Sometimes, graphics cards break down. Experienced repairmen can quickly identify the issue and either fix it or send the board to a bin, but some problems require an ingenious fix. KrisFix from GPUFix.de is a GPU repair specialist, and he recently encountered a malfunctioning graphics card that required him to drill two holes in the PCB and restore a trace.

This time around KrisFix got an MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT (which is still one of the best graphics cards despite being nearly three years old) with a rare problem where the fans and LEDs work, but there is no picture. The engineer claims that, so far, he has observed this behavior on six or seven graphics cards out of hundreds he has fixed. The source of the problem was a broken trace between the GPU and a memory chip, which in some cases led to the complete malfunctioning of a GPU. 

Modern high-end video cards are highly complex devices using printed circuit boards with 15 layers. Fixing a broken trace that resides deep inside the PCB is a challenge, to say the least, and the broken trace is located on the layer deep underneath the surface, eliminating almost any possibility of fixing it in a reasonable amount of time. Instead, KrisFix had to rebuild it using a wire by drilling two holes in the graphics card, solder a tiny wire to a pin on the memory soldering pad, solder it to a pin on the GPU soldering pad, and solder the DRAM chip and the GPU back.

Drilling a hole in an enthusiast-grade graphics card, such as MSI's Radeon RX 6900 XT, is a precise and delicate process that KrisFix prefers to do by hand. This whole process requires extreme precision and the use of a microscope to solder the hole, solder wires, resolder damaged capacitors, and restore broken traces on top of the PCB that got scratched during the process. 

The procedure performed by KrisFix is certainly an extraordinary one, and we assume that the stability of the board's operation was sound. However, the video report does not touch upon whether the manipulation of the memory trace length affects performance. Both GDDR5 and GDDR6 standards support read and write training sequences to ensure signal integrity, compensate for signal variabilities, and optimize timings. Timings were certainly affected by the trace length, though it is unclear how and how this affects performance in real-world games. 

While repairmen are not in the business of drilling holes in graphics boards because this tends to damage them, in some cases, drilling holes can actually give life to a video card that is seemingly gone.

AMD's Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards will not offer performance akin to that of the company's Radeon RX 7900 GPUs, but since they are now available at discounted prices, they still provide quite some value. To further increase their value, AMD kicked off its new Raise the Game bundle campaign with select Radeon RX 6000-series products on Tuesday.

If you buy AMD Radeon RX 6600 or a better graphics card, you will get a free Steam copy of Dead Island 2 and The Callisto Protocol game if you purchase a product from an eligible retailer and meet other requirements of the campaign. If you get a Radeon RX 6400 or Radeon RX 6500 XT, you will only get a copy of Dead Island 2. Those who get a PC with a Radeon RX 6000-series GPU from a participating system integrator will also get an appropriate title or title.

AMD's new bundle promotion aims to attract attention to its outgoing product line and enable its partners to sell as many boards as possible in the remaining months before replacing them with newer Radeon RX 7000-series products. AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX products will offer higher performance than the company's existing products. Still, graphics cards like the Radeon RX 6950 XT provide a good value at $785 or $800 (and keep in mind that these prices will go down once the new series comes closer to release), whereas the Radeon RX 6800 looks like a bargain at $480, especially with two games worth $120 included. Both models are still among the best graphics cards around.

The Callisto Protocol is an upcoming Unreal Engine 4-based survival horror game from the creator of the Dead Space series set to release on all modern platforms on December 2, 2022. The title became known recently for being canceled in Japan due to violent content and the developer's unwillingness to change it. Unfortunately, the developer has not published recommended PC specifications for the game, so we do not know whether it needs a Radeon RX 6700 XT or the Radeon RX 6950 XT to look well.

Dead Island 2 is another Unreal Engine 4-powered action zombie apocalypse role-playing game due to be launched on all major platforms on February 3, 2023. Unfortunately, the developer has not announced any recommended PC hardware configurations for the title, so we can only wonder whether Radeon RX 6500 XT will be enough to play it with decent quality settings.

Both games look good on screenshots, so they take advantage of AMD's RDNA 2 architecture behind the company's Radeon RX 6000-series graphics processors.

The new Raise the Game bundle promotion will run from November 8, 2022, till February 4, 2023. All coupon codes must be redeemed no later than March 4, 2023.

What may be the first clear photos of an AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics card have been shared online. Usually reliable Twitter-based leaker HXL uploaded some images with credit to ‘QQ’, a Chinese social media portal and instant messaging platform owned by Tencent. It is exciting to see what may be the first proper glance at one of AMD’s upcoming top-end RDNA3 chiplet-based desktop graphics cards, but please add a pinch of salt to what at best is an engineering sample design.

In the first image shared, above, the next gen Radeon is pictured above what looks like a Radeon RX 6900 XT reference design from AMD. Immediately you can see the new card, probably either an RX 7900 XT or XTX,  is only slightly larger than a previous gen equivalent. It could feature a larger cooler due to a higher TDP, but it isn’t really possible to draw that conclusion from such an image.

Looking at the fans, we know the reference RX 6900 XT fans are 78mm in diameter. (That's based on our own measurements.) The fans on the 7900 card, whatever it's called, appear to be slightly larger. Scaling relative to the 6900 XT suggests a fan size of 82–83mm. That's still not particularly large, compared to non-reference cards that we've reviewed. The Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix as an example uses 104mm fans, and the previous gen Asus RTX 3090 Ti TUF Gaming has 97mm fans. Both cards have 450W TBP ratings, though, so larger fans might be warranted.

Moving along to a top-down image comparison, where the purported new Radeon RX 7000 graphics card is the lower of the two pictured, there are some more interesting morsels to digest, if these images are genuine. Firstly, the new card (with the red stripe), is still powered by two  8-pin power connectors. No change where none is needed. This is an indication that rumors of an approx 350W TDP may not be a long way off.

The max draw for such a configuration should be 150W per 8-pin connector plus 75W via the PCIe socket (375W). A manufacturer will want to safely undershoot this value. Additionally, RDNA 3’s purported power efficiency means that it doesn’t need to litter the design with 8-pin ports or move to the troublesome 16-pin solution Nvidia and partners have shifted over to with the GeForce RTX 4090.

Other things we can see from the top-down image are that the RX 7900 XT/XTX features a development PCB. The PCB isn’t covered by a backplate, like a premium consumer design, and there are a number of protruding pins which developers can use for tasks like direct monitoring, diagnostics, and programming of the hardware.

AMD has lined up a live streamed RDNA 3 launch event for this Thursday. We should get plenty of further details about launch models, the upcoming range of RX 7000 cards, and rollout. The latest info from rumorville regarding availability suggest it will be approximately a month between Thursday’s event and third party reviews / retail.

It's as good a time as any to do a health checkup on your password security practices. While it's interesting to point out that eight Nvidia RTX 4090 cards can break the most popular password length in under an hour, it's more important to be aware that the cost to break passwords has been plummeting with each new generation.

Twitter user Chick3nman is at it again, showing just this: He recently tested the current Best Graphics card, and found that a single RTX 4090 delivers Hashcat benchmark performance that's approximately eight times higher than the score achieved by eight GTX 1080s. That's also almost twice as fast as Nvidia's previous-generation RTX 3090. 

Hashcat is a specialized software used to test graphics cards' cryptographic performance -- which can both mean encryption and decryption. And because graphics cards are highly parallel engines, they're especially attuned for cryptographic duties, where performance is calculated at hashes per second. After all, this is where the GPU mining crisis that lasted most of the 30-series' life came from: explosive performance per watt improvements (with a boost from Ethereum's pricing).

Of course, graphics cards are also capable of finding the correct password by trying every possible combination, what is known as a brute force attack. There are 96^8 possibilities for an 8-character password, and that's what the graphics card has to try to break. It's an unimaginably high number, coming in at a 16-digit figure. But they ace it. Eight of the new cards can crack that 8-digit password in 48 minutes, after all. The cost isn't negligible, but then again, it's lower than we likely imagined it to be.

Compute performance has been rising at much higher rates than pure-play graphics rendering. At 4K, the most demanding readily available resolution, the RTX 2080 Ti is around 26% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti. The generational jump made the RTX 3090 33% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 4090 increases the generational performance further with its 33% increase.

This happens (partially) because Nvidia is a graphics processing unit company, not merely a gaming one. For generations, Nvidia has tailored its graphics cards more and more toward data center workloads, developing and adding hardware solutions (such as Tensor Cores) to accelerate them. With data center hardware achieving a much higher ASP (Average Sale Price) than that of consumer-geared products such as gaming graphics cards, it's no wonder that compute performance has grown at higher ratios than graphics rendering in the same timeframe. This is how graphics performance improved across Nvidia's top-tier GPUs, across generations:

In the meantime, Hashcat performance of the RTX 4090 is 800% higher that of the GTX 1080. Granted, the RTX 4090 tested was overclocked, but there's only so much extra performance that you can generate without compromising power efficiency.

