up with a card that pulls too much power from the x16 slot.

We mentioned the relative size of the card, and this shot hopefully puts things into better perspective. The 7800 XT reference card looks almost tiny by comparison, though we anticipate there will be plenty of compact 7700 XT designs from other vendors.

There's no RGB lighting or other bling on the XFX cards, so this is as barebones as it gets. The only real extra is a switch near the IO bracket that selects quiet or performance mode. In terms of IO, you get the standard single HDMI 2.1 port and triple DisplayPort outputs.

XFX RX 7700 XT Overclocking 

This is going to be a short section, as our overclocking attempts with the XFX card basically ended in frustration. We normally start by maxing out the power limit and then attempt to dial in stable core and memory overclocks. We repeatedly ended up with a green screen and a crashed GPU after even minor changes.

It goes further than that. AMD's Radeon Settings feature auto-overclocking options for tuning the memory and GPU clocks, or you can go full manual. These are usually pretty conservative, but even clicking the auto-overclock RAM and GPU options resulted in problems.

Given we couldn't even dial in a 50 MHz core or GDDR6 overclock without issues, we decided to call it quits and move on. Whether it's our particular sample card, or something with RX 7700 XT in general, we can't say. But overclocking of RDNA 3 cards in general hasn't been all that great in our experience.

AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT Test Setup

We updated our GPU test PC at the end of last year with a Core i9-13900K, though we continue to also test reference GPUs on our 2022 system that includes a Core i9-12900K for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. (We'll be updating that with the 7800/7700 XT numbers shortly.) For this review, we use the 13900K results for gaming tests, which ensures, as much as possible, that we're not CPU limited. We also use the 2022 PC for AI tests and professional workloads.

We're using AMD's preview drivers (basically 23.8.2 but with support for the Navi 32 GPUs) for this review. Most of the results from other cards are from the past few months, and we've retested a few specific games where there were apparent anomalies in performance. We also retested Minecraft on every GPU over the past few weeks, as we found forcing vsync off in the game's Options.txt file improved performance by 10% or more on most GPUs (with Intel Arc being the biggest beneficiary).

We're including current generation and previous generation AMD hardware in our charts, with GPUs nominally priced between about $600 and $300. The same price bracket applies to the Nvidia and Intel GPUs, though we're not including RTX 30-series parts here. (If you want to see RTX 30-series results, check our GPU benchmarks or the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB review.)

Our current test suite consists of 15 games. Of these, nine support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), but we only enable the DXR features in six games. The remaining nine games are tested in pure rasterization mode. While many of the games in our test suite support upscaling — twelve support DLSS 2, five support DLSS 3, and five support FSR 2 — due to time constraints we've skipped upscaling tests here. (Keep in mind that we have both the 7700 XT and 7800 XT launching today, so there were more tests to run over the past week or so than usual.)

As with the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB review, we're also including a few additional games with limited testing: F1 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, and The Last of Us: Part 1. Just for kicks, we're also showing Starfield performance, even though Nvidia performance appears seriously poor right now. These extra games are not factored into the overall performance ranking but are more for those who want to see some newer titles.

We tested the RX 7700 XT at 1080p (medium and ultra), 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra — ultra being the highest supported preset if there is one, and in some cases maxing out all the other settings for good measure (except for MSAA or super sampling). We'll only have limited commentary on the 4K results, as the RX 7700 XT doesn't do too well at that resolution. It primarily targets 1440p gaming, according to AMD, or even 1080p.

Our PC is hooked up to a Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 32, one of the best gaming monitors around, allowing us to fully experience some of the higher frame rates that might be available. G-Sync and FreeSync were enabled, as appropriate. As you can imagine, getting anywhere close to the 240 Hz limit of the monitor proved difficult, as we don't have any esports games in our test suite.

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We installed all the then-latest Windows 11 updates when we assembled the new test PC. We're running Windows 11 22H2, but we've used InControl to lock our test PC to that major release for the foreseeable future (though critical security updates still get installed monthly).

Our new test PC includes Nvidia's PCAT v2 (Power Capture and Analysis Tool) hardware, which means we can grab real power use, GPU clocks, and more during all of our gaming benchmarks. We'll cover those results on our page on power use.

Finally, because GPUs aren't purely for gaming these days, we've run some professional application tests, and we also ran some Stable Diffusion benchmarks to see how AI workloads scale on the various GPUs.

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