It's of course, cheaper to build your own PC if you can source the parts for a good price and have the knowledge and confidence to assemble it on your own. But for those that want to remove any self-assembly hassle and buy or gift a pre-built system, then this deal on the Skytech Azure Gaming PC with RTX 4070 Ti for $1,649 might be of interest. See below for a full list of components in this speedy gaming PC. 

Another bargain is the ASRock Radeon RX 6600 GPU sees it now on offer for $174 at Newegg. This is a good GPU for some 1080p gaming and building a small gaming rig on a tight budget. With AMD partnering with Bethesda for their Starfield game you can grab a free copy of Starfield: Standard Edition with selected AMD cards taking part in the promotional campaign - saving you $60 if this a game you're looking forward to and were thinking of purchasing. 

And to round out our deals, here is one of the best price-for-performance GPUs available. Pick up the ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT for $309 at Newegg. Don't forget to use code VGAEXCAA799 when you checkout. This is the lowest price available for an RX 6700 XT GPU currently on the market.

See below for more of today's deals. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Skytech Azure Gaming PC (RTX 4070 Ti): now $1,649 at Newegg (was $2,099)
• ASRock Radeon RX 6600: now $174 at Newegg (was $239)
• ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT: now $309 at Newegg with promo code (was $239)
• Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti: now $419 at Newegg (was $479)
• PlayStation 5 Console: now $499 at Newegg (was $559)

Today’s best deals in detail

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Newegg has launched what it's calling its Bonanza Sale event, sort of the opposite of the much detested Newegg Shuffle of last year. After putting expensive GPUs behind a lottery system, often requiring people to buy bundles with other likely unwanted items, the Bonanza sale looks like Newegg is trying to clear out excess inventory of GPUs — and doing so as quickly as possible in the wake of continuing GPU price cuts. The sale is said to be a "spontaneous" shopping event, and the focus of the sale is in providing "significant discounts" on GPUs, motherboards, and monitors.

There are in fact some pretty hot deals, like the almost top-of-the-range AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT at $720 after $100 rebate card and $180 instant promo code discounts. Picking through the sale items, there are also what we consider to be good deals on a Radeon RX 6700 XT at $450, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at $480, and an RTX 3060 at $380.

The particular Radeon RX 6900 XT on offer is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC, pictured up top. Newegg must be getting a good deal on these from Gigabyte, as it was on sale last month at a "great for its time" $949, then later $899. Needless to say, the new deal at $720 is a significant and welcome cut, especially when you consider the MSRP of a reference design card is $999. Just please remember to claim the $100 rebate, and apply the VGAGBET249 code for an additional $180 off, to get to that magic $720 price.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT delivers performance about 6% lower than the RX 6950 XT, and also about 6% faster than the RX 6800 XT. The Gigabyte Gaming OC looks like a decent pick, with its triple fan Windforce 3X cooler, metal backplate, RGB Fusion 2.0 lighting, dual-BIOS, and a modest factory overclock.

Next up in our picks is a close quarters battle between the Gigabyte Eagle OC GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at $480 (reference MSRP $400) and the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC at $450 (reference MSRP $480). Again, you need to input a special discount code to get the prices we are quoting. The codes are written just above the Newegg 'eggs' rating for each model.

Those cards are at similar prices, and your choice will likely come down to your general feelings and experience in AMD vs Nvidia graphics cards. For example, the RX 6700 XT is generally faster at traditional 3D rasterization, beating the RTX 3060 Ti by 6% at 1080p ultra and 3% at 1440p ultra. However, DLSS can more than make up the difference (typically it gives 15–25% more performance in its highest "Quality" mode), and in our ray tracing test suite the RX 6700 XT was around 30% slower than the RTX 3060 Ti (without DLSS).

Still, the AMD RX 6700 XT has more VRAM, and a higher grade cooling solution from Gigabyte. The Windforce 3 should be quieter and cooler under duress compared to the more budget oriented Eagle model with twin fans. They both still offer a splash or RGB lighting though.

Our last pick from the Bonanza Sale might be a little bit controversial as it is still selling for a sizable percentage above Nvidia's $330 MSRP, and it's not a very high-end model. Still, Nvidia's mainstream GPUs are still sticking above MSRP, and this MSI RTX 3060 for $380 might still be the best budget choice as we run up to the end of June 2022.

The MSI Ventus uses Twin Torx fans with Zero Frozr technology from MSI. It's not very large at just 235mm in length, so it can fit in more compact builds. Its plastic backplate shows it is built to a budget, but it still affords handling protection when installing the card. If you don't like the MSI card, there's also an EVGA RTX 3060 XC Gaming for $375.

If none of the above graphics cards grabbed your interest, it is worth a browse around the Bonanza Sale event, as there are other decent deals and some other models from both AMD and Nvidia. Don't forget to nose through the motherboards and monitors on offer too, if you are pondering over upgrades.

Newegg hasn't mentioned an ending date for its Bonanza Sale, so it might depend on stocks. If you have your eye on any GPUs there, don't forget to cross reference our GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy 2022 so you can have a good idea of the performance you can expect.

Along with the Radeon RX 6950 XT, AMD recently launched two other new GPUs: the Radeon RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT. Like the 6950 XT, both come with faster 18Gbps GDDR6 memory, plus higher GPU clocks and slightly higher power consumption. However, prices are also slightly higher than the 6x00 XT models they replace, making the overall prospects a wash at best. You can see how the newcomers rank in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, where they're just slightly ahead of the existing models.

AMD didn't provide samples of its new cards, so we turned to the AIB (add-in board) partners for review units. Asus sent us its ROG Strix 6750 XT, which looks identical to the ROG Strix 6700 XT other than that little "5" on the sticker. We actually have a Strix 6700 XT in hand as well, so we'll get to see exactly how much more performance you get from the two factory overclocked variants. Note that most of the other cards we've reviewed, including Nvidia's RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3070, run reference clocks, so you can add a few percent in performance if you're after like-for-like comparisons.

Here's the breakdown of the specs for the AMD Navi 22 GPUs along with Nvidia's competing 3070 and 3070 Ti.

Asus bumps the GPU clock up by 43MHz relative to the reference 6750 XT, which, in turn, has a 19MHz "improvement" over the reference RX 6700 XT. Of course, the higher TBP (typical board power) on the new model means it may end up boosting a bit higher in practice, but we'll get to that later. At least on paper, the main change is the switch to 18Gbps GDDR6. That's 12.5% more bandwidth in theory, but we don't know if other aspects of the memory like subtimings may reduce the real-world gains.

There's good news in terms of the general availability of graphics cards. As we've noted recently, many GPUs can now be found in stock for prices close to the MSRP. Above, we've listed the best street prices we've been able to find for the various GPUs. That presents some difficulties for the Asus ROG Strix, a premium card that commands much higher prices. At the time of writing, the least expensive RX 6750 XT we could find costs $240 less than the Asus model, and you can shave off another $55 by opting for an RX 6700 XT.

It feels very much as though AMD and its partners came up with a pricing structure based on how much GPUs were selling for several months ago. In the meantime, cryptocurrency (and stock) prices plummeted, which now means the new products cost too much. Short of changes in supply or demand, we expect prices to continue to decline, and the 6750 XT really shouldn't cost much more than the 6700 XT, which has us wondering why it even exists.

We know AMD is hard at work on its upcoming RDNA 3 architecture, and Nvidia is likewise working on its Ada architecture. We expect to see the first cards using those to arrive before the end of the year, perhaps as early as July for the RTX 40-series. Doing a relatively minor refresh with higher official prices less than six months before the next-gen cards arrive strikes us as odd. Perhaps the supply chain has finally started catching up with backorders, but there's a real chance AMD and Nvidia could end up with a glut of "old" GPUs on their hands in the coming months, much like what happened with the RX 570 back in 2018. 

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The Asus Radeon RX 6750 XT ROG Strix looks the same as many other ROG Strix cards that we've seen. That's not a bad thing, as you get plenty of RGB lighting effects, triple fans, and ample cooling. The card measures 322x141x57 mm and weighs 1569g, which is pretty chunky for a nominally 250W graphics card — for example, the Sapphire RX 6950 XT we looked at last week only weighed a few grams more at 1582g, though it was a wider 3.5-slot design. The Asus occupies 2.9 slots, though, so it's still plenty wide.

The three fans all have an integrated rim, which helps to improve static pressure and cooling. Asus also has the middle fan spinning in the opposite direction of the two outer fans, which it says helps reduce turbulence. It's tough to say how much that really matters, but the Strix card was generally quiet, with the fans stopping completely when GPU temperatures were below 50C.

The top of the card has a large illuminated RGB lighting strip, which also shines down on the fan. The fans don't have their own RGB LEDs, not that it really matters since they typically end up facing the bottom of your PC case. The traditional black/gray/silver color scheme that we've seen on so many other cards is here as well, with the Strix logo on the backplate of the card. There are two 8-pin PEG power connectors on the top, and a small cutout near the back of the card to allow air to flow through the heatsink fins.

The Asus RX 6750 XT includes the standard three DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1 outputs. The IO bracket is only two slots wide, with half of it allowing ventilation of sorts. However, those heatsink fins are oriented parallel to the IO backplate, meaning most of the heat from the card will exhaust out the top and bottom and into your case. 

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Our GPU test PC and gaming suite was updated in early 2022. We're now using a Core i9-12900K processor, MSI Pro Z690-A DDR4 WiFi motherboard, and DDR4-3600 memory (with XMP enabled). We also upgraded to Windows 11 to ensure we get the most out of Alder Lake. You can see the rest of the hardware in the boxout.

Our gaming tests consist of a "standard" suite of eight games without ray tracing enabled (even if the game supports it), and a separate "ray tracing" suite of six games that all use multiple RT effects. We tested at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K for this review with "ultra" settings for the standard suite — basically maxed out settings, except without SSAA if that's an option. Our ray tracing suite consists of six games, and we tested at 1080p in "medium" and "ultra" settings, as well as 1440p at "ultra" settings — with the latter generally being too much for the RX 6750 XT.

We used AMD's public 22.5.1 drivers for these tests, and we also ran benchmarks on an Asus RX 6700 XT ROG Strix for comparison. (Note that AMD released 22.5.2 drivers that incorporate some additional performance improvements, particularly for DX11 games. We'll be retesting performance for our GPU benchmarks hierarchy in the near future with those drivers.) Let's get to the results, starting with 1080p.

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We'll start with our 1440p testing results, representing the ideal target for many gamers in terms of balancing resolution and performance. The RX 6750 XT also does great at 1440p, at least in our standard benchmarks, averaging over 80 fps across the test suite, with Total War: Warhammer 3 being the only game that can't average 60 fps or more — and it's a strategy game that's not quite as dependent on maintaining extremely high framerates.

Compared to the RX 6700 XT, the Asus 6750 XT delivered 6% higher performance pretty consistently across the test suite, ranging from a 5.6% to 8.3% improvement. That's nice, but we also need to factor in the overclocked nature of the Asus Strix card. If we compare the two Asus Strix models, the 6750 XT is still 5% faster overall, which is interesting to see. Basically, the RX 6700 XT Strix card was barely faster than the reference design in our testing, despite the substantially improved cooling.

Looking at some of the other GPUs, the 6750 XT basically tied the RTX 3070 (1.7% slower) while being 9% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti. Keep in mind, at current prices, the 6750 XT costs about as much as the 3060 Ti and $50 less than the RTX 3070. It's also $75 more than the cheapest 6700 XT, though, which still tends to deliver the best overall value.

Going through the individual games and focusing on the 3070 and 6750, AMD came out ahead in half the games (Borderlands 3, Far Cry 6, Forza Horizon 5, and Horizon Zero Dawn), with the 3070 delivering better performance in the other four games, with particularly large 18–20% leads in Flight Simulator and Total War: Warhammer 3.

As usual, ray tracing vastly favored Nvidia's competing GPUs, with the RX 6750 XT barely coming out ahead of the RTX 3060. Meanwhile, the RTX 3070 was 33% faster without enabling DLSS, and the 3060 Ti was 24% faster overall. But 1440p with ray tracing wasn't really a good experience on any of those GPUs, at least without some form of resolution upscaling.

The RX 6750 averaged just 23 fps across our six DXR games, and only Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition managed to break the 30 fps mark, with Control coming in just below that mark. By comparison, the RTX 3070 averaged 34 fps across the suite, but half of the games were still below 60 fps. Again, DLSS would help Nvidia quite a bit, and we'd love to see FSR 2.0 in more games as it generally provided a comparable experience. Unfortunately, FSR 2.0 at present is only available in a single game, Deathloop, with more to come in the future.

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1080p performance was about 33% faster than 1440p performance, and all of the games are now comfortably breaking 60 fps. This time, the RX 6750 XT came out 3% ahead of the RTX 3070, as the 96MB Infinity Cache has a higher hit rate at lower resolutions. The 6750 also remained about 6% faster than the RX 6700 XT, or 5% faster than the "apples-to-apples" Asus 6700 card.

Flipping through the charts, the AMD 6750 continued to lead in half of the games relative to the RTX 3070, but on Warhammer 3 showed more than a minor advantage for the Nvidia GPU. Flight Simulator incidentally ended up CPU limited on many of the graphics cards, with the 6750 landing just below the Nvidia CPU bottleneck of 84 fps — the fastest Nvidia GPUs we've tested managed around 87 fps, while AMD's fastest GPUs top out at around 83 fps.

All of our testing was completed last week, but AMD has since released an updated driver that might change the standings slightly. Other sites have reported about a 4% average increase in performance for the new "DX11 enhanced" driver, though Watch Dogs Legion — one of our test games — has seen double digit percentage gains. Note also that none of the games we tested are pushing more than 144 fps at 1080p ultra, so unless you're planning to run at minimum settings in order to boost frame rates for an esports game, there's little need for anything faster than a 144Hz monitor.

We tested in both "medium" and "ultra" settings for our ray tracing DXR suite at 1080p. Without resolution upscaling, 1080p ultra was still a marginal experience, averaging 36 fps across the six games, with Cyberpunk 2077 and Fortnite still falling below 30 fps. Control and Metro were the only games to feel mostly smooth, with 47–48 fps on average and minimums that stayed about 30 fps.

Nvidia's competing RTX 3070 delivered 47% higher fps in DXR, and the 3060 Ti was 29% faster overall. The RX 6750 was also 7% faster than the 6700 XT, slightly more than in our non-DXR gaming suite.

1080p medium with medium DXR effects still failed to get above 60 fps in all of the games, breaking that mark in two games (Control and Metro again). While that's not great, at least the worst-performing of the DXR games was now above the 30 fps barrier. We do run more demanding settings for DXR than are perhaps necessary, but we figure anyone thinking about ray tracing would prefer more eye candy rather than less. Otherwise, they could just turn off ray tracing altogether and get substantially improved performance.

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Ray tracing is obviously out of the question at 4K, so we're only looking at standard gaming performance. With 45 fps across our test suite, the 6750 XT delivered playable results, with Warhammer 3 being the only game to come up well short of the 30 fps mark. Forza Horizon 5 also nearly averaged 60 fps, but 4K doesn't do AMD's Infinity Cache any favors, and nearly every game now ran equal to or faster than the 6750 XT on Nvidia's competing RTX 3070. There's not much to add, with performance mostly mirroring what we saw at 1440p, just with much lower framerates.

If you're serious about taking on 4K gaming, you can use RSR — Radeon Super Resolution — to apply a universal upscaling algorithm to all games. It's comparable to NIS (Nvidia Image Sharpening), and while it generally doesn't look as good as native, upscaling 1440p to 4K delivers a far better experience on these high-end GPUs than trying to do 4K native. RSR is also relatively lightweight, meaning upscaling 1440p to 4K only ends up being a few percent slower than running 1440p, and some may find the resulting output to be more pleasing than native 1440p (especially on a 4K display).

FSR or DLSS still result in better upscaling quality in general, just because those require game integration and can render the HUD and text at native resolution and only apply upscaling to areas of the game where a few artifacts won't be as noticeable. But FSR and DLSS require work on the part of the game developers, whereas RSR and NIS are a cheap and "free" solutions for virtually all games.

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We use Powenetics testing hardware and software for our power, temperature, clock speed, and fan speed testing. We capture in-line GPU power consumption by collecting data while looping Metro Exodus at 1440p ultra as well as while running the FurMark stress test at 1600x900. Our power testing PC uses an open testbed, as that's required for all the extra wires and riser card, and it's the same old Core i9-9900K that we've used for the past several years.

We tested the Asus card in the three modes defined by Asus' GPU Tweak software: Gaming (default), OC, and Silent, with the latter two providing a 10% increase or decrease in power limits, along with a 20MHz increase/decrease in GPU clocks.

Interestingly, something is… off… with the GPU Tweak profiles. We actually confirmed this in some gaming tests, but the OC mode ended up using quite a bit less power than the default mode and also decreased performance by 1–2%. That's not supposed to happen, so something else apparently came into play, but this is actually good news. It means that anyone using the Asus RX 6750 XT will get optimal out-of-box performance without having to install any extra software.

One of the changes AMD made with the 6750 XT compared to the existing 6700 XT was a 20W increase in the power limit, but Asus pushed the limit even further. The 6750 reference design has a 250W power limit, compared to 230W on the reference 6700 XT. The Asus Strix card came in at 263W in our gaming test and hit 283W in FurMark. By comparison, the reference 6700 XT actually came in below the rated TBP at around 215W.

OC mode dropped the Asus card to 228W in Metro and 276W in FurMark, so it made a much bigger difference in gaming. The silent mode provided a bigger power decrease in FurMark, and actually got gaming power use below the RX 6700 XT. Of course, with the lower power limit, performance in Silent mode would be closer to the old 6700 XT, and the difference in noise levels was hardly noticeable (see below).

