Hrm! Picked up reference 7900xt open box last night instead of the 7900xtx Red Devil I went in for—edit— returned it for a xtx

JNavy89GT

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Took the 2 hour one way trip to Microcenter. I wanted the 7900xtx Red Devil @$1079, but when I went to go get it, there was an open box Asrock 7900xt reference card for $809. I figured at that price point the 7900xt starts to make some sense. I’d give it a go.

Messing with it last night I was able to get my highest timespy score with an under volt to 950mv and oc core to 2850 and ram to 2725. I was just pulling voltage, bumping core or ram and re running until crash. Not totally sure if it’s stable. I’m just having fun for now. Big jump in score from the 6800xt I had in there before . 16k to 22k.

I want to try some VR I’m DCS flight sim, and figure the 7900xt will be good enough until next gen hits. Sure I wanted the extra performance of the XTX, but my frugal side had me back off to the XT as I’m getting older and over $1k seems ludicrous for graphics card to me lol. Mental hurdle anyway to spend that much. I have 30 days to see if I want to keep it. If the XTX drops in price I may have to take a trip back to exchange it. But so far I’m impressed with the reference card. Seems to run fairly cool. It’s way smaller than the 6800xt I had on there(Asrock Phantom gaming oc).
 
An overclocked xt for a few hundred less sounds like a fine choice. Honestly I find any decent GPU is sufficiant to play everything I want at a decent res. Nice when ya can get out the door for less then 1k, especially because I'm sure you will be tempted by a next gen card eventually ;)
 
An overclocked xt for a few hundred less sounds like a fine choice. Honestly I find any decent GPU is sufficiant to play everything I want at a decent res. Nice when ya can get out the door for less then 1k, especially because I'm sure you will be tempted by a next gen card eventually ;)
Yep, kinda how I figured it.

Tweaking more at 960mv, 3000mhz in AMD tuning suite(peaks at 2830 and runs between 2700-2800 in 3dmark, per their graph, if that's accurate) and ram at 2740. Tuned the fan curve too, to be more aggressive. Still seems quiet enough.
 
I don't care if you have a 4090 Ti there will be compromises taken to eek out the highest FPS you can get. I have taken compromise to the extreme. I refused to upgrade my 2080 TI to 3000 series until recently when the prices dropped for them and I bought used 3090. I am non worse for the ware. I went from 100 Gsynced FPS to 144 in my favorite game with a little more eye candy. which to be honest I see little difference between the two. Bottom line you made a wise decision.
 
Re: DCS VR setup. I haven’t tried vr yet. Reason I’m upgrading
 
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Ok just checking as I have the same card and it performs very well in VR but getting it up and running was quite tricky so if needed I can offer some guidance to get past the pitfalls I encountered. Took 4 days of trial and error to get it working well.
 
Ok just checking as I have the same card and it performs very well in VR but getting it up and running was quite tricky so if needed I can offer some guidance to get past the pitfalls I encountered. Took 4 days of trial and error to get it working well.
I was thinking of getting the pimax 5k super for now and maybe upgrading to the 12k depending on how launch goes. This will be my first vr rig so I’m kind of unsure. I want something with a really good fov
 
Your card would do well with the 5K super. I'm considering the 8KX but am under powered for it. That one you really need a 4090 to make it sing for ya and I just can't take that much from the budget.
 
DCS in VR on a 7900 XTX was rather underwhelming for a $1,000 card; lots of reprojection, frame times were generally too high. (The vapor chamber problem didn't help, but you won't have to worry about that with an XT.)

It took an RTX 4080 (traded my 7900 XTX for it) to consistently maintain 80-90 FPS, albeit mostly free flights without the AI slugging it out. Even then, there are occasional dips.

That said, it's not really fair to compare a $809 GPU to a $1,200+ one now, is it?

I'm hoping that AMD closes the substantial gap in VR later through driver updates, and that Eagle Dynamics finally gets that long-awaited EDGE update with its promised performance improvements out the door. (Vulkan, actually useful multi-threading, possibly FSR once they're done adding DLSS 2.0 - lots of new stuff forthcoming.)
 
Haven't tried DCS as it's not really my cup of tea but Il2 and msfs 2020 performance is pretty good and I'm certain a few driver updates down the road things will get better as they did with the 6900XT. Many are having VR issues with 7900 series cards and the hurdles are not easy to get over at the moment but not insurmountable. I spent quite a bit of time getting VR performance issues sorted and running smoothly via all the usual methods. Disabling onboard graphics on my 7700X was pivotal to getting the expected performance from the GPU. Even though it was not in use it caused something in the driver to cripple the GPU performance and bring the FPS to slide show levels. Really hoping the drivers will be better optimized by the time 7800X3D chips are released as this was really the intent with the board/chipset move from X570. The 5800 X3D chips are already proven to provide a considerable boost to VR flight sims and the 7800X3D TDP according to my testing of the 7700X is exactly where it should be to provide the performance required to push much steadier frame rates required to not hurt immersion in VR.
 
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Yeah, I think for vr in flight sims; short of a RTX4090 is a compromise of sorts. That’s why I’m kind of looking at the Pimax 5k vs 8k.

I’ve been building my own computers since the mid 90s. I’ve never really felt a compelling reason to get VR up until this point. Mainly, for VR to be useful to me, it would need to do the VR flight sim stuff, well at decent resolutions, and refresh rate. Up until this point, I never really felt like it was up to the task. Now, it’s probably barely there for my comfort level, but I feel like it would be a good time to start dipping my toes into the pond.
 
So I ended up returning that reference card. Nothing wrong with it. But micro center had an Asrock Phantom gaming 7900xtx oc for $80 more open box. So for that little if difference I pulled the trigger. It’s a really nice card. I’m a sucker for the lights lol. Benches better. Oc and undervolts a bit better. But it’s huge. Reference is nice in a way as it’s not ginormous. But I’m happy. Either way, they are both great cards imo. But at full retail I don’t think they are good values. Open box prices I paid; I feel is where retail prices should be. But again, I’m happy now!
 
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