An unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPU prototype cooler has been spotted, featuring a massive 3-slot design, but it's too late to expect anything using it.
AMD Could've Indeed Been Working On A RTX 4090 Competitor During Its Radeon RX 7000 GPU Generation, As This Unreleased Cooler Prototype Seems To Point Out
A forum member at Quasarzone managed to get their hands on an unreleased AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPU cooler prototype from an online Chinese marketplace. The user wasn't aware that this was an unreleased cooler until he compared it with his Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. It turned out that this cooler was not only bigger, but also had some interesting aspects to it.
Starting with the thickness, the cooler prototype was much thicker than the reference Radeon RX 7900 XTX, and features a triple-slot design. The LED positioning is also different, but the overall aesthetics are very similar to the look and feel of the retail reference cards.
It even has the three aluminium fins that are covered in red color to designate the "RDNA 3" lineup. In terms of length, the card reaches 33cm vs the 29cm length of the reference 7900 XTX card. There were rumors, listings, and filings of several RX 7950 XTX, and RX 7990 XTX GPUs back in the day so maybe it could've used this cooler.
RX 7900 XTX (Reference) vs RX 7000 (Prototype) Cooler Thickness:
The most interesting change is that the card has enough space cut out in the power connector area for three 8-pin connectors. That's one more than the 2-connector design on the top 7900 XTX graphics card. We did see some 3x8-pin models, but that's about it.
As for the heatsink, the card seems to use a copper-based baseplate with individual surfaces connecting the VRAM and GPU. The GPU baseplate area also looks to be much larger than the 7900 XTX's reference design.
Now, this is all speculation, but AMD itself mentioned that they could've made an RTX 4090 competitor within the RDNA 3 lineup but never went there. Is this one of those prototype coolers that were used in the development process of such a graphics card?
We will never know but the hints are there. AMD did not have a GPU above its Navi 31 die in the RDNA 3 generation but they did state that power and costs were the main reasons they didn't make a 4090 competitor. So either the card was going to use a heavily overclocked Navi 31 GPU which would have run hot and consumed a lot of power, or another GPU was made that never saw the light of day.
RX 7900 XTX (Reference) vs RX 7000 (Prototype) Cooler Design:
GPU cooler prototypes such as this are revealed many years or months after the launch of the actual products. We have seen bigger prototypes for NVIDIA's RTX 4090, Titan, 4090 Ti cards too which never released. This just goes to show that a whole lot of things are made, developed, tested, & evaluated during the pre-launch cycle.
That's also why every GPU spec that you see leaking on the internet has the entire likelihood to be changed before launch, since even GPUs themselves see various revisions before the company selects the right configuration and the right chip that will hit retail shelves.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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