Clock speeds on the Asus 6750 XT were clustered pretty close together, regardless of which power mode was used. Even in Silent mode, the Asus card still averaged just over 2.6GHz, and it only dropped by around 40MHz in FurMark. On the other hand, the Gaming mode only improved average clocks by about 80MHz in gaming, or just 20MHz in FurMark.

Compared to the reference RX 6700 XT, the overclocked Asus 6750 XT provided about 160MHz higher GPU clocks, a 6.5% improvement that tracks pretty much directly with the increased frame rates that we measured. The GDDR6 memory meanwhile provided a theoretical 12.5% boost to bandwidth, but we didn't see any instances where performance increased by more than 10%. It's possible memory subtimings are also worse with the higher clocked memory, which could limit the potential gains.

Cooling performance for the Asus Strix 6750 XT was great, with the GPU not going above 60C regardless of the performance profile or workload we threw at it. That's by design, as it's clear from the fan speed charts that the card spins up the fans to keep temperatures in check. For example, silent mode topped out at around 1250 rpm while gaming, whereas the default Gaming mode allowed the fans to reach up to 1600 rpm. However, despite the relatively large jump in fan speed, the actual noise levels were pretty consistent.

We measured noise levels at 10cm using an SPL (sound pressure level) meter. The SPL was aimed right at the middle GPU fan in order to minimize the impact of other fans like those on the CPU cooler and the noise floor of our test environment and equipment measures <33 dB(A).

Using the default settings, the fans reached a maximum of approximately 47% fan speed and generated 44.1 dB(A) of noise. We say "approximately" because the three fans on the Asus card don't need to spin at the same rate, but if all three spin at 47%, we got the same 44 dB we measured while gaming. Silent mode drops the average fan speed down to 42%, with noise levels of 40.0 dB(A), while the OC mode — which, as already noted, didn't seem to be working correctly — ran the fans at 43% and 41.3 dB. We also measured with a static fan speed of 75%, which generated 57.9 dB of noise.

Incidentally, we didn't include all the Asus RX 6700 XT figures in the power charts, but that card was slightly louder than the Asus 6750 XT, hitting 46.5 dB(A) while gaming with a 50% average fan speed. It appears that model may have been tuned for slightly lower temperatures at the cost of increased fan speed and noise.

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AMD's RX 6000-series refresh in May 2022 still strikes us as a bit odd, and for cards like the RX 6750 XT, it feels largely unnecessary. At least the RX 6950 XT makes a bit of sense, going for halo glory and competing against the RTX 3090 Ti. There's no new Nvidia competitor for the RX 6750 XT, however, so it basically competes with AMD's existing RX 6700 XT as well as the RTX 3070. That's not a bad thing, as the 6700 XT continues to be one of the best overall values for GPUs, except the RX 6750 XT basically makes things worse: It costs 15% more while only improving performance by around 6%.

Two months ago, finding a graphics card with RX 6700 XT / RTX 3070 levels of performance for $550 would have seemed pretty great, but GPU prices have plummeted as the cryptoapocalypse continues. Even in our traditional gaming suite, the RTX 3070 trades blows with the RX 6750 XT. Add in ray tracing and DLSS, and it's not too difficult to justify paying a bit more money for the extra features and performance Nvidia offers. Or, more likely, with rumors that Nvidia Ada may arrive in just a couple of months, enthusiasts will wait to see what comes next rather than buying a higher cost, warmed-over GPU that debuted over a year ago in March 2021.

AMD does have a new Raise the Game Bundle going on, which applies to all RX 6000-series graphics cards. We haven't seen much in the way of bundles since 2020, as every GPU sold out immediately, often at massively inflated prices. Plus, well, large-scale GPU miners don't care about gaming bundles. The new bundle choices currently include the 2022 Saints Row reboot, slated to arrive in September, or Sniper Elite 5, which comes out May 26. There will be other games added over the coming months as well, in case those games aren't on your list.

The real issue with the RX 6750 XT, in general, is that AMD has tried to increase the pricing on its GPU stack without offering a lot of extra value. The RX 6700 XT was already "overpriced" relative to where it should have landed, were it not for the GPU shortages of the past 18 months or more. Using Nvidia's MSRPs as a baseline, the RX 6700 XT should be taking on the RTX 3060 Ti, a $400 part. Granted, it hasn't ever really sold at that price in meaningful quantities, but GPU pricing now has it at around $550, and we could actually see it selling at $450 within another month or two. Given the features and performance, that's really where we'd prefer to see the RX 6750 XT as well — it should have a lower MSRP than the RTX 3070, since that GPU has DLSS and Tensor cores that provide extra functionality.

The Asus ROG Strix RX 6750 XT delivers a good level of performance, and it targets the sweet spot of 1440p gaming. The design of the card is great; we have no concerns with that. However, Asus takes AMD's already questionable price and then tacks on an extra $100, giving it a final recommended price of $650, and retail prices are even higher right now. You can find other RX 6750 XT cards for $550, though they'll likely leave out the RGB bling and more advanced cooling that Asus offers with its Strix line. How much is the extra cooling and RGB lighting worth, though? We'd say $50, $100 at most, meaning we can really only recommend the Strix 6750 XT if you can find it for closer to $600. Asus makes a good card, but there are better values right now, and we really hope availability will improve and that the price will drop to compete with the rest of the market — a market that's still in freefall from its unsustainable peak prices.

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Pick up a PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Red Devil for $499 at MicroCenter — that's so close to MSRP for this triple-fan variant. This is a great mid-tier graphics card for gaming. Check our review of the Radeon RX 6700 XT for more information.

If you're looking for a budget gaming laptop then the Asus TUF Gaming 17.3-inch laptop for $699 at Best Buy may be a good choice for you. With an RTX 3050 Ti, this laptop should be able to play the latest games on a medium to high setting. 

Need a new PSU? The EVGA 750 GA Super Nova for only $74 at Amazon is a good price for a 750W power supply.

Check out more deals below. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Red Devil GPU: was $699, now $499 at MicroCenter
• Asus TUF Gaming 17.3 Gaming Laptop: was $999, now $699 at Best Buy
• EVGA 750 GA Super Nova PSU: was $139, now $74 at Amazon
• MSI Spatium M450 M.2 PCIe Gen 4.0 1TB SSD: was $109, now $84 at Newegg
• Monoprice Dark Matter 32in QHD IPS Gaming Display: was $274, now $249 at Amazon

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An AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT has been spotted in the GFXBench online results database by Twitter-based tech treasure hunter Komachi. We dug around and found a worthy comparison, pitting the unreleased Radeon RX 6750 XT against the widely known and well reviewed RX 6700 XT.

Before we go on, it's worth mentioning that GFXBench tends to be relatively useless as a tool for weighing up and comparing PC graphics hardware. It's more of a mobile GPU benchmark, as evidenced by its cross-platform compatibility, and doesn't scale well with the highest end PC graphics cards. Also, so far there's only one test done of the RX 6750 XT, the Aztec Ruins High Tier test. And of course, this is an early test run using potentially early hardware and drivers, so the RX 6750 XT result isn't likely to be representative.

With the above provisos laid out, this is still an interesting benchmark result, as it is the first we have seen from the purported AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT. That indicates the GPU will likely rear its head in the not-too-distant future (probably early May).

The result we see in the Aztec Ruins High offscreen test is that the revamped graphics card is just 1% faster than its predecessor. As we said, GFXBench, and in particular the older Aztec Ruins test, doesn't tend to scale well with faster PC GPUs. Given that the only rumored change is the transition from 12GB of GDDR6 memory at 16Gbps to faster 18Gbps memory, we wouldn't expect Aztec Ruins to be particularly useful.

If you are perturbed by the Aztec Ruins High "onscreen" results being worse on the new sample, please don't be. The onscreen test uses the Windows desktop resolution, which may have been 4K on the RX 6750 XT system and only 1080p on the RX 6700 XT test. The whole point of GFXBench offscreen test is to assess the rendering power of the GPU without worrying about the display resolution.

The AMD RDNA 2 refreshed graphics card lineup hasn't officially launched yet, so grains of salt are still in order. The last bit of news we had about them came from some absurdly expensive retail listings. A French retailer has listed pricing for custom Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT, Radeon RX 6750 XT, and Radeon RX 6650 XT models.

A few days earlier we had evidence of PowerColor preparing a Red Devil Radeon RX 6750 XT. In theory, the faster memory on this revamped RX 6700 XT should provide 12.5% greater memory bandwidth, but only thorough benchmarking with actual games will tell the full story of how performance has changed.

MSI has launched its first all-AMD gaming desktop. The new MSI MAG Meta 5 SE combines the red-team charms of an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU and a Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. These rub shoulders with the best processors and best graphics cards available at this time. Additionally, purchasers can spec up to 64GB of RAM, pick from various storage options, and choose air or liquid cooling. MSI is claiming this full-AMD tower will be a "budget-friendly choice."

One of the appealing aspects of choosing an 'all-AMD' system is that it will enable AMD Smart Access Memory Technology. According to AMD's own tests, this enhanced CPU-GPU communication feature can improve gaming performance by up to 15%. However, in the real world, its effect varies. We wrote about this technology in some depth back in Fall 2020. Since then, the competition, namely Nvidia and Intel, has figured out how to implement the analogous Resizable BAR technology support, so AMD SAM isn't an exclusive attraction.

While on the subject of performance enhancement technologies, MSI's press release about the MAG Meta 5 SE gaming desktop includes a segment about AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution (FSR). Using an AMD-supplied slide espousing the benefits of FSR, MSI points out that modern AAA games with raytracing can run approx 20% faster in 4K, with hardly any perceptible difference in quality (FSR Ultra Quality). However, this isn't that much of an AMD attraction, as FSR is GPU-agnostic, and it just needs support in the game engine.

Above are the full tech specs according to MSI, but they seem to miss out on any standard storage configuration choices and don't mention specific cooling options either. At the time of writing, the MAG Meta 5 SE AMD 5000 Series product pages aren't published, so we can't look up that detail. No other tech specs seem out of the ordinary or worthy of special comment.

A View From the Outside

The inner tech specs are undoubtedly capable and agreeable if the price is right, and as a sizable desktop tower with standard motherboard and supporting components, it should be as easy to upgrade as a DIY PC. However, some will find the design a little old fashioned or ugly.

MSI describes the MAG Meta 5 SE as offering "minimalist style," but the red badge on the front, alongside dual RGB LED Mystic Light backed glowing fissures, and the chrome-head bolted windows to the left are all quite fussy design features. Moreover, the top-down view isn't minimalist by any stretch of the imagination, with its multiple angular undulations and venting patterns behind the front/top I/O section.

As mentioned above, MSI doesn't have the product pages ready at this time, and we don't have the pricing to hand to judge whether the "budget-friendly choice," claim is valid.

Our favorite NVMe SSD, the Samsung 980 PRO (2TB) is on sale at Newegg for only $249 — its lowest price ever. This massive 2TB drive is Gen 4, has incredible read/write performance, and is a must-have piece of hardware for any high-end gaming rig. 

Continuing the incredible deals this Tuesday, we found an amazing price on a Radeon RX 6700 XT with XFX's Speedster SWFT309 on sale for only $599 at Best Buy — that's as close to the MSRP as we've ever seen it. Also popping up on the Real Deals radar is Intel's Core i9-12900K for only $579 at Newegg. This is also the lowest the 12th Gen flagship CPU has ever been.

More fantastic deals are below so scroll down and have a look!

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Samsung 980 Pro PCIe Gen 4 2TB: was $312, now $249 at Newegg
• XFX Speedster SWFT309 AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT: was $979, now $599 at Best Buy
• Intel Core i9-12900K: was $618, now $579 at Newegg with code EMCBQA424
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4.0 1TB: was $180, now $131 at Amazon
• HyperX Cloud Alpha S Gaming Headset: was $129, now $67 at Amazon

Today’s best deals in detail

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Today's Real Deals won't settle the Intel vs AMD CPU war, but they do give you impressive savings on the Intel Core i7-12700KF and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. It's common to see processor deals pop up just after CES, but even we weren't expecting the offers to be this good!

Other big retail news today includes AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT stock, over $70 off ASRock's Z590 Extreme motherboard and more

TL;DR — Today’s best deals

• Intel Core i7-12700KF: was $409, now $379 at Newegg with code BEUBNAA46
• AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT: $829 at Amazon (in stock)
• Gigabyte G27FC: was $249.99, now $199.99 at Newegg with code 93XSH74
• Ryzen 9 5900X: was $549, now $534 at Newegg with code BEUBNAA44
• ASRock Z590 Extreme: was $247, now $169 at Newegg
• MSI GP66 Leopard gaming laptop (RTX 3080): was $2,599, now $1,849 at Newegg

Today’s best deals in detail

Looking for more deals?

• Best deals on tech & PC hardware
• Best gaming laptop deals
• Best monitor deals
• Best PC and laptop deals
• Best SSD deals
• Best CPU deals
• Best Dell and Alienware deals
• Best 3D printer deals
• Best Raspberry Pi deals

Seven months after its release, AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT has finally made it into the Steam Hardware Survey with a 0.16% market share. That puts it right next to the RTX 3050 Ti (laptop GPU) and RX 5700. This is a new milestone for AMD since it's the first time one of its RX 6000 series GPUs has made it to the main Steam video cards survey page, reaching the required 0.15% to be on the charts.

It's good to finally see an RDNA2 architecture card finally reach a new level of popularity on the Steam survey, despite the lengthy time it has taken for the 6700 XT, one of AMD's best graphics cards, to get into people's hands. It's no secret that AMD has struggled to produce the RX 6000 series cards in any meaningful numbers, to the point that Nvidia was outselling AMD's RDNA2 cards by a factor of 11 to 1.

As for other RX 6000 series cards, the RX 6600 XT may show up a bit quicker, given its lower pricing and apparently higher availability, but the Navi 21 GPUs (RX 6800 and above) will take some time to reach the main charts. AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT is the second most popular RDNA2 card according to Steam's DirectX/Vulkan hardware survey, but it's still not popular enough to be on the video card survey.

The DirectX/Vulkan survey provides finer grained detail, though there's some wonkiness with the numbers — Vulkan sums to over 190%, while the other DirectX APIs only sum to 84–95%, depending on the month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Still, it gives us an idea of where AMD's less popular GPUs sit relative to Nvidia's counterparts.

If we look at the DirectX 12 chart, the RX 6800 XT reaches a 0.11% market share in all, right underneath that is the RX 6900 XT with 0.10% of market share, and the RX 6800 sits at just 0.05% market share. For comparison, Nvidia's RTX 3090 sits at 0.42% market share in the same category, the RTX 3080 reaches an even higher 0.99%, and the RTX 3080 Ti already has 0.26% despite being released just a few months ago.

Perhaps more telling, summing all the RX 6000-series GPUs from the DX12 API list gives just 0.43% of the total, while the RTX 30-series manages to claim 7.96%. Based off those figures, Ampere GPUs have outsold RDNA2 GPUs among surveyed Steam users by a ratio of more than 18 to 1. How many GPUs ended up in the hands of cryptocurrency miners is a different matter.

AMD CPUs up to 30% Market Share

In contrast to the GPU numbers, AMD looks much better this month on the Steam CPU survey side of the fence. AMD accounts for 30.3% of the market share, which is the highest amount of market coverage AMD has seen in years, thanks no doubt to its latest and greatest Zen 3 architecture, which powers many of the best CPUs for gaming.

There was an interesting bounce back after last month, where AMD's share fell to 27.31%, so there's definitely some variability in the numbers. That's good to see, because any statistical survey should show variation, and we see that on the CPU side — the GPU side, not so much (not at all, really). So as usual, we need to mention that Valve has never published full details of how these surveys are conducted, and while we can hope they're done with proper statistical methods, we don't actually know for certain if that's the case.

Obviously, the video card shortages continue to be a problem, along with other supply constraints. AMD and Nvidia would both love to be making and selling more GPUs, but TSMC and Samsung Foundry are basically tapped out on production. Hopefully once new fabs become operational, we'll see greater availability of future products.

The first four entries in AMD’s Big Navi line of graphics cards are finally out, meaning that there’s now a group of worthy contenders to Nvidia’s RTX throne. We spoke highly about both the now-released RX 6700 XT, RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT in our reviews for these cards, praising their price-to-power ratio and their attempt to snag the best GPU crown for Team Red. Our RX 6900 XT and RX 6600 XT review, though, were a bit more mixed. 

These cards are new powerhouses for AMD, packing ray tracing and hitting average frame rates of up to 93 fps at 4K across a 9-game average in our testing. But they also have another potential strength to wield against Nvidia- in an era where pretty much every new piece of fancy tech sells out almost instantly: They’re another option.

That doesn’t mean stock is easy to come by, because like the RTX cards before them, the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT quickly sold out when they launched early November 18th, and the same happened when custom versions of the cards hit store shelves on November 25th and the RX 6900 XT launched on December 8th.

As with the Ryzen 5000 launch, AMD’s aiming to keep stock high and steady, but we’re not expecting these cards to be readily available for a while. But if you’re struggling to get your hands on a next-gen graphics card, here’s how to broaden your net a bit and maybe find a few active AMD listings for your trouble.

One trick that might sign up your chances of snagging a new high-end card: Break out your Raspberry Pi and use it to build your own bot to snag a card. Using a Pi and the open-source Python-based Inventory Hunter app and the shared code and instructions on Github you give it a shot. If it doesn't work, at least you've killed some time between now and that foggy future where Big Navi cards are actually readily available.
 

Radeon RX 6600 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6600 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H | Micro Center

US Radeon RX 6700 XT resellers at a glance: eBay 

The RX 6600 XT is the least powerful Big Navi card you can get, targeting 1080p performance for an MSRP of $379. It's got 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 32 CUs and 9.7 teraflops of power. That's a little lower than we'd like for the cost, as we stated in our review.