This cryptographic compute performance increase is what enables a reduction in how much money a hacker would have to spend in order to crack a password. Remember that the hacker, too, has to invest in graphics cards (which have only increased in pricing across generations). That person further has to manage electrical and workload time costs to crack that eight-character password (incidentally, the world's most common password length as of 2017 was exactly eight characters). The lower the cost to hack is, the more attractive it becomes to hack a particular password. And the RTX 4090 halves that cost, despite its $1,599 MSRP.

Interestingly, Nvidia has been safely leading the Hashcat performance race. The RTX 4090 may be almost twice as fast as the RTX 3090 across workloads, but it's three times faster than AMD's RX 6900 XT. Of course, things could change with AMD's RDNA3-based cards (we'll know more by November 3rd); but Nvidia does currently enjoy a sizeable lead here. 

It's important to mention that your online passwords, or passwords protected by two-factor authentication, aren't the ones being discussed here: Those usually have mechanisms that prevent brute force attacks from working. This kind of attack is mostly directed at offline password cracking, where certain scenarios allow for these millions of attempts to be even tried. But certain scenarios, such as data leaks, could see passwords exposed: either directly viewable, as plain text, or as an encoded hash. These encoded hashes (the garble that results from the encryption process) are the encrypted data which the GPU then has to reverse-engineer towards your actual password. 

Passwords are one of the necessary evils of a technological world, the one thing standing between a hacker and whatever piece of digital you standing on the other side of the input window. But as time goes by and the cost to crack a privacy-protecting password plummets, it's perhaps wise to keep up with the times and adapt our security measures adequately. A good way to start would be to simply increase the length of passwords rather than increase memorization complexity: passphrases of strings of words like "yourpasswordreallyshouldn'tbedecrypted," alongside some special characters and/or using one of the Best Password managers may be the answer.

AMD has published a fresh list of Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card deals on the company's blog (via Frank Azor). The Radeon RX 6900 XT, one of the best graphics cards, dropped to $679.99, $320, or 32% below the graphics card's official MSRP ($999.99).

The Radeon RX 6900 XT was the fastest graphics card from AMD's Big Navi family. However, the Radeon RX 6950 XT has since taken over as the flagship SKU. Nonetheless, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is still one of the top graphics cards on the market, and at $679, it's worth your consideration.

The only inconvenience is that the Radeon RX 6900 XT deal is only available through in-store pickup at Microcenter. The retailer previously sold the PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT (AXRX 6900 XT 16GBD6-M2DHC) for $1,199.99, but it's now up for grabs at $679.99. It's the same reference model that AMD ironically sells on its website at MSRP. The only difference is that the graphics card comes inside PowerColor packaging.

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT wields the Navi 21 silicon with 80 compute units or 5,120 stream processors. The graphics card runs with a 1,825 MHz base clock but boasts a game clock and boost clock that peaks at 2,015 MHz and 2,250 MHz, respectively, under the right conditions. The Big Navi graphics card also wields 16GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit memory interface to offer a whopping 512 GBps of memory bandwidth.

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 6900 XT is just a hairline behind the Radeon RX 6950 XT and Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090 Ti. Even with the latest Radeon deals, the cheapest Radeon RX 6950 XT still sells for $949.99 on Amazon. While we've also seen some price cuts on the GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) product stack, the lowest we've seen a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti at is $740. If you absolutely need a mighty graphics card right now and can't wait for the next-generation AMD RDNA 3 or GeForce RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) offerings, the PowerColor's $679.99 Radeon RX 6900 XT is a good option.

Just a few months ago, the best graphics cards remained difficult to find at "reasonable" prices. Nvidia launched the RTX 3090 Ti at a then-obscene $1,999 MSRP at the end of March, for example. Today, retail prices have dropped as much as 43% — close to half off! Other cards have become much more affordable as well, and only a handful of GPUs remain above their official MSRPs.

Where 2020 and 2021 were a perfect storm of converging factors, including the pandemic, supply chain issues, and skyrocketing cryptocurrency prices, we're now seeing an about-face in nearly all areas. Crypto prices and mining profitability are tanking, inventory of current generation cards is "too high," and most of the supply chain kinks are being worked out. With Nvidia RTX 40-series Ada GPUs expected to debut in the next month or so, and AMD's RX 7000-series RDNA 3 parts not far behind, manufacturers are doing their best to clear the way for the upcoming launches, especially at the high-end and extreme ends of the market.

Unlike our GPU price index, which focuses on eBay prices in monthly chunks, here we want to look primarily at retail prices on new graphics cards. We're specifically looking at US prices, and we mostly won't bother with any previous generation GPUs, though there are a few Nvidia Turing models (RTX 2060 and GTX 16-series) that remain in production and are thus included.

Here's the full rundown of current retail prices, as of September 6 — do note that all of these are prone to sometimes large fluctuations. For example, short-term sales (like Labor Day) can hack off another 5–10% from the prices shown here.

Compared to the August 2022 retail GPU prices, graphics cards have dropped an average of 7%. We haven't tracked retails prices for Nvidia's Turing cards, and the Intel Arc A380 is new to the list (along with the RX 6700 non-XT), but the more expensive cards show the largest deltas.

Nvidia's highest-end RTX 3090 Ti GPU now sells for 45% less than its official launch MSRP — and Nvidia itself leads the way, as the cheapest card is the RTX 3090 Ti Founders Edition from Best Buy. That's another 21% decrease since last month! The RTX 3090 costs basically just as much, while Newegg has the RTX 3080 Ti for $809.99 (after a $40 instant rebate) — another large 15% drop. The RTX 3070 through 3080 still sell for slightly more than MSRP, but they're getting closer and should soon fall below that mark, assuming they're not simply discontinued to make way for new models. Meanwhile, the RTX 3050 through 3060 Ti are still going for 12–20% more than MSRP. That's probably because Nvidia doesn't plan to replace the budget and midrange offerings with new RTX 40-series GPUs until next year.

Flipping over to the AMD side of things, AMD's GPUs have mostly been selling below MSRP for a couple of months now, but now even the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 are joining the fun. The Radeon RX 6900 XT for $699.99 looks particularly tasty — there's also an MSI RX 6900 XT with a rebate for that same price, though we don't particularly like mail-in rebates. If you're hoping to pay less than $500, or maybe even closer to $250, the Radeon RX 6600 for $249.99 is almost impossible to beat right now. Nvidia's closest alternative is the previous generation RTX 2060 for $229.99 — it's actually faster for ray tracing, particularly with DLSS, but up to 20% slower in standard gaming performance.

However you slice it, the RTX 2060 and RX 6600 make the prospects for anything that costs less than $200 rather unappetizing. Yes, they cost more than cards like the RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT, but they're also up to twice the performance. If you want a cheap card that might actually improve in performance over the coming months, Intel's Arc A380 at $139.99 has some excellent video codec hardware, though it's currently backordered — and gaming performance can be a bit iffy at times.

GPU Prices: What to Expect Next Month

Again, there are multiple GPUs all slated to launch within the next few months. I think there's a good chance we'll see Nvidia release RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 cards by October, with the GTC 2022 keynote likely digging into some of the architecture. However, it's also possible Nvidia will start with the rumored 48GB Ada card, which could be a new Titan — with a suitably high (obscene) price. We'll find out on September 20.

AMD's plans aren't quite as clear. It demonstrated working RDNA 3 silicon during it's Ryzen 7000 announcement. While the CPUs will go on sale September 27, I think RDNA 3 graphics cards won't land at retail until late November, give or take a couple of weeks — basically a repeat of the RX 6000-series launch. I'd love to be wrong, though, and it would be far better for AMD to get RX 7000 cards out the door in October, so that they're available for the holiday shopping spree that takes place throughout November and December.

Intel's not going to be left out of the fun this year either, if the latest indications are anything to go by. The drivers continue to get regular updates, and the worst bugs and issues are being squashed. Rumors indicate an "imminent" launch for the Arc A770 and A750, and possibly A580 as well, which could happen before the end of the month — certainly by October. If pricing looks anything like the A380, Intel will be aggressive and try to get cards off the shelves rather than stagnating any further. Could we see better than RTX 3060 Ti performance from the Arc A770 for under $400? That would make the most sense, as Intel's still the newcomer to the graphics scene.

All of those upcoming GPUs mean the existing cards will, if anything, have to continue to drop in price. For high-end cards that should be eclipsed by RDNA 3 and Ada Lovelace offerings, we definitely recommend a "wait and see" approach. We may even see midrange cards drop further in pricing to clear inventory and perhaps keep people from buying Intel's new GPUs, but there's not much room to go lower than the $250 range.

Multiple AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT models are available in the US for 30% below MSRP this weekend. Visiting Newegg, we noted that RX 6900 XT, one of the best graphics cards from Gigabyte and ASRock could be yours for $699. However, several much more expensive SKUs are still available, especially those with high-end and liquid cooling. Most of these cards (including the cheapest) qualify for the AMD Radeon Raise the Game Bundle.

