Review AMD Radeon RX 7600 Review: Incremental Upgrades

[Avro Arrow]

I would not bet on such things without knowing personal needs...

I want a PC that will most likely be usable for up to another 10 years, I'm also throwing out my 10+ year old 1080p monitor, 1440p for 2023 sounds about right, also bigger...one cheap 2k/120+ and 27 inch+ that fits in my IKEA PC table goes for 300€ alone. I already had 55 inch 4k TV for watching TV shows and movies so pairing it with Series X did not require any extra cost so with PC you have to factor in price of new monitor. 4k/60 monitor goes for 320€ here (to match my console experience), 2k/120+ has similar price which is fine by me. I want to atleast match console parameters because they influence new games when it comes to HW requirements so I want at least 8 big core CPU (around 350-360€ for 13600kf or 7700 non-x), I consider 6 core to be outdated in few years. I am not going below 32gbs of RAM and I want DDR5 (120€). If you want some steady 60+FPS in 1440p atleast for 3-4 years (even that's a long time) then you have to go for GPUs like xx70ti or xx80, basically 700-800€ or more. M.2 SSD 4.0 with r/w above 5000 would be nice for my needs, full 5.0 PCIe on mobo preferable (that's 250€ for one AMD mobo, but honestly some 80€ price difference in cheap Vs full PCIe 5.0 mobo is not a big deal for me). I already have keyboard and mouse, case, fans and some older storage drives so even without it you are in 1500€ price range without any problems. I am well aware of possible cheap builds within 1000€ but those would not last beyond 5 years and I am not interested in 1080p builds for 1000€, that's what I paid for such system 10 years ago (inflation factored in).

You're absolutely correct. I had no idea that you are looking for a PC that will last another ten years. I just thought that you wanted a decent gaming setup. For a PC to last ten years is extremely rare and that's why I'm so impressed with the FX-8350 that I bought 11 years ago (that is being used in an HTPC). A PC's status as a gaming PC might last for 10 years if you have a near-unlimited budget but it not a very efficient way to buy tech.

I'll give you an example as to why. Let's say you had $2000 to spend on a video card back when the RTX 30-series was en vogue and let's just imagine that you had a stroke of luck and could get the RTX 3090 Ti for its MSRP of $2000. You bought it, in hopes that it would last for ten years (and to be fair, it probably could).

Now let's look at it another way... What if, back then, you only spent half of your $2000 budget? Going by MSRPs here, you could've purchased an RX 6900 XT instead of the RTX 3090 Ti. Now, I'm not going to say that they're the same because they're not but they're not as different as people think because while the RTX 3090 Ti was indeed faster than the RX 6900 XT, it was only by 23%.

So, let's say that you bought the RX 6900 XT for $1000 instead and now you have that RX 6900 XT and $1000 in your bank account. That $1000 today would get you an RX 7900 XTX, a card that is 19% faster than the RTX 3090 Ti.

If you spent the entire $2000 at once, you'd have an RTX 3090 Ti today but if you spent the $2000 in halves, you'd have an RX 6900 XT and an RX 7900 XTX today.

I think that the latter way of doing things is FAR smarter than the former. Please note that the fact that one path is GeForce and the other is Radeon is irrelevant. I just used those because the MSRP of the RTX 3090 Ti was $2000 and the MSRPs of the RX 6900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are both $1000 which just makes it quick and simple to demonstrate the concept. That concept is the fact that not spending everything at once but only spending what you need to over time is far more beneficial.

The amount of added benefit that you would receive by choosing what gives you the most performance for your money in the performance class you want instead of some "I want my PC to last ten years" pie-in-the-sky expectation pays HUGE dividends. When someone says to me "I want a PC that will last ten years, what do I need?" I just say "Good Luck" because no PC is guaranteed to last for ten years.

 

[cat1092]

I know this is old thread, yet this price for what NVIDIA should had considered for the RTX 4xxx series, DisplayPort 2.1 (3xfaster than DP 1.4) is included in this ultra low priced card. Not the best of the spec, but that bandwidth has to be awesome & outperform some spec that all of the NVIDIA RTX 4xxx produced.

Since EVGA dropped the GPU business, AMD's pulling ahead & will only get ahead due to such. While NVIDIA is the board that the aftermarket brands have to go by, EVGA has always kicked things up a notch, like the cooling or whatever. Have always been an EVGA fanboy, but since they're no longer here, will go AMD next time. At least I won't have to pay $1,599 for a GPU missing a top spec & other AMD cards which has these are $500-700 less in price. Not going to be held hostage to price, knowing I'll have to buy a monitor and likely build a whole PC too, minus the case.