But even the MSRP is low compared to what aftermarket sales are likely to be. As with other major tech releases as of late, stock is low across the board.

AMD: The RX 6600 XT doesn't even show up on AMD's online store.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s got three sold out RX 6600 XT models on its site, ranging form $379 to $479 in price.

Newegg: Like most tech releases, Newegg's got the widest selection. But all of its cards are also sold out, so you're going to have to resort to the Newegg Shuffle to buy from here.

Amazon: The RX 6600 XT doesn't even show up in searches on Amazon right now, which instead take you to products with similar names.

B&H: There's one RX 6600 XT model on B&H's site, but it's sold out for now.

Micro Center:  Micro Center has four models with limited in-store availability. Prices range from $379 to $549, and stock differs from store to store. 

eBay: We could actually only find one eBay auction for the RX 6600 XT as of writing, and it costs more than double the MSRP. Yikes.

Radeon RX 6700 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6700 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H | Micro Center

US Radeon RX 6700 XT resellers at a glance: eBay 

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is, like we stated in our review, sort of the diet version of Big Navi. It's got 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 40 CUs and 12.4 teraflops of power, which lets it hit clock speeds of 2,424 MHz. All of that will cost you $479, which we thought was a touch too high for a card that's geared towards 1080p/1440p performance.

But it's still nothing compared to what you're likely to find right now. As with other major tech releases as of late, the only way you're probably going to be able to buy a Radeon RX 6700 XT at the moment is either going aftermarket or buying an expensive AIB model.

AMD: AMD has a store that lets you buy graphics cards directly through its website, but stock is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s amped up its 6700 XT model selection lately, including one $899 model that's actually available to buy online and one $999 model that's available at select stores.

Newegg: Newegg is where you'll find the widest selection of RX 6700 XT listings, from Asus to Gigabyte to MSI and more, but all the official listings are out of stock at the moment. Watch out for high prices from third-party sellers, though.

Amazon: Searching for an RX 6700 XT on Amazon just brings you to aftermarket sales, so maybe wait a bit before putting it in your search rotation.

B&H: Like Best Buy, B&H actually has 6700 XT models in stock. This includes a $949 model from XFX and a $999 model from MSI.

Micro Center:  Micro Center has several RX 6700 XT models listed on its site, all of which are only available for purchase in store and have limited stock depending on location.

eBay: eBay is an especially dangerous place to search for RX 6700 XT models right now, since anything under around $800 actually won't net you a product if you look at the fine print. Be on the lookout for scammers.

Radeon RX 6900 XT: Where to Buy

US Radeon RX 6800 retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 resellers at a glance: eBay 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is AMD’s most recent Big Navi GPU, as well as its most powerful. It has a $999 starting price of and comes with 80 compute units and 23 teraflops of power, plus 16GB of VRAM. Clock speeds start at 1,825 MHz and can hit up to 2,250 MHz when boosted, and the average 4K fps on the RX 6900 XT across our 9 game suite was 85 out-of-the-box and 90.7 when overclocked. 

This card's other big feature is ray tracing, and while all of these numbers and capabilities come together to make an impressive suite, our review concluded that it's not too much more impressive than AMD's other Big Navi given the steep price increase. Hence, you're going to want to be extra conscientious when shopping.

AMD: Unlike Nvidia, AMD allows you to buy graphics cards directly through its website. Unfortunately, stock is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy has beefed up its RX 6900 XT selection, and currently has a $2,059 model from Gigabyte up for sale on its site.

Newegg: Newegg is normally where you'd find the largest selection of RX 6900 XT models, but the site doesn't seem to have any in stock right now, with listings simply pointing to other graphics cards and third-party sales. 

Amazon: Searching for an RX 6900 XT on Amazon mostly brings up third-party sellers, so don't expect to get an official card here quite yet.

B&H: Searching for the RX 6900 XT brings up listings from MSI, XFX and Asus. The XFX cards are actually in stock, starting at $1,799.

eBay: eBay markups for the RX 6900 XT are especially ridiculous, with most reasonable-seeming listings turning out to just be pictures. When you start to look for people selling the actual card, their listings start at $2,000.

Radeon RX 6800: Where to Buy 

US Radeon RX 6800 retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 resellers at a glance: eBay | stockX 

The Radeon RX 6800 is AMD’s base-level Big Navi GPU, coming in at a starting price of $579 and packing 60 compute units with 16.2 teraflops of power and 16GB of VRAM. Clock speeds start at 1,815 MHz and can hit up to 2,105 MHz when boosted, and the average 4K fps on the RX 6800 across our 9 game suite was 80. Throw in ray tracing, and that’s a pretty impressive suite, coming in just below the RTX 3080 and the RX 6800 XT while only costing $80 more than an RTX 3070. That also means this card is in high demand though, so you’ll want to keep a diligent watch on the following stores.

AMD: While AMD does sell graphics cards directly through its website, stock on all Big Navi cards is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy’s RX 6800 selection is slim, with the store only stocking the MSI and XFX models, plus a few from Gigabyte. Most are sold out right now, although one model from Gigabyte and one model from XFX have limited in-store availability depending on location.

Newegg: Newegg currently has the largest selection of RX 6800 models, with cards from Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Asrock, PowerColor and Sapphire. All of these cards are sold out right now, but you can add them to a wishlist to get email notifications for when they restock.

Amazon: Amazon is currently sold out of Radeon RX 6800 cards as well, and searching for them right now simply brings up pages from third-party sellers.

B&H: B&H now has Asus, XFX and MSI RX 6800 cards listed, but none are available.

eBay: As usual, aftermarket sellers have more availability, but the markup here is steep. RX 6800 cards are starting at $700 on eBay and going all the way into the thousands. Value is a key reason to buy this card, making these listings much less appealing.

stockX: This is another gray market site, and it currently has one RX 6800 listing up for a starting price of $1,220. That’s a more than 100% markup.

Radeon RX 6800 XT: Where to Buy 

US Radeon RX 6800 XT retailers at a glance: AMD | Best Buy | Newegg | Amazon | B&H

US Radeon RX 6800 XT resellers at a glance: eBay | stockX 

The Radeon RX 6800 XT is AMD’s big new competitor for the RTX 3080, with our review placing it at a 92 fps average on 4K ultra settings across 9 games. That’s just 4 fps below the 3080’s average, despite the RX 6800 XT costing just $50 less. Assuming you can find it, that’s a great deal, so keep an eye out for this 20.7 teraflops, 72 CU card with clock speeds of 2,015/2,250 MHz and 16GB of VRAM at the stores below.

AMD: Like the RX 6800 and the 6900 XT, you can also buy 6800 XT stock direct from AMD, assuming you can find it. Unfortunately, AMD’s store is sold out right now.

Best Buy: Best Buy only has six RX 6800 XT units listed right now, with thee from XFX, two from Gigabyte and one from MSI. They're all sold out, except for one XFX model with limited in-store availability depending on location. 

Newegg: Newegg has the widest selection of RX 6800 XT listings, with cards from Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, Asrock, XFX, PowerColor and Sapphire. Each of these listings is sold out right now, but you can add them to a wishlist to get email notifications for when they restock.

Amazon: Amazon is currently sold out of Radeon RX 6800 XT cards as well, with searches for them simply redirecting to third-party sellers.

B&H: B&H currently has five RX 6800 XT cards listed on its site. You can't buy any of them as of yet.

eBay: If you don’t mind a markup, you can turn to the gray market to get a Radeon RX 6800 XT, but prices on eBay currently start at over $1000, seriously mitigating the value this card offers.

stockX: B&H currently has four RX 6800 XT cards listed on its site, with two from XFX, one from MSI and one from Asus. You can't buy any of them as of e cost of buying new.

When SiFive introduced its HiFive Unmatchd RISC-V desktop motherboard for developers last year, it was clear from the start that sooner or later an enthusiast would attempt to try using its U7 SoC for something it is not meant for: general PC usage with high-performance graphics and video decoding. That time has come as an enthusiast has managed to make AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT work with a RISC-V SoC under Linux. 

Computer scientist René Rebe decided to prove that the SiFive HiFive Unmatched not only can run Linux, but can also use a high-performance graphics processor, reports Hackster.io. To do so, he spent 10 hours patching the Linux kernel to add support for AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card as well as the Mesa Gallium 21.1.5 driver. 

Rebe not only managed to make AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT display Linux's GUI, but he even made it render 3D graphics in a hardware-accelerated mode and decode video. He did not try to launch games (there are certain limitations with video decoding) but as this is the world's first attempt to make a high-performance GPU work with RISC-V, the endeavor can be considered a success. 

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched board with the Freedom U740 SoC has all the PC I/O interfaces that PC users are used to, including PCIe 3.0 x8/16, M.2 slots, and USB ports. To that end, it is possible to install almost any piece of modern hardware into a PC powered by the HiFive Unmatched board. After all, the board is designed for developers working on client PC and server software for upcoming RISC-V SoCs. There is a limitation though: Linux does not support RISC-V properly since most RISC-V-based chips are microcontrollers that cannot run high-level operating systems. While there are some RISC-V SoCs that can run them (e.g., the Freedom U740), they are not particularly fast.

There are more details about the SiFive Unmatched RISC-V motherboard with AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT experiment at Bits inside by René Rebe YouTube channel.

AMD released its Radeon RX 6700 XT back in March, to generally favorable reviews. It's on our list of the best graphics cards (that you still can't buy at reasonable prices) and currently sits in eleventh place (tenth if you don't count the Titan RTX) in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, slotting in right between the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. It's a great card and AMD's largest volume producer for its latest generation of RDNA2 GPUs. But it also uses the fully enabled Navi 22 GPU, and there will always be a certain percentage of chips that fail to pass muster. So where's the trimmed down RX 6700 non-XT? (FYI, that's a Photoshopped box image up top, in case that wasn't immediately obvious.)

When AMD released its first RDNA cards, the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, they both launched on the same day — with new Ryzen 3000 Zen 2 CPUs joining the party. I was there; it was a testing and benchmarking nightmare! Not because the products were bad, but because it was too many new things from one company on the same day. That day was July 7, 2019 — a not-so-subtle jab at making it to 7nm well ahead of Intel and Nvidia. Launching multiple products on the same day can create problems, so I get that maybe AMD wanted to do a solo launch for the 6700 XT this round.

Anyway, the main point is that RX 5700 XT uses Navi 10 with 40 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6, while RX 5700 uses Navi 10 with 36 CUs and 8GB of GDDR6. This is a tale as old as time — well, GPU time at least, which only goes back 21 years or so. We've seen this with basically every GPU and CPU die for as far back as I care to remember. And yet, here we are, four months after the RX 6700 XT launch and still in the middle of massive GPU shortages, and AMD still hasn't released the vanilla RX 6700. It's very weird.

To make things worse, there are now credible rumors and leaks suggesting the Radeon RX 6600 XT will launch on August 11. Maybe AMD decided not to make a non-XT 6700 and will put harvested Navi 22 chips into RX 6600 XT cards, but all the current scuttlebutt says the RX 6600 XT will use Navi 23 with 32 CUs. There's not a particularly big gap between 32 CUs and 40 CUs, though the most likely configuration for the RX 6600 XT would be a 128-bit memory bus and 8GB of VRAM. That means there's still room for a Radeon RX 6700 12GB with 32–36 CUs... but where is it?

Right now, there's only a single desktop product using Navi 22 in AMD's RX 6000 stack. There are also two mobile variants that use Navi 22, the RX 6800M (full 40 CU chip with 12GB) and the RX 6700M (36 CUs and 10GB). It's possible and even probable that all of the harvested Navi 22 GPUs are just ending up as 6700M right now, but I'm still waiting for a desktop RX 6700. Maybe I'll end up waiting in vain, but we'll have to see how the RX 6600 XT performs and where AMD wants to price that first.

RX 6700 XT has an official MSRP of $479, and while everything remains massively overpriced at retail, at least there's been a clear downward movement of late. Our GPU pricing index puts the average eBay price of the 6700 XT at $725 for the past two weeks, another 6% drop from the previous two weeks, with higher quantities sold as well. There are rumors the RX 6600 XT might launch with a $399 price point, but that still feels like it should be the RX 6700, with the RX 6600 XT taking on the RTX 3060 directly at $329. Considering this will be the first SKU where AMD has a memory deficit (8GB vs 12GB), it might even need to undercut Nvidia.

Of course, there were also rumors of an RX 6700 6GB impending launch right around the time of the RX 6700 XT debut. Those didn't pan out, and maybe Nvidia putting 12GB on the RTX 3060 is to blame. Either way, Navi 22 in RX 6700 attire is still MIA. Will it eventually surface once supply for other parts catches up to demand? It still seems like it would have been better to add another option back when prices were radically inflated, if only to cash in on the GPU gold rush. Whatever the case, with RX 6600 XT right around the corner, let's hope graphics card prices continue to fall.

Hot on the heels of the latest Radeon RX 6600 XT leak, German news outlet Igor's Lab has shared more juicy details on AMD's forthcoming Navi 23 offerings. Wallossek's information seemingly helps to confirm some of the rumored specifications for the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

As we've suspected for a while now, the Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 will use AMD's Navi 23 silicon. Navi 23, commonly known as "Dimgrey Cavefish," should be one of the more compact RDNA 2 dies in AMD's lineup. We suspect that Navi 24 will have the smallest die. 

According to Wallossek, the Navi 23 silicon measures 16.51 x 14.28mm, which works out to an area of 235.76mm². For comparison, Navi 22 has a die size of 335mm² big, so we're looking at a 29.6% reduction with Navi 23. The entire Navi 23 package reportedly checks in a 35 x 35mm with a height tolerance of 0.1mm, with the Navi 23 rotated in a 45-degrees position.

AMD may be planning to release three Navi 23-based mobile discrete graphics cards with different TGP (total graphics power) ratings. Laptop vendors will allegedly get to choose between 90W, 80W, and 65W variants. Logically, the thermal envelopes will be the limiting factor for each variant's base and boost clock speeds. Wallossek shared a screenshot of a mobile Navi 23 graphics card with a 2,350 MHz boost clock, 334 MHz slower than the rumored clock speed for the desktop Radeon RX 6600 XT.

Coming as no surprise, the Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 continue to exploit the PCIe 4.0 interface. However, Navi 23 is seemingly restricted to eight PCIe 4.0 lanes. The hard cap shouldn't affect the graphics card's performance since PCIe 4.0 x8 offers the same bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 x16. Wallossek speculates that the limit imposed by AMD will prevent the Radeon RX 6600 XT from catching up to the Radeon RX 6700 through overclocking.

In the memory department, Navi 23 is very likely to sport a 128-bit memory interface with eight independent memory channels. This configuration opens the door to connect up to four GDDR6 memory chips in x16 mode or eight chips via a x8 connection. The maximum amount of memory supported on Navi 23 would be 16GB. 

Given the segment in which Navi 23 competes, it's unlikely that the corresponding Radeon products arrive with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. Furthermore, we've already seen convincing GPU-Z screenshots of the Radeon RX 6600 XT and Radeon RX 6600 with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. That's not to say that we won't see any Navi 23-based units with 16GB, but if so, they'll probably be professional-grade graphics cards, such as the Radeon Pro series.

Surprisingly, Radeon RX 6700 XT benchmarks haven't started to pop up yet. However, the Navi 23-powered graphics card is rumored to offer equivalent or slightly better performance than the Radeon RX 5700 XT.

There is support for up to five display outputs, depending on how AMD wants to equip the Radeon RX 6600 XT. Navi 23 also supports USB Type-C, but we don't expect to see that interface on the desktop variant. If anything, the USB Type-C port will make its way to the mobile variant since it could be a valid replacement for a DisplayPort on laptops.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT comes equipped with one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. The Radeon RX 6600 XT might feature the same design, maybe with one or two fewer DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. Wallossek's data also points to a plethora of supported hardware video decoders on Navi 23, including VP9, HEVC, H.264, and VC1 decoders.

We still haven't seen any signs of when AMD will unleash the Radeon RX 6600 XT or Radeon RX 6600. Nonetheless, Computex 2021 is approaching so it's plausible that we could see an official Navi 23 announcement then, if not before.

Minisforum is known for its ultra-compact form-factor (UCFF), highly integrated PCs primarily designed for offices or living rooms. Apparently, the company does not want to stop there. This week, it introduced a rather extraordinary product for itself. Not only is the Minisforum GameMini an attempt at cracking our best gaming PCs list, but it's also an open-case gaming PC aimed at enthusiasts. 

The Minisforum GamiMini appears to be quite a powerful rig. It uses Gigabyte's Aorus B550I Pro AX motherboard carrying an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (6 CPU cores,12 threads, clock speed of 3.70 GHz – 4.60 GHz, 32MB of L3 cache, 65W). The board also packs 32GB of dual-channel DDR4-3200 RAM and a 1TB Kingston KC2500 M.2 SSD. The system is also equipped with an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card sitting on the opposite side to the motherboard. The PC is powered by SilverStone's SX650-G power supply, so it can be upgraded fairly easily. 

Since the GamiMini is an open system, Minisforum doesn't have to worry too much about cooling the Ryzen 5 5600X, a 65W CPU that can pretty hot, or the rather power-hungry Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card that's rated for up to 230W TGP. Both components use rather modest air coolers.

As far as connectivity is concerned, Minisforum's GameMini has everything that we come to expect from a Mini-ITX PC these days. The Aorus B550I Pro AX motherboard has a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 module, a GbE port and multiple USB connectors.

Minisforum traditionally funds development of its PCs using a crowdfunding platform, so it hasn't yet discussed pricing of its GameMini or a final release date. 

AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT launch proceeded pretty much as expected: The card was competitive with Nvidia's RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 in performance, and it sold out just as fast as every new GPU released during the past nine months. These days, finding one of the best graphics cards in stock feels more like winning the lottery. The RX 6700 XT currently occupies the ninth spot in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and it's just as sought after as other modern GPUs. Our GPU pricing index currently shows it selling for an average price of over $900 on eBay.

Today we're looking at the Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT Nitro+, a custom card that follows the usual pattern of adding more bling, better cooling, and boosted clocks. Sadly, it's just as bad as the reference card when it comes to availability, and the official pricing (which doesn't have much meaning right now) is quite a bit higher than AMD's own model.

In fact, Sapphire gave a list price of $579 at the time of release, the same as the higher spec RX 6800 reference card from AMD. There's not a chance the 6700 XT Nitro+ card can match the reference 6800 in performance, but then as we were just saying, "official" prices are basically meaningless right now. The 6700 XT cards sell for $800 or more, even via the Newegg Shuffle, while RX 6800 cards tend to be in the $950 range.

In terms of specs, the Nitro+ has a relatively minor factory overclock. The reference card's Game Clock is 2424MHz, with a maximum Boost Clock of 2581MHz. Sapphire's Nitro+ card comes with a maximum Boost Clock of 2622MHz — a 1.6% improvement on the maximum boost — but its Game Clock is 2548MHz, a 5.1% increase over the reference card. That means it can do 13.0 TFLOPS FP32 compared to 12.4 TFLOPS... or at least that's the idea. Despite the theoretical improvements in clock speeds, in practice, actual clocks during testing tended to be nearly the same as the reference card.

Performance isn't the only factor, of course. Sapphire currently lists three variants of the RX 6700 XT: A reference model, the RX 6700 XT Pulse, and the RX 6700 XT Nitro+. The first two have reference clock speeds with little in the way of bling. The Pulse card has a smaller cooler than the Nitro+ we're reviewing, with dual fans and a single BIOS. The Nitro+ adds some RGB lighting on the top and back sides of the GPU (none on the fans) along with a dual BIOS switch. Except, the BIOS switch is now handled via software, rather than a physical switch, so you have to boot into Windows and use Sapphire's Trixx utility to swap to the backup BIOS. Basically, it's a way to have software defined quiet and performance modes.

Design and Aesthetics of Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+

The Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ measures 313x131x48mm, so it's a 2.5-slot width form factor. Despite the large size, it only weighs 1020g — more than the reference 6700 XT (267x110x38mm and 883g) but less than the reference RX 6800 card (267x120x38mm and 1384g). The two outer fans on the Nitro+ are custom 94mm diameter models, while the center fan is a slightly smaller 83mm model (measurements are mine and could be off by about 1-2mm).

Besides the aesthetics, the Sapphire cooler does reduce temperatures quite a bit, which in turn means the fans can spin more slowly and thus generate less noise. It's virtually silent at stock settings, and as with most modern GPUs, the fans will stop completely when the GPU temperature falls below a certain threshold (usually around 40C). Sapphire also offers a few extras in the way of software, specifically the Trixx utility with Trixx Boost.

Trixx Boost leverages AMD's Radeon Image Sharpening and allows you to set a static resolution scaling factor. Think of it as a simplistic alternative to DLSS—it lacks any fancy machine learning, but it still works well enough. Dropping the resolution by 10%–15% brings an equal improvement to frame rates. It's not particularly important for 1080p gaming, but at 1440p or 4K, the reduction in resolution can prove quite beneficial. Perhaps more importantly, unlike AMD's Radeon Boost, which dynamically upscales based on movement and other factors, and can now use VRS (Variable Rate Shading) as an alternative to resolution scaling, a static scaling factor means you don't get odd dips and spikes in frametimes. That's a problem users have noticed with Radeon Boost.

Looking at Trixx Boost, we have to wonder why AMD or Nvidia haven't taken a similar approach. Nvidia's DLSS 2.0 seems to be relatively agnostic about the games and upscaling these days. Quality mode uses 2x upscaling, Balanced is 3x upscaling, Performance uses 4x, and Ultra Performance uses 9x upscaling. Are those integer scaling factors really necessary, though? Probably not, and some tuning could likely provide us with a slider or percentage upscaling similar to what we've seen with non-DLSS scaling options, but with presumably higher image quality. Maybe that will be DLSS 3.0, but we digress.

Test Setup for Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+  

We spoke with Sapphire representative Ed Crisler on the Tom's Hardware Show last month, around the time of the RX 6700 XT launch. While there was plenty to say, one interesting point Ed made was that performance isn't really a differentiating factor for most custom cards these days — that features and aesthetics are a bigger deal. Whether or not that's correct (opinions will vary), it might be because there's really very little difference in performance.

In fact, out of our test suite, we noted a meager 1% improvement in performance from the Nitro+ compared to the reference card. Even with overclocking the memory to the maximum +150MHz (17.2Gbps effective speed) and bumping up the maximum boost clock to 2800MHz, the Sapphire card was still only 7% faster on average. It technically hit the highest GPU clocks we've ever seen on a graphics card, using air cooling no less, but clock speed only gets you so far.

We're using our standard GPU test PC, the same setup we've been running for over 18 months — and it continues to do just fine, particularly at higher resolutions where the CPU becomes even less of a factor. Our test suite consists of 13 games, tested at 1080p/1440p/4K and ultra/highest/max settings (give or take), with each test setting run multiple times to ensure consistency of results. The RX 6700 XT primarily targets 1440p gaming, though 1080p and 4K are also possible with the right settings. We've highlighted the Sapphire Nitro+ results, including overclocked performance, along with the reference AMD card.

1440p Gaming Performance on Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+

Starting with 1440p ultra, the Nitro+ lands right above the reference 6700 XT, with an average lead of just 1%. Individual results show a range of -0.5% (Watch Dogs Legion) to +4.1% (Strange Brigade), though with the typical +/-1% margin of error there's little to get excited about in terms of performance. The Nitro+ does manage more than 60 fps in every game we tested at this resolution, however, which is a great start.

If we look at the bigger picture, the RX 6700 XT comes in just behind the RTX 3070, and slightly ahead of the RTX 3060 Ti — at least if we're only focused on rasterization performance. With ray tracing enabled, outside of AMD-promoted games like Dirt 5 and Godfall, Nvidia's GPUs tend to lead by a sizeable margin, and turning on DLSS Quality mode allows cards like the 3070 to basically double or even triple the performance that the 6700 XT can manage at native resolution. See our RTX 3070 vs RX 6700 XT GPU face-off for a comparison of ray tracing and DLSS performance on the two cards.

On the other hand, the RX 6700 XT easily trounces the RTX 3060 12GB card, and current market prices put those two GPUs at a similar level — that's because prices are largely based on potential Ethereum mining performance, it seems. If you're looking at $940 for an RX 6700 XT (Sapphire or some other brand), versus $920 for an RTX 3060, from a gaming perspective the AMD GPU wins hands down — it's about 40% faster on average at 1440p ultra.

Last, let's quickly note the overclocked RX 6700 XT results. The boosted clocks are enough to put the Sapphire card solidly ahead of the stock clocked RTX 3070, but it still trails the RX 6800 reference card by 10%. Despite the 8% increase in memory clocks, there's no making up for the 25% deficit in memory bus width. Overall performance ends up being pretty similar to the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti, though without the option for DLSS — at least until FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) arrives some time later this year.

1080p Gaming Performance on Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+

Dropping down to 1080p, the CPU starts to become a bit more of a bottleneck, and more than half of our games (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Far Cry 5, Forza Horizon 4, Horizon Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Watch Dogs Legion) all show the Sapphire Nitro+ and reference 6700 XT as tied, or even with the Sapphire slightly behind (margin of error). Buying for out-of-box factory stock performance isn't the draw, obviously, and the overall difference between the two cards is 0.6% in favor of the Nitro+.

You could easily get more performance with Trixx Boost at a slightly lowered target resolution, though at 1080p it's certainly not necessary. Overall performance sits at around 130 fps, and the three lowest performing games still hit 90 fps (give or take) at 1080p. Overclocking the GPU accomplishes less as well, improving performance by less than 5% overall — again, CPU limits come into play.

The Sapphire card does basically match the 3070 overall now, but that's partly because of the massive gulf between the two GPUs in Assassin's Creed Valhalla where it's 35% lead is more than double what we saw in any other game (Borderlands 3 gave the Nitro+ a 16% lead). The 3070 also has at least a modest performance lead in six of the games we tested, and ties in three others. Drop down to the 3060 Ti and the Sapphire has an 8% overall lead (again, helped immensely by Valhalla), and it soundly trounces the RTX 3060 12GB by 36%.

Gaming Performance on Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ 4K

Not surprisingly, 4K ultra can be a bit much for an ostensibly "mainstream high-end" graphics card. Forget the real-world pricing for a moment: This is a nominally $500-ish GPU, and it mostly comes in on par with the RTX 2080 Ti that used to cost twice this much. But both GPUs need a bit of help with 4K.

Five of the games we tested end up in the 60 fps or higher range, but these are lighter titles — Forza Horizon 4 and Strange Brigade are known for hitting higher fps than more demanding games. Of the remaining games, only Watch Dogs really struggles with 35 fps and minimums right at the 30 fps mark. With a FreeSync display, you could certainly play all of the games at 4K still, but it won't always be a smooth experience.

Overclocking yields the biggest gains we've seen so far, at 7.7% — basically direct scaling with memory bandwidth. But at factory stock clocks, the Nitro+ still only beats the reference design by 1.4% overall. The bigger draw, which we'll get to in a moment, will be noise levels and GPU temperatures.

Finally, looking at other GPUs, the 3070 now takes its largest lead — helped no doubt by its higher memory bandwidth, even if it has less VRAM. It's 8% faster overall, while the Sapphire card ends up 4% ahead of the 3060 Ti and 37% ahead of the 3060 12GB.

Power, Temperatures, Clocks, and Noise of Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+

We've mentioned that performance on its own isn't often the critical factor when looking at different graphics cards — and that's especially true when looking at different cards that utilize the same GPU. The reference 6700 XT and Sapphire's Nitro+ land within spitting distance of each other in the gaming charts, though we did have a bit better luck with overclocking on the Nitro+. But that big cooler has to be good for more than just a few percent higher performance, right?

Our power tests use in-line power measurements to capture just the graphics card power use, using Powenetics software and TinkerForge components. We capture data running Metro Exodus at 1440p ultra and with FurMark running the 1600x900 stress test. Before we get to the charts, though, let's quickly talk about noise levels.

While idle, or at low usage levels, the fans on most modern GPUs stop completely. That gives us a noise floor of 34 dB(A) when measured using an SPL (Sound Pressure Level) meter placed just 15cm from the fan side of the graphics cards using an open test system. (The CPU cooler fans are still slightly audible, though our SPL meter isn't really useful below about 30 dB.) During our gaming and FurMark tests, the Sapphire Nitro+ only bumped up noise levels to 36.0 dB, which is the lowest result we've measured on recent GPUs. The reference 6700 XT by comparison ran at 40.4 dB — not particularly noticeable, but certainly more so than the Sapphire card.

The FurMark power consumption chart is perhaps the most surprising result we'll see. Given that close performance between the Nitro+ and the reference 6700 XT, we expected similar power requirements. It turns out Sapphire did crank the power limit up by about 40W, based on the FurMark chart, but that's sort of a worst-case scenario. In actual games, the reference card came in 15W below the official 230W TGP limit, while the Sapphire card landed just a hair below that mark. Overclocking meanwhile pushed the Nitro+ up to 244W in Metro Exodus, but a rather impressive (in a not-good way) 303W in FurMark.

One impressive thing about AMD's Navi 22 and the RX 6700 XT is that it's the highest clocked GPU we've ever seen. Out of the box, running stock clocks, many games will push the 6700 XT beyond 2.5GHz. That may have hurt power consumption a bit, but the high clocks do result in good performance overall. In Metro, the Nitro+ averaged basically the same 2.52GHz as the reference card. FurMark meanwhile ran a bit higher — 2.42GHz vs. 2.35GHz. In either case, these GPU clocks are over 150MHz higher than the next closest GPU on the charts. Overclocking took Navi 22 even further, with the Sapphire Nitro+ reaching an average clock speed of 2.74GHz in Metro and 2.62GHz in FurMark.

While the power results aren't really a strong point for the Nitro+, the temperature data is another matter. At stock settings, the card ran about 10C cooler than the reference design. Of course temperatures are linked with fan speed, and the fans are only spinning at just under 1,000 RPM in our gaming test, and 1,100 RPM in FurMark. Our overclocked settings used a far more aggressive fan speed curve, however, which resulted in even lower temperatures but much higher noise levels and RPMs. You could almost certainly tune things better than we've done.

Bottom Line: Cool... and Just as Unattainable

The Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ delivers everything you'd expect from a custom design: More bling, enhanced cooling, and some software extras, wrapped up with a slight factory overclock. If things were normal, we could get into a discussion about whether the upgrades and enhancements are worth the additional cost. Right now, unfortunately, the harsh reality is that official prices don't mean anything.

We've been writing about the various Newegg Shuffle lotteries, which end up feeling like retailer scalping as opposed to what you'd find on eBay. The RX 6700 XT cards tend to sell for around $800–$850 lately, close to double the AMD launch price — and we'd even argue that AMD increased its launch price to be more realistic. Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti launch prices feel like the stuff of dreams right now, except for the fact that both of those typically cost less than the 6700 XT if you happen to get selected as a Newegg Shuffle winner. Crazy times!

We look forward to the day when graphics cards can actually be found on store shops, or you can order one for delivery in a day or two from online stores like Amazon and Newegg without paying exorbitant prices. All indications point to that not happening any time soon, and with increasing reports of chip and substrate shortages hitting all segments of the technology industry, we might need to wait a year or more for a return to normal. Don't be surprised if the next generation of GPUs ends up being priced higher as a result. That's what happened with Nvidia's RTX 20-series, anyway.

As it stands, Sapphire remains one of many vendors that makes compelling AMD RX 6000-series graphics cards, and they're just as unattainable as any other brand. Until the situation changes, the brand of graphics card will matter far less than grabbing whatever card you can actually find in stock at a price you can afford. That's not Sapphire's fault, but it's the world we live in right now.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy

MORE: All Graphics Content

The GeForce RTX 3070 and Radeon RX 6700 XT both target the high-end market with official prices starting near $500. These are two of the best graphics cards, and rank in the upper echelons of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. But which card takes home the crown? We've put the two contenders against each other to look at performance, features, efficiency, price, and more to determine the winner.

Nvidia beat AMD out of the gate, launching the RTX 3070 on October 29, 2020 with an official starting price of $499. The RX 6700 XT didn't arrive until March 18, 2021, almost five months later. In the interim, GPU shortages became an even bigger problem, with Ethereum mining helping to drive up prices. Our GPU pricing index shows just how bad things have become, with AMD's card selling for nearly $1,000 on eBay, which might actually seem like a reasonable price compared to the 3070's going rate of roughly $1,350. In other words, official prices are pure fantasy right now, but assuming you could actually buy one of these GPUs — they do exist, if you get lucky — how do they stack up? 

Gaming Performance 

For most gamers, performance plays a critical role in determining which graphics card to buy. We've benchmarked a baker's dozen of games, at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K running ultra quality (or equivalent) settings. Here are the results. 

All of the games were tested without ray tracing enabled (if it's supported), so we're looking at traditional rasterization performance. Overall, 1080p ends up effectively tied, with the RTX 3070 posting a negligible 1% lead. That doesn't mean Nvidia wins every game, however, and a few games strongly favor AMD — Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, and Forza Horizon 4 all go to the RX 6700 XT, with Valhalla showing a 26% deficit. There's a catch, naturally: Valhalla is the first game in the Assassin's Creed series to utilize DirectX 12, and we know from experience that it's entirely possible for a developer to favor one GPU over another with low-level APIs. Valhalla and Borderlands 3 are both AMD promoted games, so those results generally aren't typical.

The flip side is also true: Watch Dogs Legion and Metro Exodus are Nvidia promoted games that favor the 3070 more. While we're on the subject, for the record, The Division 2, Dirt 5, Far Cry 5, and Strange Brigade were also AMD-promoted games. Final Fantasy XIV, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider were Nvidia promoted games. That means, all told, we tested with six games promoted by AMD versus four games promoted by Nvidia, and Nvidia still came out ahead (barely).

Kicking up to 1440p and 4K doesn't do AMD any favors. Where the two GPUs are effectively tied at 1080p, the 3070 lead grows to 3% at 1440p ultra and 10% at 4K ultra. That's particularly interesting considering AMD's card has 50% more VRAM. There are situations where the additional memory comes into play, but the Nvidia card has more memory bandwidth, and at higher resolutions, AMD's 96MB Infinity Cache isn't quite as beneficial.

Things only get worse for AMD when we look at games that support ray tracing. The 3070's lead grows substantially with RT enabled, and that's before taking into account Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), which can boost performance by 30-50% or more without any noticeable loss in image fidelity.

Across our 10-game DXR test suite, the RX 6700 XT only gets close to the same performance as the RTX 3070 in the AMD-promoted Dirt 5 and Godfall. The overall lead ends up at just under 50% in favor of the RTX 3070 at both 1080p and 1440p, with a range of 6% (Godfall) to 121% (Minecraft).

Turn on DLSS Quality and it goes from bad to worse. For the six games we tested, the RTX 3070 outpaces the RX 6700 XT by nearly 200% — the lead is 172% at 1080p and 205% at 1440p. In other words, with RT and DLSS enabled, the RTX 3070 is three times as fast as the RX 6700 XT at 1440p. There's also a growing number of games that don't use ray tracing but still support DLSS, because in the Quality mode it's basically a free performance boost on RTX cards.

