Power supply manufacturer Seasonic has a nifty tool available (in open beta) on its website right now: a wattage calculator, which lets you punch in the specs for your planned PC build and receive suggestions for which PSU is best suited for your components. It’s a helpful tool for anyone building a new PC, but it may have also just leaked fresh information regarding AMD’s upcoming GPU releases.
The tool requires you to select your CPU and GPU from a drop-down menu, the latter of which is now listing three new Radeon graphics cards: the RX 7700 XT, the RX 7800 XT, and the RX 7900 XT. Although we know that AMD is planning to launch new GPUs using the RDNA 3 architecture to compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series, other information is thin on the ground right now.
Plugging these GPUs into Seasonic’s wattage calculator gives us a suggestion of a 650W power supply for the 7700 XT, and a 750W one for the 7800 XT and 7900 XT. These are essentially the same as the power requirements of their RX 6000-series counterparts, and the Seasonic website also recommends power supplies with standard 8+6-pin PCIe connectors, rather than the new 16-pin connectors.
It’s unclear at this point whether these power requirements are legitimate or merely placeholders that Seasonic has implemented, but these figures are entirely reasonable and within our expectations. It also does seem to suggest that the first round of 7000-series Radeon GPUs will feature these three cards, with AMD potentially waiting to release the lower-end GPUs and bypassing non-XT variants altogether.
Analysis: What do these power specs mean for consumers?
If accurate, these leaked power requirements are very good news for the average PC-builder. If the 7000-series Radeon cards are able to offer improved performance over their 6000-series equivalents without a significant rise in TDP, they’ll be very attractive to PC gamers looking to upgrade.
It’ll be very convenient if AMD’s new GPUs continue to use 8+6-pin connectors for power delivery too, since you won’t need to upgrade your PSU to install a new GPU in your system. The new 16-pin connector is only available on select power supplies at this point, and it looks like Intel’s new discrete GPUs will be using the 8+6 configuration too.
Still, such leaks should be taken with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t be overly surprised if the high-end RX 7900 XT does require a 16-pin connector, given that it’ll need to compete with both Intel’s new GPUs and Nvidia’s imminent RTX 4000 cards (which will doubtless include an RTX 4090 flagship). Pricing is also still completely unknown, with some sources speculating that the RX 7900 XT could cost as much as $2,000.
Via NotebookCheck
