If you want to upgrade to the AMD RX 7000 series of graphics cards when they come out, you better get a new power supply if your current one is already barely cutting it.
amd rx 7000 series
The reason is simple: Team Red has already confirmed that compared to their previous-generation RX 6000 series cards, the 7000 series will have a higher power consumption. How much higher, you ask? According to WCCFTech, the company never really gave even a rough percentage - but they did promise a performance-per-watt gain of around 50%.
This was confirmed by senior VP Sam Naffziger in a recent interview with Tom's Hardware. Here's what he had to say about the power draw increase for the AMD RX 7000 series:
It's really the fundamentals of physics that are driving this. The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically - and the improvement rate. So the power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we've got a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset the curve, but the trend is there.
Stripping all the corporate speak and tech jargon out of Naffziger's statement, what he basically meant is that Team Red had to increase the power draw in order to push performance. But at the same time, they also had to consider how much actual performance they can squeeze from the extra watts from the wall.
This then leads to the 50% perf-per-watt improvement over the RX 6000 series, which is quite considerable. But as per the original Tom's Hardware report, this could mean different things. It could mean that the AMD RX 7000 series cards will be 50% faster at the same power draw; have the same performance as RX 6000 but for 33% less power, or anything else.
The RX 7000 graphics cards are poised to directly compete with NVIDIA's upcoming RTX 4000 series, which have also been rumored to draw far more power than last-gen hardware. There's no official release date for RDNA 3, but it's been tipped for late 2022.
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What About The Power Connector?
When NVIDIA launched their RTX 3000 series GPUs, they also revealed a new power connector that required folks to get adapters so they can plug their PSUs in. As such, it could be smart to assume that with the increased power draw of RDNA 3, AMD will do the same.
But according to VideoCardz, it's still not confirmed yet whether the AMD RX 7000 series will have the new PCIe Gen 5.0 16-pin connector. This is a major consideration because if they do confirm usage of the connector, it could mean that the RX 7000 GPUs will consume at most as much power as the RTX 4000 series (the connector allows for up to 600 watts of power draw).
For now, only time will tell what Team Red has up its sleeve for next-gen.
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This article is posted on GameNGuide
Written by RJ Pierce