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) can't get here soon enough, but we're also skeptical that it can close the gap without compromising on image quality. Right now, the RTX 3070 at 1440p surpasses what the RX 6700 XT manages at 1080p with ray tracing. With DLSS, Nvidia's 1440p performance basically doubles AMD's 1080p performance.

Winner: Nvidia

AMD's RX 6700 XT probably wasn't intended to compete directly with Nvidia's RTX 3070, but the graphics card market is all kinds of messed up right now in terms of pricing tiers. On paper, the RTX 3070 costs $20 more, which basically means the two compete in the same market segment. Nvidia comes away with a minor win in rasterization gaming performance, but its lead only grows with more demanding rendering scenarios like ray tracing. DLSS seals the deal, considering over 30 major games now support the tech, along with Unreal Engine and Unity, and AMD still doesn't have a shipping alternative. If you're after higher frame rates, RTX 3070 beats RX 6700 XT in most of the games we've tested.

Price

We've already mentioned pricing and the discrepancies between official prices and real-world costs. Right now, the cost of a new high-end graphics card is laughable — or it would be if we weren't crying so hard. Remember when the RTX 3090 launched with a starting price of $1,500 and everyone thought that was exorbitant? Right now, you'll have to spend almost that much to nab an RTX 3070 off eBay, and it's about 30% slower than the 3090.

AMD's RX 6700 XT, by comparison, looks far more reasonable, with an average eBay selling price of only $984. That means you get a few percent less performance for about 25% less money. Or at least, that's what you'd have to spend if you wanted to take a chance on eBay.

Street pricing at respectable retail outlets is a different story, a story of empty shelves. Newegg as an example shows 19 RTX 3070 cards ranging from $500 (only one of those) up to $830. We have no way of knowing how many of those cards Newegg sells each week, or when more will arrive. Flipping over to the RX 6700 XT, Newegg lists 26 different models with prices ranging from $480 to $830. Nominally, prices appear roughly comparable, but there are definitely more 3070 cards being sold on eBay if that's anything to go by.

The good news is that, unlike the other Big Navi cards, RX 6700 XT seems to be shipping in greater quantities. At the end of March for example, just over 300 were sold on eBay compared to 60–100 each for the RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT. At the same time, there were over 800 RTX 3070 cards sold on eBay during the same period.

Winner: AMD sort of, but really nobody

Even if the RX 6700 XT theoretically can be had for a much lower price than the RTX 3070, by paying scalper prices at eBay, it's a pyrrhic victory. Both cards are selling at over twice the MSRP on eBay, and quantities are far too limited. But if you must have one, $900–$1,000 for the RX 6700 XT is a much better deal than $1300–$1400 for an RTX 3070 — unless you're doing cryptocurrency mining. Performance for either GPU ends up being comparable to the RTX 2080 Super, which was readily available for $700 back in 2019 and early 2020. Hind sight and all that, but we strongly advise against paying more than $600 for either of these cards 

Features and Tech

The RX 6700 XT and RTX 3070 go toe-to-toe on most features and superficially this category might seem like a tie. Nvidia has ultra-low latency and Reflex technologies; AMD has Anti-Lag. Nvidia has G-Sync; AMD has FreeSync. Nvidia offers GeForce Experience; AMD has Radeon Settings. There's a lot of tit for tat. There are a few items worth pointing out, however.

First, Nvidia DLSS has no direct competition as yet. Don't even get us started on Radeon Boost, which can certainly improve framerates but often causes stutters and frame pacing issues when it starts and stops. In supported games, it's very difficult to spot the differences between DLSS Quality mode and native resolution with TAA — until you look at framerates and DLSS runs 20–50% faster. FidelityFX Super Resolution will need to be very good to catch DLSS, and it will need developer support, and both of those will take time.

Elsewhere, technologies that seem similar still end up favoring Nvidia. G-Sync and FreeSync ostensibly provide the same thing: Tear-free gaming and adaptive refresh rates. Except, in practice, G-Sync tends to work better. G-Sync Compatible can also work with FreeSync displays, while FreeSync can't work on a G-Sync display. Yes, G-Sync monitors tend to cost more, but as the one item you're constantly looking at when using a computer, it's worth spending an extra $100–$200 for a better display. The same goes for Radeon Anti-Lag and Nvidia Ultra-Low Latency and Reflex. Both can improve latency by minimizing buffering, but NULL tends to be a bit better, and games that directly incorporate Reflex deliver far superior latency.

There's one area where AMD does get a clear win: VRAM capacity — actually two areas, as AMD's Infinity Cache also warrants a mention. The RX 6700 XT provides 12GB of GDDR6 clocked at 16Gbps, compared to only 8GB of GDDR6 clocked at 14Gbps on the RTX 3070. If games start to really use more than 8GB of VRAM but less than 12GB, AMD's GPU might improve in the overall performance standings. The catch is that Nvidia's card has more raw bandwidth, and tweaking the settings (e.g. turning down texture resolution a notch) will often eliminate the capacity constraints. Such discussions ultimately lead back to performance, however, which we've already covered.

Winner: Nvidia

While this is certainly more of a subjective pick, we simply find Nvidia's features work a bit better than AMD's alternatives. Team Green and the RTX 3070 notch up another win, though it's by a split judge's decision rather than by knockout. If you feel strongly about VRAM capacities, or prefer open FidelityFX options to proprietary solutions like DLSS, this category could swing the other way. But fundamentally, we feel Nvidia's Ampere architecture is more advanced than AMD's RDNA2 architecture.

Power and Efficiency

Nvidia has generally held an advantage over AMD when it comes to GPU power consumption and efficiency. That started to change with AMD's first generation Navi parts in 2019, helped immensely by the move to TSMC's N7 7nm process. With Ampere, Nvidia upgraded to Samsung's 8N 8nm process, which is more of a refinement of Samsung's 10nm tech. It's not quite at parity with TSMC’s solution, but it's better than the previous generation 12nm process.

Nvidia didn't just shrink the design of Turing when creating Ampere, however. There are major upgrades to the ray tracing hardware, the tensor cores, and the GPU cores. All of that comes at a cost, with Ampere delivering higher performance than Turing while also requiring significantly more power. The RTX 3080 delivers around 35% better performance than the RTX 2080 Ti at 4K ultra, but it also uses nearly 30% more power — 333W in our testing, compared to 259W for the 2080 Ti.

AMD's RDNA2 chips stuck with the same TSMC N7 process as RDNA1, and power consumption also increased for the top tier parts, but AMD didn't really have a competitive part at the extreme end of the performance spectrum. RX 5700 XT has 40 CUs and power consumption of around 215W in our Metro Exodus testing. RX 6700 XT also has 40 CUs and consumes around 215W, but it's about 30% faster than the previous iteration. Alternatively, the RX 6800 XT uses 303W of power (40% more than 5700 XT) and delivers about 80-90% better performance.

The end result of the various architectural changes is that the companies are generally tied when it comes to efficiency. That's especially true when looking at third party cards: Custom RTX 3080 cards often use around 350W of power, and so do custom RX 6800 XT cards — with a few models from both sides pushing into the 400W range. It's a tie in the mid-range segment as well, with the RTX 3060 Ti drawing 206W and the RTX 3070 using 218W, just slightly above and below the RX 6700 XT.

The budget segment may technically go to Nvidia still, but then the budget segment doesn't actually exist right now with cards like the GTX 1650 Super selling for $400 or more, right alongside the RX 5500 XT.

Winner: Tie

Architecturally, Nvidia's Ampere GPUs come out slightly ahead of AMD's RDNA2, but TSMC's N7 process trumps Samsung Foundry's 8N process. When we factor in all aspects of both sides, power and efficiency are close enough that it's impossible to declare a winner. Like gaming performance, certain workloads may favor AMD while others favor Nvidia when it comes to efficiency and power consumption, but the current generation doesn't show any major flaws on either side.

Drivers and Software

Both AMD and Nvidia offer drivers on a regular cadence, typically with at least one release each month, more when there are a lot of new games coming out. Not surprisingly, depending on the game, performance and support can swing wildly in favor of one side or the other. A few examples from the past year are worth mentioning.

Watch Dogs Legion ran better at launch on Nvidia hardware, and even though ray tracing worked on AMD's latest generation GPUs, it was sort of broken — it didn't render all the RT effects correctly. The latest game patches and driver updates have finally rectified that situation, but Nvidia won the WDL match up. That was expected, as Nvidia was also promoting the game. The same thing happened with Cyberpunk 2077. Forget the buggy launch for a moment; the game simply ran better and looked better on Nvidia's RTX cards. Now that a patch is set to finally enable RT support on AMD's new GPUs, Nvidia still holds the performance advantage. Again, it was an Nvidia promotional title, so we'd expect as much.

AMD has promotional games as well, however. Borderlands 3 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla both fall into that category, and both run better on AMD's latest GPUs — sometimes markedly so. But from a higher-level view looking at a wider swath of games, day-0 driver support and performance tends to be far less extreme than the few examples cited here.

What about stability and other aspects of the drivers? While there was a lot of noise about black screens with the first generation Navi cards, we didn't encounter much in the way of problems that couldn't be fixed by a clean driver install. AMD did acknowledge the issue and supposedly patched things up, and we haven't noticed any significant problems in the past year or so. AMD's drivers can auto-update, there are loads of settings and other services that can be useful, and overall the RX 6700 XT drivers have worked fine in our experience.

The same goes for Nvidia's drivers, minus the black screen issues of 2019. Our biggest complaint with Nvidia is the data mining aspect of requiring users to log in — and solve a captcha — but in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal. We do give GeForce Experience an edge over Radeon Settings when it comes to game optimizations and streaming features, but both sides work well.

Winner: Tie

It's easy to get caught up looking at minutiae when discussing drivers, but the reality is that both AMD and Nvidia have been doing this for a long time, and the current state of GPU drivers hasn't caused us any major grief on either side. If you've only used Nvidia GPUs and drivers for the past five or ten years, they're familiar and offer plenty of features. The same can be said for anyone who has only used AMD GPUs and drivers during that time — except AMD has improved more, so that where we previously would have given Nvidia the edge, AMD has closed the gap in the past few years. We switch between both vendors' products on a regular basis, which can be a bit problematic sometimes (hint: Display Driver Uninstaller works great to truly clean out most cruft), and rarely have any cause for complaint.

Bottom Line

The Radeon RX 6700 XT and GeForce RTX 3070 are closely matched, with several ties. Even the categories where one side comes out ahead are close, but overall we give the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 a slight lead. That's largely thanks to its superior performance — vastly superior performance if we include ray tracing and DLSS in the mix.

Price and availability end up being more important than any other factor, however, and unfortunately neither GPU ranks very well in those respects. Whichever company can produce the most cards will inevitably win the overall battle. Right now, based on what we're seeing from the Steam Hardware Survey at least and our GPU pricing index, Nvidia leads in availability — the RTX 3070 currently ranks as the most used latest generation GPU. (Grains of salt with regards to Steam's obscure statistics, naturally.)

It will be a wonderful day when either of these graphics cards sell at MSRP or less. That's extremely unlikely to occur any time during 2021, unfortunately, and we could see the next generation RTX 40-series and RX 7000 series by the time things settle down. That’s assuming things actually do return to normal, of course. But that's a depressing thought so let's not go there.

Anyone that actually manages to acquire either of these GPUs should be happy with the result. Performance tends to match the previous generation RTX 2080 Super, and beats the old RTX 2070 Super by about 15% as well. It's not a massive improvement in generational performance, but it is an improvement — or it would be if you could buy these at retail without having to jump through Newegg Shuffle and auto-notify shenanigans. 

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Yesterday, we saw yet another graphics card launch characterized by scant stock and disappointed gamers. On top of the pandemic driving a lack of resources that makes supply of the best graphics cards and other electronics scarce, the growth of cryptocurrency mining means gamers also have to fight cryptominers for GPUs. This has brought “frustration” to the folks at Sapphire Technology, according to Edward Crisler, North American PR representative.

During The Tom’s Hardware Show on Thursday, Crisler said the graphics card market was made by PC gamers and, thus, graphics cards should go to them, not shoppers looking to cash in on cryptocurrency.

AMD released its latest graphics card yesterday, but, as we easily predicted in our AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT review, the card is already widely unavailable. A quick look at popular online retailers today, like Newegg and Best Buy, results in a river of “OUT OF STOCK” messages. eBay, meanwhile, hosts almost 200 cards over MSRP, with prices as high as $2,700 for the reference card. We've been keeping track of where to buy the RX 6800, RX 6900 XT and other RX 6000 series cards too, and the story's the same.  

Part of the reason for the scarcity is the resurgence of cryptomining adding more demand to already-pressured supplies. Both cryptominers and PC gamers are going after the latest graphics cards — or, really, any card they can find at a reasonable price. But Crisler was clear that Sapphire wants gamers to buy its Radeon RX 6700 Nitro+, not cryptominers. 

“It’s very frustrating to many of us at Sapphire that the cards don’t end up in the hands of gamers. Because we built the card to give somebody a great gaming experience,” he said. 

Ed added that many PC gamers today feel abandoned by the graphics card market but argued that that’s not the case. 

“It’s not that the market abandoned us. It’s that everything changed, and the market is still trying to figure out how to deal with this,” Crisler said. 

We recently saw Nvidia attempt to deal with the crypto-craze for gamers by limiting the hashing abilities of its RTX 3060, only to accidentally break the anti-mining lock on its own. For its part, AMD has said it won’t be limiting its cards’ mining prowess, PC Gamer reported. 

Sapphire itself has released some mining-targeted cards in the past, like the RX 570 16GB HDMI Blockchain Graphics Card and RX 470 Nitro Mining Edition. But Crisler doesn’t believe making cryptomining graphics cards is the answer.

“There’s a couple of problems with that. First, you just pulled from the GPUs that are available for gaming cards … Second, when you sell out of the mining cards, they're just gonna go buy the gaming cards,” he said. “So developing a mining-only card isn’t necessarily a great idea because it doesn’t solve the issue for the gamers.” 

For the full discussion, see the video above or check out The Tom’s Hardware Show on YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or as a podcast. 

Sapphire is back with new custom graphics cards designed around the RX 6700XT graphics card that launches today. Sapphire's new 6700XT models come in the form of the NITRO+ and the lower-end Pulse.

The RX 6700XT Nitro+ is Sapphire's flagship card in its 6700XT lineup. It features a large triple-fan cooling system that looks identical to the RX 6800 Nitro+. But in fact, it's slightly smaller at 2.5 slots thick and a few millimeters shorter compared to its bigger RX 6800 counterpart.

For cooling, the card the 6700 XT Nitro+ uses Sapphires own "Wave Fin Design" and V-Shape Fin technology, which optimizes the fin array of the heatsink to minimize air turbulence from the intake fans as much as possible. Sapphire says this can result in a 5.5% improvement to cooling performance

Aesthetically, the 6700XT Nitro+ looks identical to Sapphires' other RDNA2 based Nitro+ graphics cards. The front shroud features a matte black finish with silver accents lining the top and bottom of the shroud. To the back is a large silver backplate, with several large cutouts to the rear and sides that allow the heatsink to breathe more effectively.

To the side, you get a fully RGB-lit Sapphire logo as well as an RGB illuminated light-bar. For power, the card comes with a single 8-pin and 6-pin. For display outputs, you get three DisplayPorts and a single HDMI. We don't know the exact revision of these video outputs, but presumably, they should be the same as the reference design.

There's also a dual UEFI BIOS setup on this card; one BIOS is optimized with a silent fan curve, the other with a more aggressive fan curve.

The RX 6700XT also comes with a factory overclock, the Game Clock has been increased from 2424MHz to 2548MHz, and the Boost Clock has been increased from 2581MHz to 2622MHz.

RX 6700 Pulse

The RX 6700XT Pulse is Sapphire's entry-level card that's optimized for a better price-to-performance ratio.

Instead of the triple fan design, Sapphire opted to go with a dual-fan solution (with larger fans) for the Pulse. The card is much smaller as well, at just 2.2 PCI-e slots thick and is just 260mm long (compared to the Nitro+ which measures 310mm long).

The Pulse features a more stealth-like aesthetic with a full matte black finish on the shroud, fans, and backplate. Plus there are several red accents dotting the card.

Poer consumption is the big advantage of this card over the Nitro+ — the card only has a total board power of 230W, compared to 260W for the Nitro+. And with the Pulse's low form factor, it should be a better choice for small form factor builds.

We don't yet know what pricing will be like for both cards. However, expect that info soon because the RX 6700XT launches today. Be sure to get onto your favorite retailer's website early today to get a chance to purchase a 6700XT. There's a good chance the 6700XT's stock will run dry just as fast as every other graphics card launch we've seen for the past 6 months.

An AMD representive has told PC Gamer that the chipmaker, unlike Nvidia, has no plans to pull any shenanigans with its RDNA2 graphics cards in regards to cryptocurrency mining.

When Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 3060, the company was firm on its decision to implement a hash rate limiter on the mid-range Ampere graphics card to dissuade cryptocurrency miners. (Note that the limiter only applied to Ethash / Dagger-Hashimoto.) So, you can imagine the level of backlash when Nvidia mistakenly released a beta driver that lifted the limiter. In a statement to PC Gamer, AMD Product Manager Nish Neelalojanan stated that "We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter."

"That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself."

The Radeon RX 6700 XT isn't too shabby when it comes to cryptocurrency mining either. The Navi 22 graphics card brings 12GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit memory interface. While not super impressive, the Radeon RX 6700 XT pumps out a maximum memory bandwidth up to 384 GBps, and we all know how Ethereum loves bandwidth. In our tests, we were able to squeeze a hash rate of 47.5 MH/s out of the Radeon RX 6700 XT, which is roughly the same level of Ethereum performance that we get out of the GeForce RTX 3060 (with its unlocked development driver).