When these powerful GPUs launched with a $999 price tag, it was at a time we knew there was little hope for many gamers and enthusiasts to grab a GPU at MSRP – during a crypto-boom cycle. However, this weekend, the majority of Radeon RX 6900 XT cards are well below MSRP. Bargain hunter highlights include a Gigabyte Gaming OC model at $699 and an ASRock Phantom Gaming D model at $699. Another SKU well worth consideration is an MSI Gaming model at $729. All the cards mentioned above are beefy triple fan designs, and many readers will pick one of these based on their brand perception preferences.

It is interesting to see the price slide, and we have been watching the RX 6900 XT price decline throughout 2022. For example, we were almost celebrating in May when this SKU first became available at retailers at MSRP pricing. More recently, we saw one model at $720 after discounts in a special sale. Today, there is plenty of choice under $999 and three to pick from under $730.

AMD’s new Radeon RX 6950 XT eclipsed the Radeon RX 6900 XT in May. The cheapest RX 6950 XT on Newegg is $949, quite a lot more than the RX 6900 XT for not that much benefit.

Anyone watching the PC GPU market will be well aware that Nvidia’s high-end GPU options are also facing significant price cuts. Earlier in the week, we heard directly from Nvidia about the need for partners to clear GeForce RTX 30-series (Ampere) stock. Moreover, a new driving force has started pushing prices down – the impending GeForce RTX 40 launch. EVGA, one of Nvidia’s premium partners, has issued price cuts up to $1,000 on the flagship GeForce RTX 3090 Ti to clear some of its inventory.

If you want a more comprehensive view of the GPU price trends across architectures, brands, and performance levels – please check out our regularly updated GPU Prices 2022 Index, which was last updated at the beginning of August. It is an excellent tool for comparing the state of the market and drilling down to the best FPS/$ for the GPU segment you are most interested in.

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.

It's been a long time since we've seen semi-sensible prices in the GPU market, so it's great to see Gigabyte's Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC priced at $949 at Newegg. Prices have been steadily and slowly decreasing from last year's insane scalper prices and now we are at the point where some graphics cards are actually under the suggested MSRP prices set by their respective manufacturers. 

If you're after a feature-rich motherboard for your new Intel Alder Lake CPU then check out the Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Pro for $300 from Amazon. It's already one of our best motherboards for gaming and a price reduction just makes it even better.

The HyperX QuadCast is down to only $99 from Amazon. This microphone is popular among Twitch/YouTube creators for its great sound quality and is also one of our best microphones for gaming. 

Look down the page for more of today's great deals. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC GPU: was $1,149, now $949 Newegg
• Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Pro Motherboard: was $329, now $309 at Amazon
• HyperX QuadCast USB Microphone: was $139, now $99 at Amazon
• Phanteks Eclipse P360A PC Case: was $89, now $79 at Newegg
• Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 (2021) Gaming Laptop: was $1,599, now $1,099 at Newegg

Today’s best deals in detail

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According to a leaked BIOS for this board, AMD's upcoming flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card will leverage a Navi 21 GPU featuring a new KXTX moniker. In addition, the new GPU will feature a whopping 5.0 GHz frequency cap and support a considerably higher total power limit than the Radeon RX 6900 XT boards. 

AMD's Radeon RX 6900/6950 XT-series graphics cards use a fully-fledged Navi 21 XTX graphics processing unit with all 5,120 stream processors enabled. Meanwhile, the original Navi 21 XTX GPU has a clock rate cap of 2.80 GHz; the more capable Navi 21 XTXH has its frequency limiter set to 3.0 GHz (some overclockers have managed to get around that constraint and boost the GPU clock up to 3.20 GHz). In contrast, the newly uncovered Navi 31 KXTX has a cap of 5.0 GHz, which essentially means no cap. 

To enable high frequencies, AMD's Radeon RX 6950 XT boards with the Navi 21 KXTXH GPU will also feature a 325W (Sapphire) and a 332W (MSI) total power limit, up from 255W for AMD's own Radeon RX 6900 XT based on the Navi 21 XTX silicon.

The information comes from TechPowerUp, which accidentally published firmware .rom files for MSI's and Sapphire's Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics cards and their internals revealing critical details about the boards late on Friday. While the website was quick to remove the BIOSes from its collection, people from Chiphell and VideoCardz were fast enough to capture all the essential information from these files and made several interesting revelations. So, unless the said BIOS versions were preliminary or fake, we can be reasonably sure that the data is correct.

AMD's Radeon RX 6950 XT is undoubtedly the ultimate Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card with maximum performance and no limitations (in fact, it is faster than the Radeon RX 6900 XT by 17% in some benchmarks). It appears to carry an all-new Navi 21 KXTX GPU presumably binned for very high clocks, lacks a maximum frequency cap, has a massive 332W power limit, and is equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory with an 18 GT/s data transfer rate. 

Regarding GDDR6 memory, the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics boards will be equipped with memory chips from Samsung or SK Hynix, whereas AMD's reference RX 6900 XT only supports memory from Samsung.

A previous leak suggests that the Radeon RX 6950 XT could arrive with a $1,099 MSRP with a rumored launch date of May 10.

Update 4/5/2022 7:40am PT: Adjusted pricing based on Newegg price change.

GPU prices continue to fall to relatively sane levels, and that's definitely the case with AMD's current flagship: the Radeon RX 6900 XT. A month ago, Radeon RX 6900 XT prices were hovering around the $1,256 mark on third-party marketplaces like eBay. However, Newegg is currently selling the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC for $999, which matches AMD's $999 MSRP for reference cards.

But it gets better: Newegg is also offering a $50 rebate, which brings the price down to $949. While we'd prefer an instant rebate over a mail-in rebate, we can't argue with getting a flagship graphics card for $50 less than MSRP during an ongoing chip shortage.

RX 6900 XT reference cards are based on AMD's RDNA 2 GPU architecture and feature 16GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. AMD's specs quote a game clock of 2,015 MHz and a boost clock of 2,250 MHz. The Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC ups those clocks slightly to 2,050 MHz and 2,285 MHz, respectively, which will give you a tiny boost in gaming performance. 

Given that this is a customer card, you'll find Gigabyte's Windforce 3X cooling systems (complete with a copper plate for the heatsink) and a metal backplate for the GPU to maintain rigidity. In addition, as is common practice with high-end gaming gear these days, Gigabyte equips its flagship with RGB Fusion 2.0 lighting, which you can sync up with other components in your rig. Other features include Gigabyte's Dual BIOS and user-friendly Aorus Engine optimization software.

This deal has been alive for a few hours, and Newegg still appears to have plenty of inventory. Given the performance that the RX 6900 XT offers, and the fact that it's $100 under MSRP (after rebate), we don't know how much longer it will stay in stock, considering that it's one of the best graphics cards for gaming.

That said, we may start seeing prices drop even further on existing Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards, as the Radeon RX 6x50 Series Refresh is right around the corner. It's expected that the cards will feature boosted GPU clock and memory frequencies to battle Nvidia's GeForce RTX 30 Series.

Like many other premium graphics cards makers, Sapphire tends to offer multiple versions of AMD Radeon-based boards for enthusiasts with deep pockets as well as those who are a little more conservative. With AMD's Radeon RX 6950 XT model, Sapphire is reportedly going to initially offer at least three models. None of which will apparently be as fast as last year's Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition. 

For now take the leak with a pinch of salt until details are confirmed. Sapphire's air-cooled Radeon RX 6950 XT line-up will consist of the range-topping Toxic Radeon RX 6590 XT, Nitro+ Special Edition Radeon RX 6950 XT, and Nitro+ Radeon RX 6950 XT, reports VideoCardz citing data from the Chiphell community.

As the name suggests, the Toxic Radeon RX 6950 XT is the fastest variant in Sapphire's Radeon RX 6950 XT line-up, it is also the most power hungry too as it is rated for an up to 345W thermal graphics power (TGP). The new air-cooled Toxic RX 6900 XT can run its GPU at up to 2565 MHz out of box, 65 MHz higher when compared to Sapphire's Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Air Cooled.  It is 165 MHz lower when compared to Sapphire's hybrid-cooled Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition.

Sapphire's Fastest Radeon RX 6900/6950 XT Graphics Cards

*Silent Mode, not Performance Mode.

Those who want maximum performance should probably wait for Sapphire's Toxic Radeon RX 6950 XT Extreme Edition with a hybrid cooling system. This system cools down not only the GPU and memory, but also voltage regulating module of the board.

Meanwhile, the Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 6950 XT will come with a so-called "Silent BIOS" setting that slightly reduces maximum clocks and sets TGP to 284W in a bid to lower fan speeds and reduce noise levels generated by the card even when it renders games. For those who want a compromise between noise levels and performance, Sapphire will offer its Nitro+ Special Edition Radeon RX 6950 XT with a 325W TGP.

