Gigabyte RX 7800 XT Gaming OC Review

The Gigabyte RX 7800 XT Gaming OC ships in a black box, with a futuristic-looking image of some sort of cyber soldier on the front. On the back, the company highlights a few key features of the card and the Windforce cooler.

Inside, the only included accessory is a small quick-start guide.

As for the card itself, the design will be instantly familiar if you've seen any of our other Gigabyte Gaming OC reviews this GPU generation. The shroud is almost entirely black, with just a couple of grey accents, while it features some circuit board-style traces and other design elements to add some visual interest.

It's obviously sporting a triple-fan setup as well, part of Gigabyte's Windforce cooling solution. Each fan measures 90mm in diameter, while the central fan spins in reverse, a common feature designed to reduce airflow turbulence.

In terms of the dimensions, the Gaming OC measures 302x 130 x 56 mm, so it's fairly long and almost a triple-slot thickness, though it's not quite as large as the RTX 4090 Gaming OC… It weighed in at 1327g on my scales.

The front side of the card is home to a glossy plastic section, with the Gigabyte logo housed within it acting as the only RGB zone on the card. This uses a rainbow-style effect out of the box but can be configured using Gigabyte Control Center software.

Flipping over to the backplate, this is a full-length design that is made of a grey metal. We can see the Gigabyte logo printed in white, while there is a very small cut-out right at the end of the card to allow some air to pass straight out of the heatsink – but as this is so small, I'm not sure it will do a whole lot for cooling.

A BIOS switch is located to the left of the two power inputs. This offers a choice of the OC or Silent modes – both offer identical power and clock speed targets, the only difference is the fan curve.

We can also note two 8-pin power connectors as expected, though for display outputs we have 2x DisplayPort 2.1 and 2x HDMI 2.1, so that's an extra HDMI port (and one less DisplayPort) than the typical configuration.

Opening up the card to take a look at the PCB, it looks like Gigabyte is using a fairly ‘vanilla' reference PCB here, certainly in terms of the VRM. We find an 11+3 layout – specifically, according to Gigabyte, ‘GPU 8+2+1 (VDD GFX /SOC/ USR)；MEM 2+1 (MEMORY /VDDCI).' 70A Monolithic Power Systems MP87997 MOSFETs are used throughout, with a trio of Monolithic MP2856 controllers as well.

For the cooler, Gigabyte has deployed two aluminium finstacks, connected by a total of 7x 6mm copper heatpipes. The GPU and memory make contact with a copper baseplate, while there are some smaller secondary baseplates used to cool the VRM.

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