Although AMD isn't putting in any obstacles for cryptocurrency miners, Neelalojanan made it clear that the chipmaker doesn't favor them either. For AMD, gamers are on the top of the priority list. Neelalojanan affirmed that "All our optimization, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we've optimized everything for gaming. Clearly gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it's not going to be ideal for mining workloads. That all said, in this market, it's always a fun thing to watch."

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is set to launch March 18, starting at $479. Performance-wise, the Navi 22 graphics card goes head-to-head with the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. It also cleans house on the RTX 3060 12GB, thanks to its gaming-optimized Infinity Cache and additional compute resources.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has landed — or at least, it will land tomorrow at retail, and sell out 0.67 seconds later. (For a bot, that's practically an eternity!) This also marks the debut of AMD's smaller Navi 22 GPU, which we'll call Little Big Navi or Medium Navi or something. Officially priced at $479, AMD pits the RX 6700 XT against both the RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070, targeting the sweet spot for price and performance among the best graphics cards and landing in the upper ranks of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Let's find out how it stacks up in our comprehensive review.

Architecturally, Navi 22 doesn't add or remove features from Big Navi and RDNA2. It comes with full DirectX Raytracing (DXR) support and implements the full DirectX 12 Ultimate features list, including Variable Rate Shading (VRS), mesh shaders, and sampler feedback. What AMD has done echoes what we've seen in past generations of GPUs: It trimmed the fat, shrinking the die size by reducing the number of shader cores, memory controllers, and Infinity Cache. Here's a quick overview of the specs for AMD's latest GPUs, plus the previous generation Navi 10-based RX 5700 XT for comparison. 

AMD made some serious cuts with Navi 22 compared to Navi 21, with half the potential CUs and shader cores. That's the biggest change, but there are others. The Infinity Cache checks in at 96MB now, 25% smaller than on Big Navi. Similarly, there are now six 32-bit memory interfaces instead of 8 interfaces, which reduces bandwidth by 25%. AMD compensates for the hefty reduction in core counts by delivering the highest official GPU clocks so far, with a Game Clock rated at 2424MHz — and like other RDNA2 chips, it can and often will exceed that in gaming workloads, with a maximum boost clock of 2581MHz (it's actually a bit higher than that according to AMD's drivers, but that's what AMD lists on the official spec sheet).

The RX 6700 XT's clock speed represents a bit of an interesting compromise. To push clocks into the 2.5GHz range, AMD had to increase the power limits. Considering the smaller die and reduced VRAM, normally we'd expect a pretty significant drop in power requirements compared to the RX 6800, but AMD lists a TBP (Typical Board Power, meaning it includes all power and not just the GPU) of 230W. That's not bad, and it's certainly within reach of most modern gaming PCs as it only requires a decent 500W PSU (AMD recommends 650W or higher). However, it's slightly more than Nvidia's competing RTX 3060 Ti and 3070 GPUs.

Navi 22 actually looks very similar to Nvidia's GA106 used in the recent RTX 3060 12GB. It has the same amount of memory and a similar die size (slightly larger for AMD due to the Infinity Cache). Had AMD kept clock speeds closer to 2.25GHz, it probably could have shaved off a decent amount of power — certainly less than 200W is possible. But higher clocks come with performance benefits, and AMD apparently felt sacrificing some efficiency to boost performance was the better course.

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Today, we have two RX 6700 XT cards. AMD's reference card comes with the base level of performance and a design that echoes the other RX 6000 reference cards. Physically, the 6700 XT has the length and width of the RX 6800, but it's slightly shorter and significantly lighter. It measures 267x110x38mm and weighs 883g, while the RX 6800 measures 267x120x38mm and weighs 1384g. The RX 6700 XT also uses a dual-fan configuration, but it has custom 88mm fans, whereas the 6800 has custom 78mm fans. Considering the similar power ratings, we'd expect the RX 6700 XT to run a bit hotter than the other RDNA2 cards, but we'll check the details below.

The other card we have comes from Sapphire, the RX 6700 XT Nitro+. Besides a modest factory overclock, the Sapphire card uses a much larger heatsink with triple fans. It measures 313x131x48mm, so it's a 2.5-slot width. Despite the large size, it only weighs 1020g — more than the reference card, but quite a bit less than the reference 6800 card. The two outer fans on the Nitro+ are custom 94mm diameters, while the center fan is a slightly smaller 83mm model (all measurements are mine, and could be off by about 1-2mm).

We'll have a separate write-up of the Sapphire card soon, and we'll include the performance results here as a point of reference for the various factory overclocked models that will likely be far more common than the reference design. We ran out of time during testing to do a full overclocking investigation, so the Sapphire card also stands in for those results. We'll also include performance results from a Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti card in the charts to show how custom Nvidia cards stack up — and the Gigabyte card was tested with the latest 461.72 drivers, which mostly appears to have affected performance in Horizon Zero Dawn. 

Software: FidelityFX, Radeon Boost, and More

The latest AMD and Nvidia drivers are packed full of features and options. For AMD, the latest enhancements include Anti-Lag, Radeon Boost, Image Sharpening, streaming options, and more. AMD also offers other software tools, like the FidelityFX library for developers, including CAS (Contrast Aware Sharpening), ambient occlusion, and screen space reflections. AMD's Super Resolution remains a work in progress and isn't available yet, unfortunately. All of the FidelityFX libraries are royalty-free and open source and work with any compatible graphics card, including Nvidia's cards.

Time constraints preclude us from testing every feature in the software options, and turning certain options on can impact our performance measurements. We ended up benchmarking using the "Standard" profile in AMD's drivers, which turns off all extras. We've also encountered bugs in the past (e.g., with Enhanced Sync) that sometimes make the extras more trouble than they're worth. Still, we appreciate having choices for tuning performance available.

As an example, Radeon Boost combines resolution scaling with CAS to improve performance. When you're moving, and particularly turning, most games have blur effects, and it's difficult to see all of the high quality details. At the same time, turning represents an action that can benefit from higher frame rates, as it often means you're trying to aim at an enemy. Radeon Boost lowers your rendering resolution in such situations to increase fps, and the loss in image fidelity shouldn't be very noticeable. Theoretically, it's the best of both worlds… but it doesn't work well for our apples-to-apples benchmarking.

There's a whole series of testing we can look at, including things like Radeon Boost, DLSS, Anti-Lag, Reflex, Chill, and more. We're looking at ways to quantify these features, but again: Time constraints. Our advice is to try some of these features and see if you like the result. If a feature potentially drops fps slightly but improves latency, that could be a net win. Or if a feature improves fps while causing a drop in image quality that you don't actually notice, that's another potential win. AMD and Nvidia both have a bunch of tech that's worth further investigation, but we'll focus on performance in like for like testing for this initial review.

We're interested in hearing your thoughts on what features matter most as well. We know AMD and Nvidia make plenty of noise about certain technologies, but we question how many people actually use the tech. If you have strong feelings for or against a particular tech, let us know in the comments section.

Test Setup

Our test hardware remains unchanged from previous reviews, but we have made a few updates. Specifically, we're now running the latest version of Windows 10 (20H2, build 19042.867), and we've also updated our motherboard BIOS to version 7B12v1B1, which includes beta resizable BAR support (aka, 'ReBAR').

AMD first brought attention to this existing feature of PCI Express with its RX 6800 series launch last November, dubbing it Smart Access Memory (SAM). At the time, AMD only supported the feature with the latest-generation Zen 3 CPUs, 500-series chipset motherboards, and AMD's latest RDNA2 GPUs. Since then, both Nvidia and Intel have begun supporting ReBAR as well, and AMD has extended support to other CPUs and GPUs. As a result, it's now possible for us to enable ReBAR on our primary test PC.

Speaking of which, we keep thinking it should be time to upgrade, but the gains from slightly faster CPUs aren't quite to the point where we've felt it was necessary to swap testbeds and retest everything. That's a daunting task. We looked at CPU scaling on the latest GPUs at the time of the RTX 3060 Ti launch, with a focus on the top-performing solutions (Ryzen 9 5900X, Core i9-10900K, and Core i9-9900K). While there were some differences, overall the net gain from swapping to a different CPU is only 1–2 percent, and the 9900K remains more than capable. Maybe we'll swap when the 11900K arrives later this month; more likely, waiting for Alder Lake or Zen 4 seems like a better plan.

We're using the same 13 games as well, but again with a change: Besides game patches, we've elected to drop DXR use in Dirt 5 and Watch Dogs Legion — sorry, ray tracing fans. There are several reasons for this. First, DXR support in Dirt 5 was provided via an early access code, and the support was and is still buggy. Second, the visual improvements from enabling ray tracing in these games are present, but they're not huge while the performance hit can be quite significant. Finally, we wanted to include AMD's previous-gen RX 5700 XT card in our test results, and it can't support DXR.

We'll be looking at a deeper investigation into the state of ray tracing in the coming days. It remains an interesting topic and it's not going away, but we felt it wasn't as critical a factor on the lower echelon cards. AMD's RT performance remains generally worse than Nvidia's RT performance, but some of that undoubtedly stems from Nvidia's position as the first company to provide DXR hardware and the 2-year lead it had on AMD. DLSS is something we would also need to factor into testing, and then we're back to comparing apples and AI-upscaled apples — not exactly unfair, but also not quite the same. So, stay tuned for a future article on the subject.

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Radeon RX 6700 XT 1080p Gaming Performance

AMD pitches the Radeon RX 6700 XT primarily as a 1440p gaming solution, or alternatively, a 1080p solution targeting higher fps. We'll start with the 1080p results and move up to 1440p and 4K below. Given the high-end price, we're sticking with our ultra (max/highest without MSAA or SSAA) settings for this review. Our GPU benchmarks hierarchy includes results from 'medium' quality testing — or it will once we get it updated. We have the 6700 XT numbers, but need to update the text and charts.

Overall, the RX 6700 XT achieves buttery smooth frame rates at 1080p ultra — no surprise there. Across our test suite, which doesn't include any DXR enabled games for this review, the card averaged 131 fps, about 7% faster than the RTX 3060 Ti and 1% slower than the RTX 3070. That disclaimer about not including any ray tracing tests matters, though. Watch Dogs Legion with DXR at ultra settings dropped performance to just 35 fps, while the RTX 3060 Ti managed 52 fps at the same settings — and with DLSS Quality mode enabled, the RTX 3060 Ti jumped to 70 fps.

As noted earlier, time constraints prevented us from doing a full suite of ray tracing benchmarks, and we'll look at that in the coming days. It's also important to remember that the enhanced visuals that come from ray tracing often aren't that noticeable. Improved reflections, lighting, and shadows might be nice, but not necessarily at half the frame rate. Of course we'd say the same thing about most games' ultra settings compared to high settings.

A few other comparisons are worth pointing out. The RX 6800 is (theoretically) $100 more than the 6700 XT, a 21% difference in price, and it's only 16% faster. The RX 6700 XT is also 26% faster than the previous generation RX 5700 XT, and over 40% faster than Nvidia's RTX 2060 Super, with a launch price that's about 20% higher than those two cards. If we include the factory overclocked cards from Sapphire and Gigabyte, the story remains much the same: The Sapphire card outperformed the Gigabyte card by 6% on average.

Looking at the individual game results, the RX 6700 XT — and AMD in general — delivered significantly better performance in Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Borderlands 3. Those are both AMD promotional games, and they both use the DirectX 12 API. The results suggest some fine tuning of AMD's performance, without similar effort on behalf of Nvidia. Other DX12 games like Dirt 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Forza Horizon 4 end up closer to a 10% lead, rather than 30-45%. If we dropped the AMD-friendly games, or added more games where Nvidia performance is better (e.g. quite a few ray tracing games), we could easily distort things to make it look closer. But that's not the point.

The main takeaway here is that AMD's newcomer lands right where you'd expect, in terms of traditional rasterization performance, when looking at the official launch prices from AMD and Nvidia. It's faster than the 3060 Ti, and close to the 3070, with a price slightly lower than the 3070. If you don't care about ray tracing, or you don't want an Nvidia GPU, the 6700 XT looks good.

Radeon RX 6700 XT 1440p Gaming Performance

Gaming at 1440p continues to be the sweet spot in our view, combining high refresh rates with improved resolutions. The RX 6700 XT performance dropped by 23% compared to 1080p ultra, but all of the games we tested, at the settings we tested, stayed above 60 fps. Watch Dogs Legion does fall below 60 fps on minimum frame rates, as does Metro Exodus — and Valhalla just barely dips below that mark. Otherwise, 1440p ultra won't be a problem.

The console comparison here is appropriate, considering the 6700 XT likely comes in around the same level as the Xbox Series X — XSX has 52 CUs clocked at 1.83GHz, compared to 40 CUs at 2.4GHz for the 6700 XT, so they're pretty close. How can an Xbox manage 4K gaming while a PC can't? Easy: Dynamic resolution scaling combined with slightly lower settings. 1440p upscaled to 4K at well over 60 fps is often what you get on consoles, and you can get the same with PCs.

Overall standings don't change too much with the higher resolution, though some of the margins become a bit larger. The 6700 XT still came in 7% ahead of the 3060 Ti, but it's now 3% behind the 3070. The RX 6800 lead increased to 21%, while the 6700 XT beat the 5700 XT by 30% and the 2060 Super by 48%.

In the individual games, the results varied. Looking at just the 3060 Ti and 6700 XT, AMD's lead in Valhalla and Borderlands wasn't quite as large as at 1080p, but Dirt 5, Far Cry 5, and Horizon Zero Dawn all have slightly bigger leads for AMD. That's why it ends up a net wash. 

Radeon RX 6700 XT 4K Gaming Performance

4K ultra tends to require extreme GPUs for 60 fps, but if you're willing to tweak the settings a bit, or use dynamic resolution scaling or Radeon Boost, it's certainly within reach. Across the full suite of 13 games, the 6700 XT managed 57 fps on average, with five of the games breaking 60 fps — and a few like Forza and Strange Brigade did so by a wide margin, pulling the overall average up. Memory bandwidth starts to play a bigger role at 4K, however, so the RX 6700 XT's lead over the RTX 3060 Ti now shrinks to just 2% — and again, DLSS can easily make up for the difference and then some.

That's actually a worthwhile point to make, considering Nvidia just announced three more games with DLSS support this morning: The Fabled Woods, System Shock, and Crysis Remastered. That brings the total number of games with DLSS 2.x support up to more than 20 currently available games, with another dozen or so in development. DLSS in quality mode generally looks just as good as native rendering with TAA, with 20-30% higher performance at 1080p and 1440p, and potentially 40-50% higher performance at 4K — more if you're willing to use balanced or performance DLSS modes. That's enough to swing our vote generally in favor of the RTX 3060 Ti, or at least it would be if prices weren't in the stratosphere. 

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We noted at the start that the rated TBP comes in higher than we'd normally expect, likely thanks to the higher GPU clocks. We're not going to take the time (right now) to see how much power use drops at lower clocks, but we'll run our normal suite of Powenetics testing and check the GPU power consumption and other aspects. We run Metro Exodus at 1440p ultra and FurMark at 900p to collect these results.

It's good to see the RX 6700 XT come in a bit lower than the rated TBP, sitting at around 215W. As usual, FurMark required a bit more power, but it's only 2W in this case — nothing to worry about. It looks as though AMD was a bit conservative with its power ratings. That's better than the alternative, which we've seen quite a bit of lately, of cards using 5W-10W more than the rated TBP. Of course, third-party cards are free to increase the power limits, and clearly, the Sapphire card did.

Power scales with voltage and clock speed, and the 6700 XT has the highest reference clocks of any GPU to date by about 175MHz. Interestingly, the Sapphire and reference cards are basically tied on average clocks in Metro Exodus, while the Nitro+ makes use of its additional power in FurMark. Maximum clocks during gaming tend to average roughly 2.5GHz, depending on the game, while the RX 6700 XT still cruises along at 2.35GHz in FurMark.

Fan speeds directly affect temperatures, and here we see the reduced cooling capacity of AMD's reference design. It's not loud, but it does hit higher temperatures — not that 72C is particularly hot. The larger fans help make up for the reduced number of fans, but the triple fan cards all achieve lower temperatures. Meanwhile, Sapphire's RX 6700 XT posts some of the lowest average fan speeds we've ever seen.

Lower fan speeds naturally mean lower noise levels. The noise floor of our test environment and equipment measures 34 dB(A) at a distance of 15cm from the side of the GPU. We put the SPL (Sound Pressure Level) meter close to the GPU fans to focus on their noise, rather than case fans or other noise sources. The reference RX 6700 XT measured 40.4 dB, while Sapphire's card was only a touch above the noise floor with 36.0 dB.

Radeon RX 6700 XT Mining Performance

Unlike Nvidia's RTX 3060 12GB, AMD isn't even trying to stop miners from using its cards. On the one hand, that might seem like a poor decision, but we also saw how that all played out with Nvidia accidentally posting a development driver that doesn't fully implement the Ethereum mining speed limiter. Anyway, for better or worse, cryptocurrency mining is a thing right now, so we checked the hashing performance of the RX 6700 XT using NiceHashMiner.

Before running the built-in benchmark in precision mode, we tuned for optimal Ethereum mining performance. Basically, that means finding the highest stable memory clocks and then dropping the GPU clocks (or power limit, depending on the card) until we find a good balance.

In the case of the RX 6700 XT, we settled on 50% maximum GPU clocks (around 1300MHz) with a 150MHz GDDR6 overclock (17.2Gbps effective) and fast memory timings enabled. We also set the power limit to the maximum — that appears to help AMD's RDNA2 cards make better use of the memory bandwidth even if GPU clocks don't improve. Actual power consumption was only about 120W with these settings.