In general, Sapphire's air-cooled Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics boards will not only feature faster memory than the company's Radeon RX 6900 XT cards, but will also have slightly higher GPU clocks. What remains to be seen is how much will those cards cost.

The official AMD online retail pages currently list the Radeon RX 6900 XT and Ryzen 7 5800X3D as available and for sale at their respective MSRPs. They are selling for $999 and $449, respectively. Or you can buy them both, together, for $1,448. The same prices apply in Europe, with the store using a 1:1 USD to EUR conversion.

While visiting the retail pages, we checked that there was stock and successfully added the titular GPU and CPU to a shopping basket before venturing to the checkout. However, adding another identical GPU or CPU to the basket didn't work – so it looks like AMD has smartly limited the shopping cart to stop folk from buying these up in bulk. It is a good move as not many ordinary PC enthusiasts and gamers will need to buy more than one product. However, we don't know what would happen if we completed checkout and revisited the store using the exact checkout details (name, address, and payment card).

Earlier this week, we happily reported that AMD was selling its newest RDNA2 GPUs, and the attractive new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, for MSRPs - at the PAX East expo in Boston. We pondered whether the sales of the reference design Radeon RX 6700 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite Edition GPUs, plus the recently released Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU at the show, at MSRPs, was a sign of things to come. It certainly seems to be playing out that way.

The terrible GPU availability and pricing saga has run for far longer than we care to recount. Moreover, we hope it won't be returning for a third season. The Tom's Hardware GPUs editor looked at the state of the market in some depth mid-week, considering what GPUs are available in reasonable quantities and which are the best bang-per-buck if you wish to read more. The next will be quite telling, so please check back for that.

On the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, this new 3D V-Cache enhanced CPU caused some waves at launch and quickly sold out, with various parties attempting to sell on chips at well over MSRP. We were slightly worried whether AMD had enough of these CPUs in the pipeline, as perhaps it had been taken by surprise by the demand. However, observing the PAX East sales and seeing the wide geographic availability of the 5800X3D direct from AMD has eased those worries.

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a particular 8C/16T CPU in some regards, with it being a first consumer PC processor with 3D-stacked SRAM technology – for 96MB of L3 cache. Moreover, its existence marks a satisfying gaming performance pinnacle to which users of older AM4 systems can aspire. That is why we feel stocks of this chip must be available and remain available for some time. The other note is that the Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a good product for its MSRP. Still, the silly post-launch pricing completely ruined it as a sensible proposition (against both AMD and Intel alternatives) to extend your AM4 system's working/gaming life.

When Valve released its Linux-based Steam Deck portable game console with loads of ports and interfaces, we fully expected this product to see some interesting projects. We'll undoubtedly see other peripherals and gadgets tailored for Steam Deck users, but enthusiasts can do something completely unexpected. Journalists from the ETA Prime YouTube channel decided to add some graphics oomph to the Steam Deck and managed to connect a Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card to the console.

Since Valve's Steam Deck does not have Thunderbolt 3/4 port, they had to use its M.2 slot featuring a PCIe x4 interface and a special adapter that allows plugging an add-on card into such a slot. Usage of the M.2 slot naturally reduces local storage capacity, which means that they had to use a microSD card to store their games, and such cards are considerably slower than M.2 SSDs. But for the sake of experiment and entertainment, things worked just fine. They also installed Windows 11 and the latest drivers, though likely future mods could be made to work with Linux.

Adding one of the best graphics cards for gaming to a system based on a quad-core, low-power APU doesn't really make a lot of sense in the normal world. AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT — the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula if we're being precise — will inevitably run into CPU bottlenecks. But these things must be done, for science!

Adding an external graphics card to the portable game console naturally makes it immobile. The Steam Deck essentially becomes an entry-level desktop with a quad-core custom APU, paired with an obscenely huge graphics card via external cables. Messy, but beautiful. It's too bad about the lack of faster storage, which will inevitably limit gaming options.

As expected, the Radeon RX 6900 XT was substantially faster than the built-in GPU. In this configuration, the Steam Deck could actually handle such titles as The Witcher 3, GTA5, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, and God of War running at 1080p or even 4K. That's a significant upgrade compared to the integrated APU, which at present can't even run Cyberpunk 2077 at all.

We'll call the experiment a success, as it proves it's possible to improve the Steam Deck's performance using an external graphics card. Now we just need an M.2 adapter connected to a dock that offers additional PCIe lanes for storage and graphics. Or not, since people would be better off just buying a separate desktop PC. The Steam Deck's promise lies in its portability and fixed set of hardware, but we can't blame the people at ETA Prime for trying.

The Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6900XT SE Gaming OC has dropped in price a few times over the last couple of weeks, but today, with the help of a Newegg promotion code, you can now get a further $150 off of an already reduced RX 6900XT. 

AMD's flagship GPU comes with 16GB of GDDR6 VRAM Memory, core clock speeds of 2125MHz, 5120 stream processors and PCIe 4.0 support. It's one of the fastest graphics cards today. Be sure to check our RX 6900XT review and our GPU hierarchy to see how it compares to other graphics cards. 

More spotted deals today include a WQHD 2K gaming monitor - the Gigabyte G27Q 27-Inch QHD gaming monitor for an unbelievable $250 and a Razer Blade 14 (RTX 3070) for $1,685 - the cheapest its ever been on Amazon, but there is limited stock so you will have to be quick to snap this one up. 

More great offers are below in today's Real Deals!

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6900XT SE Gaming OC: was $1,800, now $1,350 at Newegg with code VGAPCJY793
• Gigabyte G27Q 27-Inch QHD 144Hz: was $330, now $250 at Newegg with code EMCBQ337 and rebate
• Razer Blade 14 (RTX 3070): was $2,200, now $1,685 at Amazon
• Creality Ender 3 V2: was $279, now $236 at Newegg
• Corsair RMx Series RM650x (2018): was $125, now $65 at Newegg with rebate

Today’s best deals in detail

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The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X has just dropped to its lowest ever price of $599. That's a great price for one of the best CPUs on the market. Why not have a look at our Ryzen 9 5950X review for more details. Hurry and grab one whilst stocks last - it surely can't stay at this price for long. 

Also on today's menu are the WD Black SN850 for $261 and a further $100 slashed off the price of the ASRock OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT - what a great day for deals.

Scroll down for even more great offers in today's Real Deals!

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: was $799, now $599 at Amazon
• WD Black SN850 NVMe M.2 2TB: was $330, now $261 at Amazon
• ASRock OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT: was $1,700, now $1,500 at Newegg
• Intel Core i7-12700K: was $414, now $380 at Newegg
• Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 850W: was $140, now $100 at Amazon

Today’s best deals in detail

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Another great day for GPU price drops as this Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6900XT dips down to £1,500. This is great news for gamers trying to get their hands on a powerful graphics card. Don't forget to have a look at our GPU Hierarchy and RX 6900XT reviews for any information to help you make an informed decision. 

A massive $500 off Aorus' FO48U 48 inch 4K gaming monitor takes this Editor's Choice award winning display down to $1000 at Newegg. With stunning image quality and pro-level accuracy out of the box, this should be on your shopping list.

Today we also have a massive 57% discount on a popular Razer gaming keyboard - the Razer BlackWidow Tournament Edition Chroma V2 TKL (Tenkeyless). This mechanical gaming keyboard uses orange key switches for a tactile yet silent experience. 

To make it a family affair, we also spied another Razer keyboard - the Razer Huntsman V2 TKL with 25% off of its normal asking price. 

Keep scrolling for more real deals below. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 6900XT SE Gaming OC: was $1,800, now $1,500 at Newegg
• Aorus FO48U 4K OLED 48-Inch: was $1,500, now $1,000 at Newegg with promotion code FEB4SALE and rebate
• Razer BlackWidow TE Chroma v2: was $140, now $60 at Amazon
• Razer Huntsman V2 TKL: was $150, now $112 at Amazon
• Samsung EVO Plus (2TB) NVMe SSD: was $230, now $200 at Amazon
• HyperX Cloud II 7.1 Gaming Headset: was $100, now $78

Today’s best deals in detail

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What a refreshing change to see the prices of GPUs going down instead of up. ASRock's OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT - the AMD flagship GPU has $100 knocked off of its price as well as availability as we all pray for an end to the GPU drought and excessive prices.   

The Intel Core i7-12700K is also back on sale at a low price, so if you're looking for great gaming performance at a good price point, now is a great time to pick up a 12700K. Intel’s Core i7 Alder Lake 12700K has received our Editors Choice award for its superb performance. Also in today's deals is a great saving on a Corsair iCUE 220T RGB Airflow case - check out our review if you would like to see what we think of it.

