We're big fans of the Radeon RX 7800 XT over here at PC Gamer. It's a smarter, cheaper, slightly more powerful RX 6800 XT, dropping the cost for that level of gaming performance down to a more palatable price point. Win, win, and win. And you can grab an overclocked version of this fine GPU for just £480 at CCL today thanks to our shiny promo code.
That's under the original MSRP for the stock-clocked RX 7800 XT and you're getting one that's tuned to be faster out of the box, too. Honestly, it's not going to be a huge amount quicker in terms of raw frame rates compared with the standard card—it's a boost clock of 2,475 MHz versus 2,430 MHz after all—but when you're paying less than the price of most stock versions I'll take a faster GPU every time.
In terms of its competition, the RX 7800 XT goes head-to-head with the RTX 4070, a card which it can either perform at the same level as or beat in pure rasterised gaming terms. Throw ray tracing into the mix, however, and the performance weighting is a lot heavier on the side of the Nvidia card. But it's worth noting that you're still going to be paying a good deal more for the privilege, even after the post-Super price cut.
The cheapest RTX 4070 I've found today is £510 at Amazon, which really isn't a bad price at all considering where it started life. But how much is ray tracing performance worth to you? That's the question you're going to have to ask yourself. And whoever pays the bills.
Because another string to the AMD card's bow is the fact that it comes with 16GB of GDDR6 running at 19.5 Gbps, and all across a 256-bit bus. This is something where Nvidia's GPUs still fall behind even when you factor in their beefed-up L2 cache levels. The RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Super both still sport 12GB GDDR6X, and it's a tough call as to how long that's going to be enough for 1440p gaming. Arguably, that's still plenty of memory, but there is a certain gamble to it.
This isn't the cheapest RX 7800 XT you can buy today, however, that prize goes to the Sapphire Pulse RX 7800 XT at Ebuyer where it's £470. That is a stock-clocked GPU, with a lower boost clock, and only a tenner cheaper. But every little helps, and Sapphire makes bloody good cards, too, so we wouldn't argue against picking up the Pulse, either.