Considering Ethash tends to favor memory bandwidth over other factors, and the RX 6700 XT has a 192-bit bus instead of the 256-bit bus on the Navi 21 6800/6900 cards, the drop in hash rate pretty much matches the drop in bandwidth.

With tuning, we're able to get around 65MH/s out of the Navi 21 GPUs, while the RX 6700 XT maxed out at around 47.5MH/s. 25% less bandwidth, 25% lower hash rate. Maybe additional tuning would improve hash rates a bit more, but it's unlikely the 6700 XT will get much above 48MH/s with current mining software.

It's worth pointing out that 48MH/s is actually lower than the previous-gen RX 5700/5700 XT, again, thanks to the narrower memory bus width. It's slightly faster than the RX 5600 XT due to the higher memory clocks and also matches the "oops, we accidentally unlocked it" RTX 3060 12GB in Ethash rates.

What does that mean for gamers? Not much, except that the other cards that can do around 48MH/s currently sell for $800 or more, which means you can pretty much count on and a very limited supply of cards priced remotely close to the official MSRP, and the RX 6700 XT selling out.

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It feels like so much has happened in just the few short months since the launch of Big Navi. In December, all we had to worry about was limited supply and scalpers hoovering up what few graphics cards there were, only to see cards show up on eBay at significant price premiums. Now we have to deal with all of that, plus coin mining fueled shortages and even higher prices.

If all of the Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA2 GPUs were available at prices close to MSRP, the RX 6700 XT would look a bit overpriced. It's basically a match for the RTX 3060 Ti, without the option for DLSS and weaker ray tracing performance, at an $80 price premium. Calling this an RTX 3070 competitor is a bit too ambitious, unless you limit testing to AMD-promoted games like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, Dirt 5, etc. But now? Now there are a lot of gamers who would happily pay $479 for an RX 6700 XT — and they're not likely to find one in stock.

AMD's Navi 22 chip takes over from the previous generation Navi 10 chip, packing in new features and a large Infinity Cache that results in 33% larger die. It's not just ray tracing and cache, though, as VRS, mesh shaders, and a reworked pipeline that can hit significantly higher clocks are all part of the package. If nothing else, the clocks on AMD's RDNA2 parts are certainly impressive, and the 6700 XT typically runs at clocks around 40% higher than RX 5700 XT. Combined with the other architectural tweaks and enhancements, that yields gaming performance that's around 30% faster, plus 50% more VRAM to ensure you won't hit memory limits in the most voracious of games.

Is that enough? At 'official' prices — which are basically just fantasyland right now — we'd call this a good card, but we'd point to the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT as better overall picks. More memory, more cores, better performance, and not that much more expensive. We'd also give the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070 an edge over the 6700 XT, due to features, performance, and pricing (in that order). Except, right now, the Navi 21 and Ampere cards are all selling at more than double their MSRPs on eBay, and finding cards at retail continues to be a problem.

There's also the next-gen console factor to consider. We're big proponents of PC gaming, but you can get a very good gaming experience from an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5. In fact, the RX 6700 XT ends up as a very close match to the Xbox Series X GPU: Fewer cores and higher clocks make it a net wash. Of course, all the next-gen consoles keep selling out as well, but at least miners aren't snapping them up, which means you can find the consoles for around $600. Given a choice between $600 for an Xbox or potentially $800 (what the RTX 3060 currently sells for on eBay) for an RX 6700 XT, sadly, we would have to say the consoles are the better deal right now from a pure gaming perspective. Unless you want to mine when you're not gaming to offset the cost of the card, maybe?

There's no question the Radeon RX 6700 XT represents a potent card at a reasonable price. Rather, the question is how many cards will actually be available for anywhere close to AMD's official launch price. We suspect that, just like with the other RDNA2 cards, the answer will be "not nearly enough." Even if mining weren't making a bad situation worse, the latest GPUs would likely still be hard to come by, and shortages on various tech components — including GPUs, memory, substrates, and even automobile and smartphone chips — are currently projected to last until 2022.

The good news is that, as a smaller chip, AMD planned for higher sales back when it ordered Navi 22 wafers. If AMD follows the usual pattern, there will probably be twice as many RX 6700 XT cards as all the Navi 21 cards combined. Maybe the less impressive mining performance will make them less attractive to miners as well. Unfortunately, we doubt that will be the case. That means if you can find one for sale at MSRP tomorrow, you should probably just buy it — even if you don't want it, you can almost certainly find someone who will buy it off of you at a decent markup. Or you could just be a good friend and trade it to someone at cost, since getting one will be more like winning the lotto than just navigating through the usual checkout procedures.

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VideoCardz has just leaked renders of one of PowerColor's new Hellhound series graphics card. As it's pretty straightforward, the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound is based on AMD's latest Radeon RX 6700 XT and designed to contend with the best graphics cards on the market.

For the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound, PowerColor is experimenting with a black and blue theme. The graphics card arrives with a dual-slot black cooler that employs a trio of cooling fans with translucent fan blades. PowerColor even dipped the bracket in black paint, which is a nice finishing touch on the vendor's part. 

The cooling fans feature blue lighting, but it's uncertain if the RGB palette is available or not. The Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound also incorporates a full-cover backplate that has the new Hellhound logo. The cutout on the backplate should help with heat dissipation.

The clock speeds for the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound remain a mystery. Given the tier of the Hellhound series, it should come with lower operating clocks than PowerColor's other higher tier models, such as the Liquid Devil, Red Devil or Red Dragon family of graphics cards.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound may be using a custom PCB as the PCIe power connector layout is different from AMD's reference design. The vanilla Radeon RX 6700 XT utilizes one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCIe power connector. The Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound, on the other hand, resorts to two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, which also insinuate a strong factory overclock.

The display outputs on the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound fall in line with the reference design though. You get access to one HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs with DSC support.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT will have its official coming out party on March 18 so we should know pricing for the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound in the upcoming days. For reference, the Radeon RX 6700 XT will start at $479. Taking into account the amount of customization on the Radeon RX 6700 XT Hellhound, it'll probably carry a small premium.

ASRock has revealed its lineup of custom-designed Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards. The family includes three boards that offer different levels of performance and features, and therefore will sell at three different price points. All of the cards feature enhanced voltage regulating modules (VRMs), require two eight-pin power connectors, and come with sophisticated cooling systems. So expect them to be faster than AMD's reference designs.

ASRock's lineup features the Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D 12GB OC (RX6700XT PGD 12GO), the Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger Pro 12GB OC(RX6700XT CLP 12GO), and the Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger D 12GB (RX6700XT CLD 12G). All of these cards are aimed at enthusiasts, but for some reason ASRock does not disclose their exact frequencies. So it's impossible to make guesses about how exactly these boards stack up against each other and against AMD's reference Radeon RX 6700 XT. That said, ASRock is not the only company to keep the specifications of its Radeon RX 6700 XT cards a secret.

ASRock's Phantom Gaming is the company's premium gaming brand, so it's not surprising that the Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D 12GB OC is the company's top-of-the-range Navi 22-powered product. The graphics card relies on an ASRock-designed black printed circuit board (PCB) featuring DrMOS power stage devices, 60A inductors, and solid-state capacitors to ensure very clean power is delivered to the GPU. 

The card is equipped with a sophisticated cooling solution comprising two massive aluminum heatsinks, four heat pipes, three striped axial fans, a reinforced metal frame, and a metal backplate. Traditionally for higher-end products, the card is outfitted with addressable RGB LEDs (which can be disabled with a switch). The cooler seems to be at least 2.5 slots wide, so the Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming will need to be installed into fairly roomy cases.

ASRock's Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger Pro 12GB and the Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger D 12GB sit below the Phantom Gaming, yet they feature the same AG2005 revision 1.00 PCB as their higher-end counterpart. So from power delivery, components, and build quality standpoints, all three products are exactly the same (or at least very similar).  

As the name suggests, the Challenger Pro is positioned above the Challenger D, which is why it is equipped with a larger triple-fan cooling system with three heat-pipes. By contrast, the Challenger D is slightly more compact and has two fans. Meanwhile, both boards are two slots wide, so they will fit into smaller cases. 

ASRock has not revealed any MSRPs for its custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards, which is not particularly surprising given shortages of GPUs and components. Whatever the launch price, expect them to sell out faster than you can fat-finger them into a shopping cart.

In AMD's recent announcement of the RX 6700XT,  the company revealed that the new GPU would feature a game clock of 2,424 MHz. That spec is much higher than any of AMD's other RDNA2 GPUs, but now, according to a Geekbench 5 benchmark (Tweeted by APISAK), we have evidence that the RX 6700 XT could boost much higher than that.

In the openCL test for this specific RX 6700XT, Geekbench identified the GPU running at a peak core frequency of 2.85 GHz, which is 17% higher than the card's rated game clock.

With modern GPU algorithms, this type of behavior is not uncommon, both AMD's and Nvidia's GPUs for the past few years, including all the best graphics cards, have the ability to boost beyond their rated boost frequencies if power and temperature allow it.

But with the 6700XT in particular, the alleged extra headroom available is impressive. With AMD's Navi 21 GPUs, the extra headroom available is not as high as on the 6700XT without manually increasing power limits.

This could be a surprising benefit from AMD's new Navi 22 GPU (that the 6700XT is using), which features a 50% reduction in core count compared to Navi 21. The benefits of a reduced core count include less power output and as a result, less heat.

So theoretically, if the power delivery and cooling system on an RX 6700XT stay similar to that of an RX 6800, the RX 6700XT's remaining cores can boost much higher and gobble up all the remaining thermal and power headroom the other cores were using.

However, what Geekbench 5 reported was the GPU's maximum frequency, not the card's average clock speed which could be much lower, depending on how large the thermal and power envelope is. Plus we don't know if the card was manually overclocked.

But, if the RX 6700 XT can sustain anything close to 2.85 GHz, then this will be exciting news for RDNA2 enthusiasts and RX 6700XT buyers, as AMD is letting the cores boost as high as they can within reason.

Evidently, not all reference Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards will arrive with the same clock speeds — Biostar (via VideoCardz) has listed a reference design that flaunts a small factory overclock.

Biostar refers to the graphics card as "VA67T6TEL9 Ver. RX6700XT M," although it's uncertain if that's the actual model name or the part number. The manufacturer used a render of AMD's reference Radeon RX 6700 XT, but the packaging itself has the "Extreme Gaming" label. The last bit may allude to the fact that Biostar's version is clocked higher than the usual reference edition.

AMD lists the Radeon RX 6700 XT with a 2,321 MHz base clock and game and boost clocks up to 2,424 MHz and 2,581 MHz, respectively. The Biostar Radeon RX 6700 XT features slightly higher clock speeds across the board. The graphics card arrives with a 2,330 MHz base clock, and game and boost clocks that scale to 2,433 MHz and 2,615 MHz, respectively. The increase in base and game clocks is negligible, while the boost clock showed a 1.3% uplift.

In case you missed AMD's announcement, the Radeon RX 6700 XT debuts with the Navi 22 silicon that's fresh out of TSMC's 7nm cooking oven. Navi 22 ushers in 40 Compute Units (CUs) for a grand total of 2,560 Streaming Processors (SPs). The graphics card also packs 40 ray accelerators. The Radeon RX 6700 XT offers 12GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory that runs across a 192-bit memory interface to supply a memory bandwidth up to 384 GBps. The number might look disillusioning, but let's not forget that AMD offsets the memory with 96MB of Infinity Cache.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT will hit the stores on March 18 for $479. The RDNA 2 graphics card will take on the GeForce RTX 3070, which starts at $499. With the graphics card shortage still transpiring, it might not be a battle of who is the fastest, but rather which card is readily available for purchase. AMD has promised to have substantially more Radeon RX 6700 XT stock at launch, so let's hope the chipmaker delivers.

Asus has introduced its family of custom graphics cards based on the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU with 2560 stream processors and a 192-bit memory interface. The new boards formally belong to higher-end/performance mainstream segment of the market, yet they have almost all the features that are found on enthusiast-grade graphics cards.  

Asus's family of custom Radeon RX 6700 XT video cards includes three models: the Dual Radeon RX 6700 XT, the TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6700 XT, and the ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT. The ROG Strix-badged Radeon RX 6700 XT card naturally sits on top of the stack, the TUF-branded board combines durability and performance, whereas the Dual card is slightly more compact than the other two and can fit into Micro-ATX and Mini-ITX cases.

All the products rely on their own custom PCB that is both tall and long, which most probably indicates an enhanced voltage regulating module (VRM). The cards also feature a hardware BIOS switch to automatically load different clocks and voltage settings, so it is safe to say that the three Radeon RX 6700 XT boards from Asus feature higher frequencies than those recommended by AMD.

As far as power delivery is concerned, the ROG and the TUF Radeon RX 6700 XT cards use two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, whereas the Dual Radeon RX 6700 XT board comes with one eight-pin and one six-pin PCIe power connectors. 

All of the Asus Radeon RX 6700 XT cards are equipped with a large proprietary cooling system that is wider than two slots, feature two (in case of the Dual model) or three fans that stop at idle, multiple heat pipes, and a backplate to improve cooling and guarantee longevity. Since the new custom-built Radeon RX 6700 XT cards are designed mostly for DIY enthusiasts, their coolers are equipped with addressable RGB LEDs, making sure that the card blends in with your chosen aesthetic. The ROG has plenty of LEDs, whereas the TUF and Dual boards have more modest lighting.

Asus yet has to announce final specifications of its Dual Radeon RX 6700 XT, TUF Gaming Radeon RX 6700 XT, and ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT cards, so at this point it is impossible to tell how the new cards stack up against AMD's reference design. 

Asus did not disclose pricing or availability dates of its Radeon RX 6700 XT, though given the current deficit of GPUs and components, this is hardly surprising. 

Coming on the heels of AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT announcement, MSI unveiled its own graphics cards lineup carrying the same Navi 22 GPU with 2560 stream processors along with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory interconnected using a 192-bit interface. The family includes three boards, one featuring AMD's reference design and the other two developed in-house by MSI.  

MSI's reference Radeon RX 6700 XT 12G will most likely be the cheapest card in the lineup, it follows all of AMD's design recommendations, yet the company does not disclose its final GPU clock rate just yet. The card uses one eight-pin and one six-pin auxiliary PCIe power connector, it also has four display outputs: three DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1 with VRR support.

The MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Mech 2X is positioned slightly above the reference board and likely features frequencies higher than those recommended by AMD. This card is slightly shorter, approximately 1 inch,  when compared to AMD's variant, but it is taller and has a thicker cooling system, which indicates that MSI installed an enhanced voltage regulating module and uses a specially designed cooling system that features the company's Torx Fans 3.0. The board has the same set of display outputs as the Radeon RX 6700 XT 12G, but has two eight-pin power connectors.

The top-of-the-range board in MSI's Navi 22-powered lineup is the Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X that has the best cooling system and we assume the highest clocks, but that detail is still TBD. This card uses its own design and is longer, taller, and thicker than the rest products in the lineup, which indicates further VRM enhancements. The board comes with MSI's Twin Frozr 8 cooling system with two Torx Fans 4.0 to maximize its overclocking potential. As for connectors, we are dealing with a unit featuring three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs, one HDMI 2.1 port with VRR support, and two eight-pin PCIe power connectors. 

MSI's Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics boards are projected to be available in mid-March. Given the current situation on the market, MSI did not disclose any MSRPs for the new boards.

We now have official specs for the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT, yet another poorly kept secret in the land of GPUs you can't actually buy. We've been expecting Navi 22 to join the ranks of the best graphics cards and land somewhere near the RTX 3060 Ti in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy for several months now, and it will officially arrive on March 18, 2021, at 9am Eastern. It will be completely sold out by 9:00:05, and based on recent events like the RTX 3060 12GB, we doubt more than a handful of people will manage to acquire one at whatever MSRP AMD sets.

Update: Check out our Radeon RX 6700 XT review that's now live.

Speaking of which, AMD revealed that it plans to launch the RX 6700 XT with a starting price of $479. Considering AMD expects it to be faster than the RTX 3070, never mind the RTX 3060 Ti, that's a reasonable target. The die size also appears to be relatively large, thanks to a still-sizeable Infinity Cache. Here's the full list of known specs:

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT comes in with the highest GPU clocks we've to date, 2424 MHz. The RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT both have 2250 MHz game clocks, though in actual benchmarks, we've seen speeds of more than 2500 MHz already — the Game Clock is more of a conservative boost clock. Even with a drop down to 40 CUs (from 60 CUs on the RX 6800), the higher clock speeds should prove relatively potent. Raw theoretical performance sits at 12.4 TFLOPS, and assuming AMD uses 16Gbps GDDR6 again (which is likely), it will have 384GBps of bandwidth. Except, it still has a honking 96MB L3 Infinity Cache.

We were very curious about how far AMD would cut down the Infinity Cache from Navi 21. The answer appears to be "not very much." The Biggest Navi chip has up to 80 CUs and 128MB of Infinity Cache, so AMD cut the computational resources in half but only lopped off a quarter of the cache. That should keep cache hit rates high, which means effective bandwidth — even from a 192-bit memory interface — should be much higher than Nvidia's similarly-equipped RTX 3060 12GB.

Let's go back to that TFLOPS number for a moment, though. 12.4 TFLOPS may not sound like much, but it's a big jump from the previous gen 40 CU part. The RX 5700 XT had a theoretical 9.8 TFLOPS, and we know the Infinity Cache allows the GPU to get closer to that maximum level of performance in games. That means a 40-50 percent jump in performance might be possible. On the other hand, the RX 6800 with 60 CUs, even at lower clocks, is rated for 16.2 TFLOPS, a 31% increase in compute potential. It also has 33% more memory bandwidth, which means on average it should be at least 20% faster than the 6700 XT, for about 20% more money (well, if MSRP was anything but a fantasy right now).