Don't forget to check out all the deals below. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• ASRock OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT: was $1,700, now $1,600 at Newegg
• Corsair iCUE 220T RGB Airflow: was $110, now $90 at Newegg with rebate
• Intel Core i7-12700K: was $390, now $351 at Amazon
• Razer Raptor 27 (2K, 144 Hz) Monitor: was $700, now $620 at Amazon
• Asus TUF Gaming VG27WQ monitor: was $330, now $270 at Newegg

Today’s best deals in detail

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The release of Intel's Alder Lake processors and accompanying new motherboards seems to have inspired a significant wave of new benchmark world records. Of course, many of the achievements were stemmed from CPU-based tests, but over recent days some important 3DMark graphics benchmark world records have also fallen. Both the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme world records have been claimed by overclocker Biso Biso wielding an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT. Meanwhile, the 3DMark2001 SE world record has been claimed by overclocker Rauf using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

3DMark Fire Strike / Extreme World Records

A 3DMark Fire Strike score of 62,389 was achieved by Korean OC expert Biso Biso on Thursday. This record is notable for a couple of reasons. First, it was done using the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT pushed to a 3,147 MHz core clock. Secondly, it unseated a Quad-SLI Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti-powered record by Kingpin (61,206) that had stood for almost two years.

On Sunday, Biso Biso achieved another world record pole position, this time in Fire Strike Extreme 1x GPU, and validated by HWBot. Checking through the details of the feat, you can see it confirmed that the Korean overclocker used liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling on both the Intel Core i9 12900K and XFX Radeon RX 6900 XT used in the benchmarks.

This Fire Strike Extreme record of 39,515 wasn't a big leap over the previous holders, and the top 10 all appear to use the same GPU, so this test looks like a sweet spot for AMD's top-end consumer GPU.

3DMark2001 SE World Record

Yes, people still compete fiercely over achieving the highest score in 3DMark2001 SE, which was released in, you guessed it, 2002. With such aging software, it might not be surprising that only older GPU architectures can run, using older OSes, to complete the benchmark successfully. The new world record, recorded on Sunday by Overclocker Rauf, stands at a 253,975 marks, as validated by HWBot.

Rauf used an Intel Core i9 12900K with eight P-cores active, on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Apex motherboard, with DDR5 RAM, to grab this world record. The GPU behind his success was an Asus GeForce GTX 980 Ti Matrix Platinum Edition.

Interestingly, the CPU was cooled using LN2 and running at 7,125 MHz, but the GPU was air cooled. In the photo you can see that the GPU is covered in paper towel to prevent condensation from the CPU pot affecting or damaging it.

We have covered some other interesting benchmark and overclocking world records recently. Certain new Intel Alder Lake motherboards have a feature where users can unlock BCLK, which has inspired a flood of new records using chips you can't usually overclock, such as value-orientated Core i5, i3, Pentium and even Celeron CPUs.

We're well over a year removed from the launch of AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, and the graphics cards are still selling for well over MSRP. You can chalk this situation up to the ongoing global chip shortage, which is forcing gamers to pay up to twice the MSRP from third-party sellers to get their hands on the cards. Even though existing RX 6800 XT/6900 XT SKUs are hard to obtain, MSI is pushing forward with refreshed versions that could land on our best graphics cards list.

First up is the refreshed Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Z Trio 16G, where MSI swapped out the X for a Z. It sees its game clock rise from 2045MHz to 2065 MHz, a mere 20 MHz uplift. Likewise, the maximum boost clock climbs to 2310 MHz, up from 2285 MHz. These slight clock increases mean that MSI hasn't altered the TDP of the card, which still stands at 300 watts.

Next, we have the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming Z Trio 16G. This card receives an even greater performance boost, with the game clock increasing from 2105 MHz to 2235 MHz. MSI also cranked the boost clock from 2340 MHz to a heady 2425 MHz, making this one of the fastest cards in the Radeon RX 6900 XT kingdom. Like its RX 6800 XT Gaming Z counterpart, the RX 6900 XT Gaming Z holds the line with a 300-watt TDP.

While the previous Gaming X graphics cards featured a graphene-reinforced backplate, the new Gaming Z offerings use a stronger aluminum counterpart. You'll still find a Tri Frozr 2 cooling system with triple Torx 4.0 fans, precision-machined core pipes, and the ability to stop the fans when the GPU isn't under load, which goes a long way towards lowering acoustics. And for the RGB fanatics out there, Mystic Light support is naturally available.

All other specs remain the same, including 4,608 stream processors (5120 for the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming Z), 16GB of 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit memory bus, three 8-pin power connectors, three DisplayPort 1.3 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port.

At this time, there is no information on pricing or availability for the new Gaming Z cards. However, no matter what MSRP these cards carry, we'd imagine that the actual street prices will continue to be highly inflated for the foreseeable future.

Sega has been busy with Intel and ASRock, attempting to craft the "world's fastest PC." In a techy double entendre, the purported 'speediest PC on Earth' is designed with the cream of the crop of current PC components from the Intel Alder Lake series plus the ASRock Radeon 6000 series, all built into a chassis propelled by a powerful G-Force Remote Control car that hits a top speed of 100kmph. 

It is hard to deny the result of the collaboration is impressive. The companies put together a compact PC with Intel Core i9-12900K processor, an ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT OC Formula 16GB, 32GB of dual-channel RAM, and a 2TB SSD. The rig is crammed full of Sega Atlus classic PC titles, too, so we're happy to report it didn't crash and burn during the time trials in Japan.

Sega says it built this souped-up PC as a commemorative project to celebrate the Steam Holiday Sale (featuring a multitude of Sega titles on offer, of course), which runs until January 5. This means the four-wheeled machine isn't just for us to gawp at — Sega is kindly giving it away as part of a social media-boosting competition prize. To have a chance at winning, you have to be a resident of Japan, are expected to follow Sega Official on Twitter, have to retweet the campaign and comment on the competition. The prize drawing will take place at the end of the Steam Holiday Sale.

The "world's fastest PC" doesn't have the sleekest design. Its boxy delivery truck shape doesn't convey its potential on the track, and even the go-faster RGB LED stripes don't hide that fact. Other PC laptops and components makers have previously teamed up with the likes of Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Porsche - and this kind of design input is sorely missing in the design of the Sega mini-vehicle.

Coming on the heels of Nvidia's Matrix Resurrected sweepstakes, AMD this week kicked off its Halo Infinite Advanced Combat Exercises (ACE) Contest that gives participants a chance to win AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite Limited Edition graphics board, which is one of the best graphics cards available today.

AMD's Advanced Combat Exercises Contest offers several ways to win a one of 28 Radeon RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite graphics boards:  

• Easy way. Just submit your contact information to AMD and hope that you will win the card in one of the raffles.
• Talkative way. Visit https://www.twitch.tv/karma and/or https://www.twitch.tv/bthmaniac during the applicable Entry Period, wait for a moderator to mention a keyword, comment and enter the keyboard.
• Hard way. Download Halo Infinite Multiplayer, follow AMDGaming, OpticMaNiaC or DKarma on Twitter. Look for tweets from OpticMaNiaC and DKarma with challenges to complete while playing Halo Infinite Multiplayer, reply to their posts with video captures of you completing one or more challenges. Select gamers will train as a team in a series of ACE live streams.  One of the selected combatants will get a card.

AMD's ACE sweepstakes start on December 14, 2021, and end on January 28, 2022. In total, AMD will raffle 28 Radeon RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite boards at different drawing dates in January, 2022. Since entry periods and drawing dates vary and not all countries and states can participate, we suggest you to check AMD's rules and terms before entering the contest.

I've been rather happily running and benchmarking graphics cards with Windows 10 since just after it launched in 2015. Microsoft tried to encourage people to upgrade by initially offering Windows 10 for free, plus it was the only OS with support for DirectX 12. Portions of DX12 were eventually backported to Windows 7, and you can still get Windows 10 for cheap, but now Windows 11 (see how to get Windows 11 for free or cheap) is the new kid on the block. So how does it perform, specifically with games? That's what we wanted to find out, so we grabbed the two best graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia and put them to the test.

Let's be clear: Change for the sake of change doesn't go over well with me, and Windows 11 puts a new coat of paint on the worn-in and comfortable feeling Windows 10 house I've been living in since 2015. A new coat of paint would be fine, and I'm not necessarily averse to that. But in the process, it seems as though the UI designers felt a need to rearrange the furniture, switch around the drawers, and clean house on a bunch of functionality that I actually like.

We've covered some of the worst Windows 11 changes, and how to fix them. Ultimately, two months after release, our Windows 11 launch impressions remain largely unchanged, and we're discovering even more disappointing aspects to the OS—like the Windows 11 SSD issues, which apparently still persist. With that in mind, I wanted to verify that Windows 11 doesn't impact graphics card performance before switching to the new OS. Of course, that switch is still in the works since I'll be shifting to an Alder Lake Core i9-12900K system for GPU reviews in the near future. And of course, using Alder Lake is one of the only good (sort of) reasons to switch to Windows 11, thanks to the new process scheduler that integrates with Intel's Thread Director hardware.

