ASUS TUF Gaming A16: First Look at AMD’s RX 7600S Graphics

AMD unveiled the RX 7600 series of laptop graphics cards at this year’s CES, but it is now April, and laptops featuring these cards have yet to hit the market. However, their presence should soon grace the marketplace, as ComputerBase has obtained an ASUS TUF Gaming Advantage A16 gaming laptop equipped with the RX 7600S graphics card and has released test results.

The RX 7600S utilizes the RDNA 3 architecture’s Navi 33 GPU, manufactured using TSMC’s 6nm process. In all honesty, its specifications are not particularly impressive, boasting only 28 compute units, 1,792 stream processors, and 128-bit/8GB GDDR6 memory. The GPU also houses 32MB of Infinity Cache and adopts a PCI-E 4.0 x8 interface. As AMD’s mobile “S” suffix graphics cards actually compete with NVIDIA’s Max-Q offerings, their power consumption is somewhat lower than standard versions, with the RX 7600S’s TGP ranging from 50 to 75W. Thus, it is the least powerful RDNA 3 architecture-based graphics card that AMD has released.

The ASUS TUF Gaming A16 itself is equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 7735H processor, with a Ryzen 9 7740HS version to follow, and features DDR5-4800 memory. The RX 7600S graphics card can be set to a peak TGP of 95W, but this value drops to around 83W in ray-tracing games.

ComputerBase compared the RX 7600S to the RTX 4060 laptop GPU. The RTX 4060-equipped laptop’s TGP can be unlocked up to 140W, but the actual tested average TGP was 103W, with a maximum of 107W. The RX 7600S’s average TGP was 83W, with a maximum of 88W. Both GPUs boast incredibly high frequencies, with the RTX 4060 reaching 2,612MHz and the RX 7600S achieving 2,446MHz. In reality, there is little difference in performance below a 70W TGP, but the RTX 4060 gradually pulls ahead at higher power levels.

ComputerBase posits that the RX 7600S’s 8GB of memory is the card’s most significant bottleneck, while the PCI-E 4.0 x8 is less of an issue. They contend that Radeon graphics cards typically require more extensive memory to compete with GeForce cards. Without ray tracing enabled, the 80W RX 7600S trails the RTX 4060 by 13% in performance. However, if texture settings are lowered to avoid memory capacity bottlenecks, this gap is reduced to 6%. Nevertheless, when ray tracing is activated, the RX 7600S simply cannot compete with the RTX 4060.