There are other indications this will still be a performant card, like the 230W board power (just 20W lower than RX 6800). And then there's the die shot comparison.

AMD didn't reveal all of the specs, but based on that image, it looks like RX 6700 XT / Navi 22 will max out at 96 ROPs (Render Outputs), and the total die size looks to be in the neighborhood of 325mm square, with around 16-17 billion transistors (give or take 10%). That's quite a bit smaller than Navi 21 (520mm square and 26.8 billion transistors), and perhaps the above images aren't to scale, but clearly, there's a lot of other circuitry besides the GPU cores that still needs to be present — the cores and cache only account for about half of the die area.

By way of comparison, Nvidia's GA106 measures 276mm square with 12 billion transistors, while the GA104 has 17.4 billion transistors and a 393mm square die size. AMD's Navi 22 should be competitive with GA104, but with a smaller size thanks to its TSMC N7 process technology. However, TSMC N7 costs more and is in greater demand, which leads back to the $479 price point.

Performance, as usual, will be the real deciding factor on how desirable the RX 6700 XT ends up being. AMD provided some initial benchmark results — using games and settings that generally favor its GPUs, naturally. Take these benchmarks with a grain of salt, in other words, but even reading between the lines, the 6700 XT looks pretty potent.

That's eight games, three with definite AMD ties (Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Borderlands 3, and Dirt 5) and two with Nvidia ties (Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs Legion). AMD says "max settings," but we suspect that means max settings but without ray tracing effects. Still, there are a lot of games that don't use RT, and of those that have it, the difference in visual quality isn't even that great for a lot of them, so rasterization performance still reigns as the most important factor. Based on AMD's data, it looks like the RX 6700 XT will trade blows with the RTX 3070.

AMD had a few other announcements today. It's bringing resizable BAR support, called AMD Smart Access Memory, to Ryzen 3000 processors. That excludes the Ryzen 3200G and 3400G APUs, which of course, are technically Zen+ architecture and have a limited x8 PCIe link to the graphics. AMD also didn't mention any Ryzen 4000 mobile or desktop APUs (i.e., Renoir), so those may not be included either, but every Zen 2 and Zen 3 AMD CPU will have Smart Access Memory.

AMD didn't discuss future Navi 22-derived graphics cards, but there will inevitably be more products built around the GPU. From what we can tell, RX 6700 XT uses the fully enabled chip with 40 CUs. Just as we've seen with Navi 21 and previous GPUs like Navi 10, not all chips are fully functional, and harvesting those partial dies is a key component of improving yields. We expect to see an RX 6700 (non-XT) at the very least, and there are opportunities for OEM-only variants as well (i.e., similar to the RX 5500 non-XT cards of the previous generation). We'll probably see the RX 6700 (or whatever the final name ends up being) within the next month.

Again, pricing and availability are critical factors for any GPU launch, and while we have no doubt AMD will sell every RX 6700 XT it produces, we just hope it can produce more than a trickle of cards. When asked about this, AMD issued the following statement:

"We hear, and understand, the frustration from gamers right now due to the unexpectedly strong global demand for graphics cards. With the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT launch, we are on track to have significantly more GPUs available for sale at launch. We continue to take additional steps to address the demand we see from the community. We are also refreshing stock of both AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards and AMD Ryzen 5000 Series processors on AMD.com on a weekly basis, giving gamers and enthusiasts a direct option to purchase the latest Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs at the suggested etail and retail price."

That's nice to hear, but we remain skeptical. We've been tracking general trends in the marketplace, and it's clear Nvidia continues to sell far more graphics cards than AMD, and it's still not coming anywhere close to meeting demand. Will Navi 22 buck that trend? Our Magic 8-Ball was cautiously optimistic, as you can see:

All joking aside, we're looking forward to another likely frustrating GPU launch. There's no indication that AMD will follow Nvidia's example and try to limit mining performance on its future GPUs, but with or without high mining performance, the RX 6700 XT will inevitably sell out. There's at least some good news in recent GPU mining profitability trends, however: Cards that were making $12–$15 per day last month are now mining in the $6–$8 range and dropping. That's not going to stop mining completely, but hopefully it means fewer people trying to start up mining farms if the potential break-even point is more than a year away, rather than 3–4 months out.

The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT officially launches on March 18. We'll have a full review at that time. Given the pictures AMD sent along, we expect there will be dual-fan reference cards, but AMD will want to shift the bulk of cards over to its AIB partners. We should see various models from all the usual partners, and we're eager to see how the GPU fares in independent testing. Check back on March 18 to find out.

Below is the full slide deck from AMD's announcement today.

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AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT announcement is still a few days away, but it seems that Videocardz has managed to source images of the latest cards from Asus. Until we get the official announcement on March 3rd, take this news with a grain of salt.

We believe the Radeon RX 6700 to be using the Navi 22 GPU with 40 CUs, 2,560 Stream Processors, and 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Basically, this card should be the RDNA2 replacement for the last-gen RX 5700 XT. One big unknown is the Infinity Cache, whether it's present in a smaller size, or even present at all, but we'll need to wait for confirmation on this from AMD.

Radeon RX 6700 XT TUF Gaming

We expect Navi 22 cards to have a lower TDP than their higher-tiered Big Navi (Navi 21) siblings, giving AIB partners such as Asus more wiggle room to develop compact coolers for the GPU. However, it seems Asus went all out on the 6700 XT TUF Gaming. The card looks almost identical to the RX 6800 variant with a width approaching three PCI-e slots and a beefy triple fan heatsink. Aesthetically, both cards share the TUF Gaming logo at the top right and the "tire track" design flowing down the middle of the card, as well as on the bottom-right and top-left edges.

Unlike the 6800, Videocardz says the 6700 XT TUF Gaming has a different heatpipe layout and a narrower PCB compared to other TUF Gaming Radeon cards. It uses a 6-pin + 8-pin configuration for the supplementary power connectors. This means the RX 6700 XT should have the lowest TDP so far of any RDNA2 GPU, but combines with the PCIe slot it could still theoretically access 300W of power. It probably won't use anything close to that, and we expect the thermals and acoustics will be quite good, but we'll have to wait and see.

Radeon RX 6700 XT Dual

The Asus RX 6700 XT Dual represents the cheaper dual-fan option for the new GPU. The card has a near 3-slot width like its bigger sibling, and is aesthetically similar to other Dual cards from Asus. It includes multi-toned black/gray trim, plus the silver/purple accents to the top of the card. The RX 6700 XT Dual will feature the same supplementary power configuration as the TUF with a single 6-pin and a single 8-pin.

For now, this is all Asus has to offer regarding its RX 6700 XT graphics cards. If Navi 22 ends up similar to Navi 21 in other aspects, we expect it to clock quite high, in the 2.25GHz range. That should be a decent improvement over the RX 5700 XT, and there should be ray tracing hardware support as well. Pricing and performance remain uknown for now, but be sure to check out our detailed coverage of the RX 6700 XT once the announcement drops on March 3rd.

AMD will reveal a new Radeon RX 6000 graphics card during Episode 3 of its "Where Gaming Begins" event on March 3 on 11 AM US Eastern. Although the chipmaker didn't specify which model, it's likely going to be the much-awaited Radeon RX 6700 XT. Following AMD's Big Navi release pattern,. the Radeon RX 6700 Xt is the next SKU in line after all.

AMD's render of the RDNA 2 graphics card aligns with a previous leaked design of what the Radeon RX 6700 could look like. On an aesthetic level, the Radeon RX 6700 XT shares similar traits as the reference design for other Big Navi models, such as the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6800. However, the Radeon RX 6700 XT features a less robust cooling system with a dual-slot design.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT emerges with a shorter cooler with only two cooling fans. A quick glimpse at the front of the graphics card reveals three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and a single HDMI 2.1 port. It would seem that AMD has removed the USB Type-C connector on the Radeon RX 6700 XT. While the USB Type-C port has its uses, it never really took off so it will please consumers to know that it has been replaced with an extra DisplayPort 1.4a output instead.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT will be gunning after Nvidia's mid-range Ampere-based graphics cards, such as the GeForce RTX 3060 that launches tomorrow. The specifications for the new Big Navi (I guess this is really Medium Navi) graphics card are still blurry, but we expect to see a full Navi 22 (codename Navy Flounder) die, which houses 40 Compute Units (CUs). As AMD has done in the past, it's reasonable to think that the chipmaker would also put out a Radeon RX 6700, which would probably leverage a cut-down version of the Navi 22 silicon.

The rumors are painting the Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6700 with 2,560 and 2,304 Stream Processors (SPs), respectively. Assuming that the SP count is accurate, the XT variant will have 40 ray accelerators at its disposal, while the non-XT variant should be equipped with 36 of them.

On the memory aspect, Gigabyte has registered multiple custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards before the EEC (Eurasian Economic Commission) with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Similary, ASRock has submitted a couple of Radeon RX 6700 SKUs with 6GB of GDDR6 memory.

Pricing and performance are important, but availability has ultimately taken up a bigger role nowadays given the graphics card shortages, crypto-mining boom and scalpers. AMD has made it clear that it'll announce a Radeon RX 6000 graphics card on March 3. However, it'll be interesting to see if it will be available for purchase sooner rather than later.

PowerColor has filed a list of model names for the yet unannounced RX 6700 and RX 6700 with the Eurasian Economic Union. Interestingly, the listing shows potential memory configurations for both GPUs: The RX 6700 XT features 12GB of VRAM and 6GB for the RX 6700. This information comes just a week after ASRock shared product names with the EEU, listing a 6GB RX 6700 and a 12GB RX 6600 XT. This makes PowerColor the second company so far to suggest an RX 6700 6GB could be on its way.

Even with PowerColor and ASRock backing each other up, the only evidence for a 6GB RX 6700 comes from the EEC and EEU. We've seen plenty of product names enter the Eurasian Economic Commission/Union that turned out to be false. So take this info with a grain of salt. Still, there's plenty of reason to suspect it's viable.

Will the RX 6700 be bottlenecked due to the low VRAM capacity? We've discussed how low VRAM capacity cards will be affected in the past, and we're reaching the point where 6GB is becoming a minimum requirement to run the latest titles at high or ultra detail settings. Perhaps if AMD does a ton of optimization for this card, and you run games without ray tracing (which is a VRAM hog), that might make 6GB okay for a mid-range RDNA2 card.

This could also be a temporary measure. GDDR6 — along with most computer parts — is experiencing massive shortages, forcing graphics card production to slow down for Nvidia and AMD. AMD could be decreasing VRAM capacity to the absolute minimum to keep production going as much as possible. Plus, there's nothing stopping AMD from making a 12GB RX 6700 in the future by using higher capacity memory chips.

The good news is that it seems like the RX 6700 XT will feature 12GB of VRAM, which should be perfectly adequate for 1440p and 4K gaming without encountering memory capacity issues. Plus, given these will be mid-range (or lower high-end) cards, 4K isn't really a major concern.

Let's hope AMD can create product volume for these future mid-range cards once they arrive. The RX 6800, 6800 XT, and 6900 XT are already super hard to come by. If more SKUs are coming soon, AMD will need to figure out a way to produce these cards in large enough quantities to maintain at least some adequate supply. Considering everything else happening right now, including Ethereum mining, delivering adequate supply on any graphics card seems unlikely.

AMD made it clear during its CES 2021 presentation that new mainstream RDNA 2 graphics cards will arrive in the first half of this year. The Radeon RX 6700 XT may be one of the very first models.

Gigabyte (via Komachi_Ensaka) today registered at least six custom Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), implying that we may be nearing the Radeon RX 6700 XT's release. While the Radeon RX 6700 XT's specifications are left to speculation, Gigabyte's submission at least confirms that the graphics card will come equipped with 12GB of GDDR6 memory.

There have been whispers that the Radeon RX 6700 XT would employ AMD's Navi 22 (codename Navy Flounder) silicon. Size-wise, the die should be smaller than Navi 21, which dwells inside the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT (one of the best graphics cards) and RX 6800. Navi 22 may well end up with 40 Compute Units (CUs), adding up to a total of 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs).

Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT Graphics Cards

Since we're looking at 12GB of GDDR6 memory, it's reasonable to think that the memory would communicate across a 192-bit memory interface. We still don't know what clock speed the memory will be running. If these are the same GDDR6 chips as the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6800 XT, then they should be clocked at 16 Gbps. Across a less generous memory bus, the Radeon RX 6700 XT would be able to deliver a maximum memory bandwidth up to 384 GBps.

As for the Infinity Cache, it would be silly to expect the Radeon RX 6700 XT to feature the same 128MB of L3 cache as the Radeon RX 6900 XT or RX 6800 XT. If the 192-bit memory interface is sound, there's a possibility of coupling six 16MB chunks of cache to each memory controller. In that case, we could see an Infinity Cache of 96MB. It's also possible the Infinity Cache size doesn't need to match with the memory controllers, in which case something smaller like 64MB is feasible.

While the Radeon RX 6900 XT and Radeon RX 6800 XT are rated for 300W, the Radeon RX 6700 XT should feature a more modest TDP in the range of 200W. If so, a single 8-pin PCIe power connector would suffice. If AMD is using the same display output formula with the Radeon RX 6700 XT as it did with the Radeon RX 6900 XT and RX 6700 XT, the Radeon RX 6700 XT will likely have an HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and possibly the USB-C port as well.

Current rumors suggest we could see RX 6700 XT (and possibly RX 6700 as well) cards launch by the end of March.

AMD's RDNA2 architecture has been full of surprises, especially in its ability to hit astronomically high core frequencies compared to the Nvidia competition. But, it appears we haven't seen the best of what RDNA 2 can offer. Patrick from Twitter has tweeted that the RX 6900 XT can hit 3 GHz (if cooling isn't a bottleneck) before running into artificial limiters. Similarly, IgorsLAB shared specifications in BIOS for the yet unannounced RX 6700 XT, showcasing its official limit of 2950Mhz on the core clock.

Note that these numbers are highly theoretical and way above what these GPUs do at stock settings. Both the Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT have rated boost clocks of 2,250 MHz. So, unless you're using liquid nitrogen or other crazy cooling methods, it's unlikely that you would hit or be able to exceed the reported 2.8-GHz limit on the 6800 XT, 3-GHz limit on the 6900 XT and 2.95-GHz limit on the 6700 XT.

It makes sense that the RX 6900 XT would have the highest frequency limit, as it is the highest tiered GPU in AMD's lineup and presumably has the best silicon as well. But what's really interesting is that the RX 6700 XT is alleged to have a maximum clock of 2950 MHz while the the RX 6800 XT maxes out at 2.8 GHz. This indicates that the 6700 XT could be great for overclocking.

IgorsLAB dug into the RX 6700 XT's BIOS a bit more and discovered that the board partner BIOSes (AIB partners unknown) feature much higher power limits and higher core voltage than the reference RX 6800. BIOS 1 (which Igor thinks is for the reference spec) is targeted at around 186W for TGP (total graphics power). For the 2nd BIOS (Igor thinks is for a high trim model) that TGP goes up to 211W. And core voltages for the RX 6700 XT are supposedly higher than the RX 6800, whose reference spec allows just 203W for TGP.

If this is true, and the RX 6700 XT cards ship around these specifications, we could see the highest factory overclocked RDNA2 chips on the market. The 40 CUs on the RX 6700 XT would potentially be fed with more juice, allowing higher frequencies on air, and only having 40 CUs means it's much easier to cool vs. 60 CUs like on the RX 6800.

It's uncertain whether it's pure speculation or insider information, but Newegg seems to have all the juicy details on AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. In the latest installment of Newegg Insider (via VideoCardz), the U.S. retailer reportedly exposes the specifications for the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6700 XT.

Newegg Insider is a platform that offers consumers buying guides, videos and product overviews. Some of the specifications in the article appear to fall in line with a previous discovery. Since we can't be certain if the author had access to confidential information or not, we recommend you take the specifications with a bit of salt.

A couple of things make us question the accuracy of Newegg Insider's alleged specifications. The publication seems to think that all three RDNA 2 graphics cards will come with a 1,500 MHz base clock, which seems doubtful. This is probably conjecture since we probably won't know the exact clock speeds until AMD announces the Radeon RX 6000 series on October 28.

Secondly, the Radeon RX 6700 XT presumably features 6GB of GDDR6 memory. If the Stream Processor (SP) count is legit, the Radeon RX 6700 XT should replace the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which has 8GB of GDDR6 memory. We wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's unlikely that the successor would arrive with less memory than the model it replaces.

The confined memory interfaces show up as red flags on the map, too. However, rumors have neem brewing that AMD might have revamped the cache design on RDNA 2 to alleviate the lower memory bandwidth.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, RX 6700 XT Specifications*

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

According to the Newegg Insider, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6700 XT are equipped with the same 1,500 MHz base clock and 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips. 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT supposedly checks in with 5,120 SPs and 16GB of GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory bus. The end result is a memory bandwidth of 512 GBps.

Apparently, the Radeon RX 6800 XT lands with 3,840 SPs and leverage 12GB of GDDR6 memory. It's plausible that the Radeon RX 6800 XT could have a 192-bit memory interface, putting the maximum theoretical bandwidth at 384 GBps.

As for the Radeon RX 6700 XT, the graphics card ostensibly has 2,560 SPs and 6GB of GDDR6 memory. The publication claims that the Radeon RX 6800 XT and the Radeon RX 6700 XT offer the same level of memory bandwidth, albeit the latter having 6GB instead of 12GB.

The final bit of information from the article shows that the Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT and RX 6700 XT might sport TDP (thermal design power) ratings of 300W, 200W, and 150W, respectively.

Admittedly, there are still a lot of questions surrounding the Radeon RX 6000 series. Lucky for us, AMD will have all the answers for us in a month.