Feed: AnandTech
Feed Link: https://www.anandtech.com
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Title: ASRock Launches Passively Cooled Radeon RX 7900 XTX & XT Cards for
Servers

Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2024 16:00:00 EDT
Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21491/asrock-l...

As sales of GPU-based AI accelerators remain as strong as ever, the immense
demand for these cards has led to some server builders going off the beaten
path in order to get the hardware they want at a lower price. While both
NVIDIA and AMD offer official card configurations for servers, the
correspondingly high price of these cards makes them a significant financial
outlay that some customers either can't afford, or don't want to pay.

Instead, these groups have been turning to buying up consumer graphics cards,
which although they come with additional limitations, are also a fraction of
the cost of a "proper" server card. And this week, ASRock has removed another
one of those limitations for would-be AMD Radeon users, with the introduction
of a set of compact, passively-cooled Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT video
cards that are designed to go in servers.

Without any doubts, ASRock's AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Passive 24GB and AMD
Radeon RX 7900 XT Passive 20GB AIBs are indeed graphics cards with four
display outputs and based on the Navi 31 graphics processor (with 6144 and
5376 stream processors, respectively), so they can output graphics and work
both with games and professional applications. And with TGPs of 355W and 315W
respectively, these cards aren't underclocked in any way compared to
traditional desktop cards. However, unlike a typical desktop card, the cooler
on these cards is a dual-slot heatsink without any kind of fan attached,
which is meant to be used with high-airflow forced-air cooling.

All-told, ASRock's passive cooler is pretty capable, as well; it's not just a
simple aluminum heatsink. Beneath the fins, ASRock has gone with a vapor
chamber and multiple heat pipes to distribute heat to the rest of the sink.
Even with forced-air cooling in racked servers, the heatsink itself still
needs to be efficient to keep a 300W+ card cool with only a dual-slot cooler -
 and especially so when upwards of four of these cards are installed side-by-
side with each other. To make the boards even more server friendly, these
cards are equipped with a 12V-2x6 power connector, a first for the Radeon RX
7900 series, simplifying installation by reducing cable clutter.

Driving the demand for these cards in particular is their memory
configuration. With 24GB for the 7900 XTX and 20GB for the 7900 XT is half as
much (or less) memory than can be found on AMD and NVIDIA's high-end
professional and server cards, AMD is the only vendor offering consumer cards
with this much memory for less than $1000. So for a memory-intensive AI
inference cluster built on a low budget, the cheapest 24GB card available
starts looking like a tantalizing option.

Otherwise, ASRock's Radeon RX 7900 Passive cards distinguish themselves from
AMD's formal professional and server cards by what they're not capable of
doing: namely, remote professional graphics or other applications that need
things like GPU partitioning. These parts look to be aimed at one application
only, artificial intelligence, and are meant to process huge amounts of data.
For this purpose, their passive coolers will do the job and the lack of
ProViz or VDI-oriented drives ensure that AMD will leave these lucrative
markets for itself.

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