What if you're not using Alder Lake, though? I took my current GPU testbed, which is now about three years old, and did a clean install of Windows 11 on a new Crucial P5 Plus SSD for testing purposes. I tested basically the fastest graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, the Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and I also retested those cards on Windows 10 using the latest drivers and updates. (Yes, technically the 3090 is a bit faster and has twice the VRAM, but it's close enough and the 3080 Ti tends to be more readily available.) That means running the AMD 21.21.1 and Nvidia's 497.09 drivers, with a complete driver cleanup (via Display Driver Uninstaller) between testing. Here are the results of the 14 games I used for testing.

If you were looking for yet another reason to hate on Windows 11, this is obviously disappointing. For those who are more open-minded, though, this is good news. Windows 11 may not be any faster at games than Windows 10, but neither is it any slower. Of course, we tested Windows 11 with VBS disabled—that was the default after a clean install on our test hardware. There has been some concern that VBS defaults to enabled on clean installs, but so far it looks like it needs to be explicitly enabled, which is likely only something you'll see from large OEMs and business PCs.

Across our 14-game test suite, the overall performance difference between Windows 10 and Windows 11 at three resolutions was less than one percent. There was one instance where Win10 was 4% faster (RTX 3080 Ti in Far Cry 6), and Assassin's Creed Valhalla was consistently 3% faster, but a few minor anomalies are to be expected. Sometimes Windows 10 was a bit faster and sometimes Windows 11 came out ahead, but in practice there wasn't any significant change.

The minimum fps (technically 99th percentile frametime converted to fps) results show a bit more variability, but that's always the case. Here we see an instance (Strange Brigade on the RTX 3080 Ti) where Win10 beat Win11 by 10%, and there are a few other cases of 5% differences, but a single frame or two rendering slowly can easily skew the results. That's why we don't place as much emphasis on minimum fps.

Interestingly, the RX 6900 XT was far more consistent in its performance across the two versions of Windows, where average fps was within 0.3% overall, and the biggest differences were still less than 2%. Even the minimum fps only had up to a 5.5% difference, and in that case, it was Windows 11 coming out ahead.

If you prefer seeing things in chart form rather than the above tables, here's a gallery of all 45 of the 1080p, 1440p, and 4K results. (Note: The above table uses the geometric mean for average, where all values are given equal weight, while the 14 game average charts below use the arithmetic mean and can skew due to "outlier" results.)

While these results are boring in general, they're good news because I'd hate to see the new OS penalize or benefit performance. Hopefully, Microsoft will walk back some of the UI changes, or maybe I'll just need to execute my own workarounds. Either way, my new Alder Lake build will basically require Windows 11, plus retesting all the GPUs on our new 2022 test suite. So that's how I'll spend much of January, I think.

If you're curious, I'm planning on using the following games for the coming year of graphics card reviews: Borderlands 3, Dirt 5, Far Cry 6, Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon 5, Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Watch Dogs Legion. Note that seven of those use DirectX 12, with Red Dead being the sole Vulkan representative—and there are no DirectX 11 games in the list. I'll also use a somewhat different suite for ray tracing tests: Bright Memory Infinite, Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Far Cry 6, Fortnite, Metro Exodus Enhanced, Minecraft, and Watch Dogs Legion, with the goal being to use games that show some real visual benefits from enabling ray tracing. (Feel free to comment below if you think I've missed any game that warrants inclusion.)

When AMD introduced its Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics card earlier this year, it said the product was only meant for system integrators and therefore would not be available for home system builders. Nonetheless, a few of the cards are now available from MindFactory.de, a major retailer from Germany.

At press time, MindFactory.de has over five reference Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled supplied by PowerColor in stock (thanks to VideoCardz for the tip), which is not many, but good enough for a product that was not to be sold at retail at all. The card costs €1749 ($1960 with VAT, $1650 without VAT), which is more expensive than the price of air-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT (which retail for €1500 ~ €1700), but is cheaper than the price of custom liquid-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT (which are available for €1800 ~ €2000).

This is not exactly the first time such boards have hit the retail market, as the product was previously spotted in India for about $3000 with taxes, as well as in Brazil, but it is not unusual for certain products to 'leak' in such large markets, as nobody notices if a company sells a graphics board, or even a dozen of them, without permission. 

A listing at a major European retailer, however, indicates that the card got there through authorized channels and is 'officially' available. To that end, we may well see AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled become available from other retailers and in different markets.

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled is based on the Navi 21 XTXH GPU with 5120 stream processors clocked at up to 2250 MHz (game clock) and paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory featuring a 18 GT/s data transfer rate. 

From a GPU frequency point of view, AMD's reference Radeon RX 6900 XT LC looks rather pale compared to Sapphire's, PowerColor's, ASRock's or Asus's liquid-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics boards. However, that fast GDDR6 memory is a feature exclusive to AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT LC, which is why some users may prefer it to custom-designed liquid-cooled adapters. 

At this point it remains unclear whether AMD intends to change its position and offer the reference Radeon RX 6900 XT LC as a full retail product, but it looks like some of its partners certainly want to.

Hot on the heels of its announcement of three homegrown systems-on-chips (SoCs) for data center applications, Chinese cloud giant Tencent introduced the Xinghai Wisdom Wood Series GA01, a custom graphics card based on an AMD graphics processing unit. One of the interesting details of the announcement is that Tencent gets to design its own drivers for the board, suggesting rather close collaboration with AMD.

A modern graphics processor can be used for a variety of applications, including rendering for gaming and professional applications, media encoding/decoding, and high-performance computing. Tencent runs various workloads in its cloud data centers, so it needs a rather versatile GPU that can be used for a variety of things, so it turned to AMD for a semi-custom solution, reports CSDN.net.

Tencent's GA01 GPU is based on AMD's Radeon Pro V620 card with 32GB of GDDR6 memory (according to TechnoPixel), but it uses a liquid cooling system (LCS) and is equipped with real-time fault monitoring and early warning capabilities to make it more reliable. Perhaps more importantly, the GPU is 'highly customized at the driver level' to optimize its rendering, encoding/decoding, and image processing. Tencent claims that the board is 120% faster compared to mainstream graphics cards, though the company didn't elaborate.

AMD's Radeon Pro V620 is based on Navi 21 GPU that relies on the company's latest architecture, RDNA 2. The GPU supports SR-IOV virtualization and can be used concurrently by multiple remote users (for cloud gaming, DaaS, WaaS, and ML). In addition, it supports advanced security capabilities to protect user data from other users.

Normally, AMD ships its Radeon Pro with its own drivers, but with Tencent, it let the Chinese company design its own software, which is a rather unusual move since both AMD and Nvidia tend to protect peculiarities of their latest GPU architectures from competitors. Meanwhile, Tencent plans to use the card in a specially designed server with enhanced availability and reliability, so perhaps it needed to develop special drivers for the card to maximize compatibility with the machine and its software stack.  

It's noteworthy that Tencent is one of the few companies that adopted Intel's Xe-LP-based SG1 Server GPU card for its remote rendering last year. These systems are used primarily to remotely render some of Tencent's games for Android to ensure smooth framerates on entry-level smartphones. Meanwhile, it looks like Tencent preferred to use an AMD GPU for other cloud data center workloads perhaps for performance and availability reasons: AMD's GPU is already here, whereas Intel's Xe HPG GPUs are months away. 

AMD sells quite a lot of custom hardware. The company supplies custom system-on-chips (SoC) for Microsoft and Sony consoles. Furthermore, AMD has a number of semi-custom GPUs available only to Apple. Therefore, building a semi-custom offering for Tencent was not a big deal for the company, but beating Intel in Tencent's cloud data centers is a big deal for AMD. 

AMD has been quite successful with its EPYC CPUs for datacenters, but with GPUs aimed at the same market the company has not been particularly fruitful, so Nvidia currently rules this market. With Tencent, AMD scores a relatively big design win, albeit with a semi-custom offering. 

As you can see in our graphics card pricing index prices are shooting up in the face of continuing shortages. However, Newegg is bucking that trend with an over $200 saving on this Radeon powerhouse!

Right now at Newegg, the ASRock OC Formula AMD Radeon 6900 XT GPU is down to $1,629.99 after a $270 price cut.

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Our ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula review highlights the key strengths of this 7nm card built on AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture. From the 5,120 GPU cores and a subdued, premium design, to the seriously impressive cooling system with three fans and a massive heatsink, this raytracing beast can hang with even the most graphically intensive games you can find today.

Of course, the massive construction makes this an awkward fit into certain builds, so do check the dimensions before you buy, but if you can make room for it, the quiet cooling keeps that up-to 2475 MHz boosted clock speed of the 6900 XT running at its best.

If you are getting impatient and need a powerful new GPU for your PC build, this is the best discount we’ve seen in a while and the best deal you can get your hands on right now.

