Power supply manufacturer Seasonic has a nifty tool available (in open beta) on their website right now: a power calculator, which allows you to enter specifications for your PC’s planned build and receive suggestions on which PSU is best suited for your components. It’s a useful tool for anyone building a new PC, but it may also have leaked new information about AMD’s upcoming GPU releases.
The tool requires you to select your CPU and GPU from a drop-down menu, the latter of which now lists three new Radeon graphics cards: the RX 7700 XT, the RX 7800 XT, and the RX 7900 XT. While we know that AMD is planning to release new GPUs using the RDNA 3 architecture to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, other information is scarce at the moment.
Plugging these GPUs into Seasonic’s power calculator gives us a suggestion of a 650W power supply for the 7700 XT and a 750W power supply for the 7800 XT and 7900 XT. These are essentially the same as the power requirements of their RX 6000-series counterparts, and the Seasonic website also recommends power supplies with standard 8+6-pin PCIe connectors rather than the new 16-pin connectors.
It is unclear at this point whether these power requirements are legitimate or merely substitutes that Seasonic has implemented, but these numbers are entirely reasonable and within our expectations. It also seems to suggest that the first round of Radeon 7000-series GPUs will feature these three cards, with AMD potentially waiting to release the low-end GPUs and completely ignoring the non-XT variants.
Analysis: What do these power specifications mean for consumers?
If accurate, these leaked power requirements are very good news for the average PC builder. If Radeon 7000 series cards can deliver improved performance over their 6000 series counterparts without a significant increase in TDP, they will be very attractive to PC gamers looking to upgrade.
It will be very convenient if new AMD GPUs continue to use 8+6 pin connectors for power supply too, as you won’t need to upgrade your PSU to install a new GPU in your system. The new 16-pin connector is only available on selected power supplies at this time, and it seems Intel’s new discrete GPUs will also use the 8+6 configuration.
Still, these leaks should be taken with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t be too surprised if the high-end RX 7900 XT requires a 16-pin connector, as it will need to compete with Intel’s newest GPUs and Nvidia’s looming RTX 4000 cards (which will no doubt include a flagship RTX 4090) . Pricing is also still completely unknown, with some sources speculating that the RX 7900 XT could cost up to $2,000.
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