Card Layout and Photos
The Merc 319 7800 XT Black shares the same styling that XFX used on the Merc 319 7900 XT Black and on their 6000 Series Merc cards as well. The fan shroud design is extremely simple, it has a flat black finish and the length of the card is flat, without any of the crazy angles and styling that most cards add to look “gamer”. The only styling that XFX has gone with are silver accents around each of the three fans and silver along the ends of the shroud as well. It’s a lot like a tuxedo, it is simple and clean and never goes out of style. They also don’t have any XFX branding on the fan side of the card or the back really with just the one XFX logo up on the top edge. Too many companies these days are trying to pack their logo all over the place. I guess they do also have the XFX printed on the PCB down at the PCIe connection but that isn’t going to be visible at all.
The Merc 319 7800 XT Black is a huge card, there isn’t any getting around that, especially coming from the reference 7800 relatively compact XT by sticking with the old “standard” high-end GPU size. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black on the other hand is a lot like all of the cards from the last two generations. It is 12.83 inches long or 326 mm long. It goes over the standard PCI height by 21 mm with its 4.96 inch or 126 mm tall design and it is 2.28 inches thick or 58mm which is just a hair under a full triple slot width. I’m surprised we don’t see more of the thicker cards like this use a larger triple-slot PCI bracket for additional support. The overall size is close to what we saw on the Merc 319 7900 XT Black, but the 7900 XT was a little thinner and longer by 18mm.
The triple fan configuration has two larger 100 mm fans on both ends and then a smaller 90 mm fan in the center. The 100 mm fans are 96 mm tip-to-tip and the 90 mm fan is 86 mm tip-to-tip, both fans are 15 mm thick as well. All three are 13-blade fans and are axial, blowing down into the heatsink for cooling. The fans also have auto-stop enabled and will turn off below 50c to keep things quiet. I am surprised that the XFX fan design doesn’t integrate the outer ring for strength that almost all of the GPU fans are using these days, this design is more of a traditional design. They are black and for the centers, they have a black and silver accent. Looking down through the fans gives us a look at the vertically arranged heatsink design which uses aluminum heatsink fins. XFX has a unique alternating fin height design that they are using to help pull more air in through the heatsink. I’m told in total the Merc 319 7800 XT Black has 829007 mm ² surface area.
Up on the top edge, both the fan shroud and the backplate wrap around in different areas. The backplate has a lip that has the Radeon branding printed on it. Then down at the end of the card, the fan shroud has the XFX logo which is also backlit in white. Also on the top edge is of course the power connections and like with the reference card the Merc 319 7800 XT Black has two 8-pin PCIe power connections. This means that you don’t have to worry about a 12VHPWR adapter or new ATX 3.0 power supply just yet to power the Merc 319 7800 XT Black. The power plugs are at the end of the PCB, everything beyond that is part of the blow-through heatsink design. Then up towards the front edge on the PCB XFX does have a dual BIOS switch but at least on our sample they only have the one profile programed to both, I’m unsure if they plan on changing that in the future with a quiet profile or one that uses more or less power. But right now you at least have a backup BIOS which should be great for overclockers.
Looking around at the edges of the card we can learn a little more about the cooling setup. The end of the card for example is mostly covered with a large wrap-around flap from the backplate, it doesn’t have the screw holes that most cards have that you can use for extra support however. The top and bottom show that the plastic fan shroud has the same amount of wrap around on both sides but only the top has the backplate wrapped around on it at all. The cooler is designed to push its airflow out the bottom and top of the card and both are mostly open for that. The bottom view also gives us a peak at the vapor chamber design which is made of copper and nickel plated. XFX has a total of 10 thermal pads between the heatsink and the PCB here, in addition to the 4 for the backplate. The heatsink does a great job of being shorter in the areas needed without wasting any space. Down inside of the heatsink, it has 5 6 mm heatpipes that run down on top of the vapor chamber and then across the card. For power circuitry XFX went with 15-phase full digital PWM and they are MP87997C DrMos chips for the Mosfets and MP2856 for the PWM.
The silver trim around the fan shroud matches with the all silver finish that XFX has gone with for the backplate. The backplate on the Merc 319 7800 XT Black is die-cast aluminum and XFX uses the thick design as a heatspreader with thermal pads between it and the back of the PCB. It does run the length of the card and wraps around along the top edge as well as on the end which help give it even more strength. But even without that, the 2.4mm thickness is going to help keep the card from sagging. Down at the end behind the last fan XFX has cut in a D-shaped opening which exposes the heatsink and allows air to blow through. There are also slots cut in just under the power plugs for ventilation as well as above the GPU and near the PCI bracket on the end. The entire backplate has vertical groves in it which give it a little more surface area and style. There is one small sticker with your model and serial number printed on it. Then up near the top for the power plugs and the BIOS switch they have dropped the height down in those areas to give access to them.
For display connections, the Merc 319 7800 XT Black has the same four connections that the reference card had. You get three DisplayPort 2.1 connections and one HDMI 2.1 connection. The HDMI is up at the top near the mounting ears on the PCI bracket, this is a lot better than in the past where the MDI would just be in the middle of the DisplayPorts making it hard to blindly plug things in. While the heatsink isn’t designed to push any air in this direction the PCI bracket does have ventilation slots in it, the XFX logo was also integrated into them. The bracket itself has a tinted metal finish. I do think a black bracket would go well with the Merc 319 7800 XT Black design, but with the black and silver, this matches as well.
Getting the Merc 319 7800 XT Black next to the Radeon RX 7800 XT reference card from AMD really puts the size difference between the two into perspective. The Merc 319 7800 XT Black is a big card in every sense of the word. If you look closely though you can see that they do have a similar PCB length, but XFX takes advantage of that to have the blow-through section for the last fan.
The XFX logo on the top edge of the card is backlit, so I did also get a picture of it lit up. XFX has kept things simple, the logo is backlit white and doesn’t have any RGB lighting. As a whole I’m not a big fan of backlit logos, it can start to make your PC look like Times Square, but I do think that the logo being in white is about as good as you can get. That said I would still prefer some simple styling accents that are backlit rather than the branding.