Microsoft has partnered with AMD to launch the Radeon RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite Limited Edition graphics card to commemorate Halo Infinite's debut. The graphics card won't be available for purchase, so the only way to get your hands on one is through giveaways that AMD, Microsoft and its other partners will hold.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT Halo Infinite Limited Edition sticks to AMD's reference cooler cooler. It borrows inspiration from Master Chief's Mjolnir Powered Assault Armor Mark VII, which consists of a mixture of green shroud with an iridium gold fan border. The backplate features the "117" Spartan callsign and even has a Cortana-blue light, representing the AI slot that's located on the back of Master Chief's helmet. Microsoft didn't reveal the specifications for the limited-edition graphics card, but we expect it to be identical to the vanilla Radeon RX 6900 XT.

343 Industries developed Halo Infinite in conjunction with AMD, so the title is optimized for the chipmaker's products including the latest Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 processors and Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 graphics cards. The game supports AMD's FreeSync Premium Pro, but ray tracing will arrive as a post-launch update. However, there wasn't any confirmation if Halo Infinite will support AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) or Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technologies.

PC gamers will obviously get all the goodies, such as ultrawide and super ultrawide support (including cinematics), FOV adjustment and frame rate customization. They'll also have access to weapon offset controls, triple key-binds and LAN multiplayer support.

In addition to AMD, 343 Industries also worked with Discord and Razer to bring features to the game. As a result, Halo Infinite supports in-game Discord server invites and integrates into Razer's Chroma RGB ecosystem. Different in-game actions or events will trigger a special effect on Razer Chroma peripherals.

Speaking of peripherals, Razer has given its Kaira Pro wireless headset, DeathAdder V2 gaming mouse, BlackWidow V3 mechanical gaming keyboard and Goliathus mouse mat the Halo Infinite treatment. The Halo-themed peripherals have already gone up for purchase at Razer's online store.

Starting October 26, AMD will bundle a one-month suscription of Xbox Game Pass for PC with select AMD Radeon and AMD Ryzen boxed products at participating retailers and e-tailers. As for Halo Infinite, the game will come to PCs on December 8.

Formula One cars are some of the fastest things with wheels on the planet, so you'd expect the ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT Formula OC to set some records — and it does. The AMD Navi 21 GPU beating at the heart of the Formula currently ranks third in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy while powering some of the best graphics cards. As an interesting change of pace, you can actually find the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula in stock at Newegg right now… currently "on sale" for $1,700. That's basically scalper pricing, and we've seen it at $1,900 as well, but we're not sure if that's ASRock's MSRP or Newegg just inflating the price.

We originally thought the RX 6900 XT felt too expensive at $1,000 when it launched in late 2020, but the past year of GPU shortages requires us to reevaluate things. When RTX 2060 cards sell for $600 or more, an RX 6900 XT for $1,700 doesn't seem out of the question. Seriously, though, it's still a terrible time to buy a graphics card, and our GPU price index shows just how overpriced most models are.

Back to the matter at hand, the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula OC takes AMD's fastest GPU and then adds a massive air cooler and overclocks the boost speed up to 2475 MHz — 10% higher than the reference model's 2250 MHz. It also cranks the power limits to 357W when you load up ASRock Tweak and select the OC mode, which increases the power limit by 10% compared to factory stock and sets the maximum boost clock to 2659 MHz. Yeah, the way AMD reports things with maximum boost clocks is a bit odd, but it's basically like Nvidia where the boost clock is more of a conservative estimate, while the maximum boost clock is only listed in software. Basically, the ASRock Formula has a very high clock speed, and the card also draws way more than 357W, even without the OC mode.

Regardless, we used the OC mode for our testing, though the extra OC only made for about a 1–2% improvement over stock performance. Here are the specs, compared to the reference AMD RX 6900 XT:

Better cooling and a 10% overclock, combined with a 10% boost to the power limit, should all result in a decent bump to performance. We're still looking at the same Navi 21 GPU, and real-world clocks matter more than the theoretical numbers on the specs sheet. Take the power rating as an example. In our in-line power testing, we measured 383W while running Metro Exodus at the default clocks, and 415W with OC mode enabled. The GPU clocks were also about 50MHz higher than the 2475MHz figure, and OC mode increased clocks an additional 60MHz.

Of course, the same was true of the RX 6900 XT at launch. It averaged over 2300MHz during our gaming tests, despite a 2250MHz "maximum" boost clock that's not actually the maximum. But we prefer having AMD underpromising and overdelivering on clocks to the old way of doing things. ASRock also recommends at least a 1000W power supply for the RX 6900 XT Formula OC, and while a good 850W PSU should still suffice, we'd take the recommendation to heart.

The one thing we'd really have liked to get with a card like the Formula is something we rarely see: a good factory overclock on the memory. AMD released the special liquid-cooled version of the RX 6900 XT to system builders, and it comes with 18Gbps GDDR6 memory. We did poke around at overclocking on the ASRock card and were able to boost the base clock by about 140MHz (17.12Gbps effective speed), but that's basically the same speed we hit with every other Navi 21 card we've tested — even the lowly RX 6800.

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The ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula isn't quite the largest graphics card we've ever tested, but it does come close. It's slightly longer than the reference RTX 3090 Founders Edition, a card that still surprises me with its heft every time I pick it up. But the ASRock Formula isn't quite as heavy, weighing 'only' 1831g — the 3090 FE weighs 2189g. The ASRock card does use every bit of its triple-slot thickness as well, with dimensions of 331 x 124 x 59mm.

ASRock sticks with traditional axial fans, though it notes the ones on the Formula are "striped" — presumably to reduce air turbulence. The highest performing fans these days use an integrated rim, increasing the static pressure and helping to direct more airflow over the radiator fins. We've seen such fans on Asus and MSI cards, for example, but not from ASRock. The three 95mm fans should still provide sufficient cooling, but for a premium card we'd like to see a fan upgrade — these are the same fans as you'll find on ASRock's lesser Phantom Gaming line.

Another interesting twist is that compared to the Phantom Gaming cards, there's very little RGB lighting on the Formula. Some will appreciate the lack of bling and generally subdued looks, particularly anyone using a case that doesn't have a window, but if you like colorful lights you'll be better served by other options. There's just a single RGB strip that wraps around the back and top sides of the card, and it's not particularly visible unless you look from the right angle. Naturally, you can use ASRock's Polychrome SYNC software to control the color of the strip, or turn it off completely.

As mentioned above, we tested the Formula using OC Mode, which you can access through the ASRock Tweak software. You can also opt for the Quiet Mode, which cuts clocks and drops the power limit, though the card was relatively quiet even in OC mode. Manual overclocking is also possible, either via ASRock Tweak or just using AMD's Radeon Settings software, and the AMD software exposes more fine-grained control than ASRock Tweak so there's no real need to install the extra software unless you just want the one-click overclock button.

ASRock does have a rather wide range of overclocking speeds exposed on the Formula, but unless you're planning to replace the cooler with a liquid nitrogen pot, you're going to end up only using a fraction of the available range. You can set the maximum GPU clock as high as 4000 MHz, which is definitely not a thing you should do, and you can try to push the memory clock as high as 2624 MHz (21 Gbps effective). While there's a bit of headroom on both, in practice you'll want to stick to about a 150MHz maximum increase on either one, and then test to ensure stability. The minor gains in performance you'll get from such an overclock likely aren't worth the added power use, heat, and potential instability, which is why we opted to stick with the OC Mode for testing purposes.

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Our test configuration for the hardware and software remains unchanged from other recent reviews. We're using an 8-core/16-thread Core i9-9900K running stock clocks, but with DDR4-3600 memory and the XMP profile enabled. The CPU generally runs at 4.7GHz during our gaming benchmarks, though the slightly older Coffee Lake architecture can be a bit of a bottleneck at lower resolutions.

We're also still running Windows 10 21H1; we plan to update to Windows 11 in the near future and see how that impacts performance — which will also require retesting a bunch of GPUs, so we're not looking to jump on the preview builds just yet.

We limit testing on third-party cards to our standard 13-game test suite, running at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p at ultra (or equivalent) settings. We compare the review card, ASRock Formula in this case, against reference design GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. Since we just reviewed the Asus ROG Strix LC RTX 3080 Ti and it goes after a similar extreme performance market, we've included results from that card as well.

Each test setting gets run multiple times, to ensure the consistency of our results. We're also skipping ray tracing benchmarks, though you can see a full suite of tests for the reference models in the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT review. We expect to see similar performance scaling relative to the reference RX 6900 XT, with or without ray tracing, which means the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula should still fall behind the RTX 3080 in ray tracing performance, particularly in games that use multiple RT effects.

