XFX RX 7800 XT Merc 319 Review

Conclusion

If you’ve had your appetite whetted by the introduction of the new RX 7800 XT GPUs to the AMD Radeon range then you’ll be curious as to which model best suits your investment.

Like any discussion about which model to buy there are some considerations to make. Firstly the partner cards such as the XFX Merc 319 here and the Sapphire Nitro we have also reviewed today have a price tag which is above that of the vanilla cards. Understandably so as it would be impossible to move from a small heatsink and a couple of fans to a setup such as the one we find here on the Merc 319, boasting a super thick backplate that forms part of the whole cooling arrangement. There are three fans, a vapour chamber, 14 thermal pads, 15 phase digital PWM with a DrMOS chip supplying 70A per phase and a meaty factory overclock. By any metric it’s all a graphics card could hope to be, and the price is a bit above the reference card – £479.99 for the AMD, £529.99 for the XFX.

At this segment of the market budgets are always tight, and a fifty quid price jump can put the Merc 319 just out of the reach of those of you with very limited wallets. Only you can make that decision. What we can say is that the XFX card is built like a tank, and has huge cooling potential. Cooling is something that is important in systems built to a price as more affordable cases tend to have smaller airflow than premium ones, so you need the hardware itself to do the heavy lifting and not rely upon the airflow equivalent of a hurricane to keep the temperatures manageable. The XFX handles this with aplomb.

For more mercenary people the sheer performance might be enough to tempt you. Although all of the RX 7800 XT cards perform very well in our test suite, we cannot ignore the fact that the XFX Merc 319 was, more often than not, the most capable performer, spitting out the highest average frame rates of the three. It also scored the highest average GPU Boost clock speed, being 270 MHz faster than the AMD card and 90 MHz faster than the Sapphire. Those numbers and the high average frame rates we saw aren’t a coincidence.

There is no doubt that the XFX RX 7800 XT Merc 319 is the best of the new Radeon offerings. Whether the solid build quality, low temperatures and high performance justify the £50 price hike above the reference card is something only you can decide upon, but for us it’s more than worthy of our OC3D Performance Award.

  

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