Sapphire’s Toned Down Radeon RX 7900 XT Custom Design Drops Vapor Chamber, $70 US Cheaper

Sapphire has released a new variant of its Radeon RX 7900 XT Nitro which gets rid of the vapor chamber but also comes at a lower price.

Sapphire's New Radeon RX 7900 XT Nitro Says Goodbye To Vapor Chamber, Comes At Lower Price

The Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Nitro+ Vapor-X graphics card is one of the best custom-cooled designs for the Navi 31 GPUs. It has great aesthetics & great cooling which is made possible thanks to vapor-chamber cooling and some solid heatsinks that cover the VRMs. This card also costs a lot and has a premium of almost $200 US with the card listed for $1045 US at Amazon ($849 US MSRP for MBA model).

Well, it looks like Sapphire has decided to make some adjustments to a new variant of the card that is labeled as the Radeon RX 7900 XT Nitro OC L. This new variant looks and feels the same as the existing model but there are some huge changes underneath the hood. First up, there is only one RGB LED bar on the sides of the card and the other major difference is the removal of the vapor chamber cooling.

The Vapor Chamber cooler plays a huge role in keeping the card cool and Navi 31 GPUs can get quite hot if they don't get decent cooling. The card still retains its triple-fan and triple-slot design with a similar heatsink assembly that uses aluminum heatsinks on the VRMs but since the card is not using the vapor chamber anymore, it had to be adjusted in terms of clock speeds.

As such, the new Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Nitro OC L variant features a 2450 MHz boost versus a 2560 MHz boost on the Vapor-X variant. The card retains its triple 8-pin connector configuration & also carries the triple-BIOS switch but power limits might have been adjusted slightly. All of these changes mean that Sapphire can tone down the costs significantly. Instead of being priced at 6799 RMB or $970 US, the new card costs 6299 RMB or $900 US.

The new pricing is just $50 US more than the reference pricing of $849 US which is a huge drop compared to the $200 US surcharged being asked for the Vapor-X variant. For Chinese users, the pricing brings the card down to -15% compared to the official Chinese MSRP of 7399 RMB ($1055 US) for the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card.

Written by Hassan Mujtaba