A massive prototype cooler from AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series has surfaced online, sparking speculation that AMD once considered a true RTX 4090-class GPU during the RDNA 3 era. The leak originated from Korean forum Quasarzone, where a user named FP32 shared images of a mysterious shroud purchased from the Chinese marketplace Xianyu. At first glance, it looks like a standard RX 7900 XTX reference cooler, but a second look reveals another story entirely. Thankfully, the user broke down everything, comparing the cooler with an actual, retail RX 7900 XTX.
The prototype measures almost 34 cm in length compared to 29 cm for the RX 7900 XTX, and is nearly 5.5 cm thick, taking up three slots with a triple-fan configuration. It has slightly different cutouts for LEDs as well, but it largely looks the same aesthetically.
The most eye-catching feature is its power design, with space carved out for three 8-pin connectors instead of the two seen on the 7900 XTX. This alone suggests a total board power well beyond 450W, making it more akin to Nvidia’s RTX 4090 in scale and power delivery. The heatsink itself has three painted red fins, indicating “RDNA 3,” and it’s a centimeter longer than the RX 7900 XTX reference edition.
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Once opened up, we see a copper baseplate and a heavy heatpipe array, clearly intended for handling higher thermals and demanding loads. The internal layout of this design is decidedly different than the 7900 XTX, further suggesting it was intended for a beefier config. Keep in mind that there was no PCB inside, so it couldn’t be connected to a PC for further testing. The cooler also lacks any I/O at the back, so we can’t (accurately) guesstimate what model this was going to house.