While AMD has thus far avoided the issues of energy socket overheating and melting plastics plaguing Nvidia’s latest GPUs, its newly launched series of graphics cards featuring AMD processors surprisingly sport the infamous 12VHPWR connector. AsRock introduces a fresh range of Creator graphics cards, built around the latest gaming GPUs and featuring a 16-pin power connector located on the right-hand side.
Two new graphics cards, inspired by the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, occupy the top spot in AMD’s current gaming GPU lineup, despite not being among our usual recommendations for the best options available now. The card’s design boasts an uncommon feature in modern gaming graphics cards: the vintage blower-style cooler.
This style of cooler features a solitary, high-velocity blower fan situated at one end of the graphics card, yet has fallen out of favour among gamers over the past couple of years due to its propensity for producing significant noise levels when the GPU is operating at maximum capacity. While modern gaming graphics cards often feature one to two large fans that can effectively dissipate heat at lower speeds, blower coolers still hold advantages in certain niches.
This is due to their compact design, allowing for the installation of multiple graphics cards next to each other on a single motherboard. These ASRock graphics cards exclusively utilize just two PCIe expansion slots. While you may not require them for gaming, these cards can excel in GPU compute applications where multiple GPUs are necessary for non-gaming purposes.
Meanwhile, the 16-pin 12VHPWR socket rests securely at the edge of the cardboard, precisely positioned atop the primary surface. Since the Nvidia RTX 4090’s launch in 2022, numerous investigations have emerged regarding the occurrence of 12VHPWR socket melting, which has rendered graphics processing units and power supplies inoperable in certain situations.
Until recently, AMD stuck with traditional PCIe power connectors on its Radeon graphics cards, with the company’s senior director of consumer marketing, Saša Marinković, even leveraging this fact as a selling point. Here is the rewritten text: @AMD Radeon: A zoomed-in shot showcases the two eight-pin PCIe power connectors on an AMD graphics card, highlighting its robust power delivery architecture.
The latest ASRock Creator graphics cards have been spotted by Videocardz and are now available on Newegg, priced at $829.99 for the 7900 XT model and $1,069.99 for the more powerful 7900 XTX variant. Each graphics card optimizes its GPU performance at traditional reference specifications, priced higher than standard gaming options. While a competitive price comparison is crucial in today’s market, the ASRock Phantom Gaming Radeon RX 7900 XT card currently retails for $699.99 on Newegg, making it an attractive option for those seeking high-performance graphics capabilities at a reasonable cost.
Eager gamers seeking insights into the performance of these Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can find detailed information in our comprehensive reviews of the Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX, where we subject each model to a rigorous series of gaming benchmark tests?
