Acer surprised many of us when it decided to enter the discrete graphics card market a few years ago. However, its first offerings were based on Intel GPUs that, with the best will in the world, weren’t the most in-demand options. Since then it’s added the entry-level AMD Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7900 GRE but has otherwise maintained a modest selection. Now, though, the company has really ramped up its offerings, by bringing out Acer Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT cards.
While the RX 7700 XT isn’t our absolute favorite GPU, that’s only because its slightly more powerful sibling the RX 7800 XT is the better choice of these AMD GPUs, and our pick for the best graphics card under $500. With this card in particular, Acer could finally make some major inroads into the discrete graphics card space.
The company has two variants of the RX 7800 XT coming out, along with a single version of the RX 7700 XT. These consist of the Acer Radeon RX 7800 XT BiFrost, the RX 7800 XT Nitro, and the RX 7700 XT Nitro.
The BiFrost version of the 7800 XT has a triple-fan cooling setup that’s much longer than the Nitro’s cooler, with the latter employing just two fans. The BiFrost – a name also attached to several of its previous cards, such as the Intel Arc A770 BiFrost – also has a fetching all-black design with a black bac plate, and blue Predator logo on the top.
Its GPU is the standard AMD Radeon 7800 XT with 3,840 stream processors, but it has a reasonable overclock, with its boost clock hitting 2,560MHz, compared to 2,430MHz for non-overclocked cards. Despite this boost, the huge triple-slot cooler should ensure it’s a very quiet, cool-running card, even under heavy loads.
The Nitro card is likely to be the complete opposite, with its much shorter cooler being not as thick and generally having far less heat capacity. That means the fans will need to run a lot faster to keep the card cool. That’s why it costs $50 less than the BiFrost design, though. So, if you’re not too fussed about heat and noise, it’ll be the cheaper option at $519.99 while the BiFrost costs $569.99. Both are on the higher side of pricing for 7800 XT cards, but both include the decent factory overclock.
As for the 7700 XT Nitro, it uses the same cooler design as the 7800 XT Nitro but, thanks to the 7700 XT GPU being a little less power hungry, the cooler will cope better with the reduced heat output of the card. This card arrives with a much more modest $419.99 MSRP. In terms of raw specs, this card has the standard 3,456 stream processors of the RX 7700 XT and comes with a very slight boost overclock of 2,590MHz, compared to 2,545MHz for non-overclocked cards.
If you’re not convinced by AMD’s GPU offerings right now, though, we recommend checking out the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super. It’s a little more expensive than the 7800 XT but has better ray tracing performance and DLSS support.