Cat

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I know this is old thread, yet this price for what NVIDIA should had considered for the RTX 4xxx series, DisplayPort 2.1 (3xfaster than DP 1.4) is included in this ultra low priced card. Not the best of the spec, but that bandwidth has to be awesome & outperform some spec that all of the NVIDIA RTX 4xxx produced.

Since EVGA dropped the GPU business, AMD's pulling ahead & will only get ahead due to such. While NVIDIA is the board that the aftermarket brands have to go by, EVGA has always kicked things up a notch, like the cooling or whatever. Have always been an EVGA fanboy, but since they're no longer here, will go AMD next time. At least I won't have to pay $1,599 for a GPU missing a top spec & other AMD cards which has these are $500-700 less in price. Not going to be held hostage to price, knowing I'll have to buy a monitor and likely build a whole PC too, minus the case.

Cat

If you're going to try to proclaim AMD the winner based on video outputs, at least get the specs right.

DP1.4a is a max data rate of 25.92 Gbps (32.4 Gbps with 8b/10b encoding).
DP2.1 is a max data rate of 77.37 Gbps (80.00 Gbps with 128b/132b encoding), for the UHBR20 version.
AMD supports UHBR13.5, though, so it's a max data rate of 52.36 Gbps (again, 54 Gbps with 128b/132b encoding).

That means the max bandwidth is actually only double what Nvidia delivers, if you look at DisplayPort. However, HDMI 2.1 has a max data rate of 42 Gbps (48 Gbps with 16b/18b encoding). And since you could actually do multiple HDMI 2.1 ports on Nvidia, you're really talking about a 25% advantage in video bandwidth. Even then, as I've noted repeatedly in reviews, you'd need a monitor with native DP2.1 support (UHBR13.5 minimum), and really at least 4K and 240Hz to make it matter.

Note that such monitors have been announced at CES 2023, but I'm not sure any have actually started shipping. There is the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQXR... which features UHBR10 (40 Gbps) support. Yup, you read that right: One of the only DP2.1 monitors actually doesn't even support more bandwidth than HDMI 2.1 can provide.

However, DSC (Display Stream Compression) means DP1.4a can do 4K and 240Hz, and having used it for the past year, I can safely attest to the fact that it really is "visually lossless." (Any loss in fidelity due to compression ends up getting covered by the high refresh rate, so a new frame comes along so quickly that your eyes don't register any compression artifacts... not to mention, for a lot of content, DSC can actually be truly lossless.)

I'm not saying AMD's support of DP2.1 doesn't matter, but it's really and truly not that important to 99.9% of users (who don't have DP2.1 monitors and likely aren't planning on buying one in the near future). There are far, far more HDMI 2.1 capable displays (including TVs) than there are DP2.1 options. And because all HDMI 2.1 connections are 48 Gbps rated (42 Gbps data), rather than the optional UHBR10/13.5/20 stuff in DisplayPort, there's not much point yet in having DP2.1 UHBR20 outputs. (AMD does support that on one port for their Radeon Pro W7900, incidentally.)

 

[InvalidError]

I'm not saying AMD's support of DP2.1 doesn't matter, but it's really and truly not that important to 99.9% of users (who don't have DP2.1 monitors and likely aren't planning on buying one in the near future).

For the bandwidth to matter, you'd also need GPUs capable of putting out those 160+ 4k FPS and that won't be happening in the budget segment any time soon either. There isn't any meaningful benefit to having a GPU with video outputs that exceed the highest rendered pixel rate the GPU could ever realistically produce by over 2X, especially with adaptive sync in the mix allowing timely delivery of whatever the GPU can output instead of adhering to a fixed refresh rate.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

For the bandwidth to matter, you'd also need GPUs capable of putting out those 160+ 4k FPS and that won't be happening in the budget segment any time soon either. There isn't any meaningful benefit to having a GPU with video outputs that exceed the highest rendered pixel rate the GPU could ever realistically produce by over 2X, especially with adaptive sync in the mix allowing timely delivery of whatever the GPU can output instead of adhering to a fixed refresh rate.

Technically you can do higher refresh rates outside of games as well... but the benefits of going above 240Hz for 4K content are highly questionable. 🙃 "Look how awesome it is to move windows around on my desktop at 4K and 480Hz! It's sooooo smooth!"