The supply of AMD's Big Navi GPUs has been pretty bad since the launch last year, and the RX 6900 XT tends to be even more difficult to find. This is the first custom RX 6900 XT card we've received for review, and based on what we've seen in our GPU price index as well as the Steam Hardware Survey, there simply aren't that many cards to go around. At least according to Steam, RX 6900 XT currently makes up 0.08% of all surveyed PCs from last month — slightly more than the RX 6800's 0.05% but less than the RX 6800 XT's 0.10% and the RX 6700 XT's 0.13%. It's also less than every RTX 30-series GPU, including the RTX 3080 Ti that only launched in June and already accounts for 0.16% of surveyed PCs. 

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With a large cooler and a healthy factory overclock, we expected the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula to easily beat the reference model across our test suite. It did, but the last testing of the RX 6900 XT is now about four months old and a few of the games actually ran slower, likely due to driver and/or game updates. There were also a few larger jumps in performance, especially at 4K, which may also be partly thanks to updated drivers.

Across our test suite, the ASRock Formula was 6% faster than the reference RX 6900 XT. Only Borderlands 3 showed a slight 2% drop in performance, while the remaining dozen games improved by anywhere from 3% to 12%. Final Fantasy XIV, The Division 2, and Red Dead Redemption 2 all showed double digit percentage gains of 10–12%.

Looking elsewhere, the ASRock Formula also came relatively close to matching the performance of the Asus ROG Strix LC RTX 3080 Ti, trailing by 5% overall. A big part of the reason for ASRock's good showing is our inclusion of Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which heavily favors AMD's latest GPUs (and is an AMD promoted game), though Forza Horizon 4 also favors ASRock's card by 17% — the largest win at 4K. Meanwhile, Horizon Zero Dawn, Strange Brigade, The Division 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider all have the Asus RTX 3080 Ti card leading by 12% or more.

AMD's Big Navi architecture generally does better than Nvidia's Ampere architecture at lower resolutions. That's because the large 128MB Infinity Cache can hold proportionately more data, as 4K mostly ends up using the cache for the various buffers and doesn't have as much extra space for things like textures. Where the ASRock card was slightly slower than the Asus RTX 3080 Ti at 4K ultra, at 1440p ultra it swaps places and now leads by about 1% overall. The games that favor AMD GPUs do so even more at 1440p, with Assassin's Creed Valhalla giving the ASRock card a 34% lead over the Asus card — very much the exception rather than the rule. Remove that one game from the test suite and Nvidia's GPU would still hold onto a slight lead.

The ASRock card also sees less of an advantage over the reference RX 6900 XT at lower resolutions, and is now only 4% faster. There are also two games now (Borderlands 3 and Dirt 5) where the results from the reference card were slightly ahead of the ASRock card, but again we suspect that's due to drivers and game updates that have occurred in the past four months.

At 1080p, the Infinity Cache really starts to flex its muscle and the ASRock Formula now beats the Asus ROG Strix LC by 5%. Valhalla remains an outlier, now showing a 46% lead for the AMD GPU, but Horizon Zero Dawn and Watch Dogs Legion also have ASRock leading Asus by 15% and 13%, respectively. CPU limitations also play a role, particularly in Far Cry 5 and Forza Horizon 4, with the 1080p results only being slightly better than the 1440p results.

Given the price and the target market, we're not nearly as concerned with 1080p performance as we are with 1440p and 4K performance, though esports fans might want to look for benchmarks of the various GPUs at 1080p and see which ones can max out a 240 Hz or even 360 Hz monitor. Most of the games we test don't come anywhere close to 240 fps, never mind 360 fps — Strange Brigade being the exception, though it's still not an esports game. 

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Performance isn't the only important metric when it comes to graphics cards. We also test power consumption using in-line monitoring tools and Powenetics software. We log power, clock speeds, temperatures, and fan speeds. We loop the Metro Exodus benchmark five times at 1440p ultra settings, and then run FurMark stress test at 1600x900 for over 10 minutes. We also measure noise levels using an SPL meter. We collected the data using the default profile, as well as the OC mode.

ASRock clearly threw caution to the wind on the RX 6900 XT Formula. Even in the default mode, it used more power in our gaming test than any other GPU in our charts. Turn on the OC mode and power use jumps an additional 30W in Metro Exodus and 40W in FurMark. The triple 8-pin power connectors are definitely required to deliver this level of power, and the PCIe power draw maxed out at under 40W even in OC mode. Compared to the reference 6900 XT, the ASRock Formula uses 35% more power in gaming and nearly 40% more power in FurMark — all for about 6% more performance on average.

We've known for some time that AMD's Big Navi / RDNA 2 architecture was really tuned to hit higher frequencies. The official boost clock on the reference card is 2250 MHz, but even that card averaged 2327 MHz in our gaming test. The ASRock matches the clocks we've seen on the RX 6600 XT and RX 6700 XT, breaking 2.5 GHz in average clocks, and OC mode adds another 60 MHz.  Clock speeds are also quite high in the FurMark stress test, with the ASRock in OC mode basically doubling the clock speed of the reference RTX 3090 card. Again there was a 60 MHz bump in clocks with the OC mode, which honestly isn't much for the extra 30-40W of power that's required. It's a classic case of the diminishing returns we see when moving up the voltage and frequency curve.

Last, we have fan speeds and temperatures, which are very much interlinked. Some cards shoot for lower temperatures and ramp up fan speeds more quickly while others are okay with temperatures in the 75C range and take a more relaxed approach to fan RPMs. Given the power draw, it's not too surprising that ASRock needs both high speeds and relatively high temperatures.

The RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti are the only GPUs that ran hotter, and the reference cards definitely came near the limits of their cooling potential. ASRock only needed relatively modest fan speeds in the default mode, but OC mode needed a big bump in RPMs to keep thermals in check. Compare that to the Asus RTX 3080 Ti card that employs liquid cooling, and you can see that the combination yields lower temperatures and fan speeds.

We also measured peak noise levels using an SPL meter at a distance of ~10cm from the GPU fans, pointed at the center fan. Keep that distance in mind, because it's intended to show more of a difference between the graphics cards we test. At a normal distance of around one meter (where your head is relative to the case), noise drops about 10 dB(A).

At stock settings, the ASRock card generated 48.1 dB(A) of noise running Metro (just sitting in the game rather than looping, so there's no periodic dip when the benchmark loops). That corresponded to a fan speed of just 52%, so there's plenty of room for more noise and better cooling. Using the OC mode kicked the fans up to 62% and 52.3 dB(A), while setting a static fan speed of 75% resulted in noise levels of 60.0 dB(A). 

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As with other graphics cards that we've looked at during the past year or so, pricing and availability are generally completely messed up. ASRock's official MSRP on the RX 6900 XT Formula OC is apparently 'only' $1,700, though we've seen Newegg list it for as much as $1,900 in just the past two weeks. Still, the fact that it's available at all without dealing with the Newegg Shuffle or other shenanigans is at least some consolation. But then $1,700 is basically as much as you'd pay for an RX 6900 XT card off of eBay.

Is the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula worth $1,700? Normally, this would be a hard pass, but in the present climate there will undoubtedly be some takers. Plus you can get Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village for free for the time being, potentially offsetting the cost a bit (assuming you want both games). Of course, part of the reason for the inflated GPU prices is Ethereum mining, and the RX 6900 XT only manages about 65 MH/s — not enough to command the sort of prices that we still see on RTX 3090, 3080 Ti, and 3080. For pure gaming performance, the RX 6900 XT manages to trade blows with Nvidia's top GPUs and might be worth the cost… unless you care about ray tracing, in which case the RTX 3080 Ti easily comes out ahead.

Ten months after the official launch, AMD's RX 6900 XT still occupies an interesting position. Skip ray tracing and run at 1440p or 1080p and performance basically matches and sometimes exceeds the RTX 3090, at lower prices than you'll find on Nvidia's halo card. If you're after 4K and maxed out settings, and you want to be able to enable ray tracing in the games that support it, AMD's Big Navi GPUs are decidedly less enticing. Even if you want an AMD card, there's also a case to be made for skipping the RX 6900 XT and stepping down to the RX 6800 XT — or there would be if either one were regularly in stock at prices closer to AMD's MSRP.

If you have $1,700 that needs to be spent on a graphics card upgrade, the ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula might be what you're after. It's also telling that RX 6900 XT cards are at present the only GPUs currently available at Newegg without going through the Shuffaluffagus shenanigans. That suggests people aren't champing at the bit waiting to buy AMD's top cards. The unfortunate state of affairs is that waiting for prices to come down and return to normal could mean delaying a GPU upgrade for another year or more.

If you opt for the ASRock 6900 XT, you'll get AMD's top offering, boosted to even higher levels of performance, but mind the power draw and case ventilation. Those who prefer less extreme prices and performance, or anyone who wants more RGB joy or ray tracing in their next PC build, should look elsewhere.

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AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT already delivers impressive performance, ranking among the best graphics cards (that you still can't easily buy). Part of that comes thanks to the impressive clocks on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, and XFX has partnered with EK Water Blocks to deliver XFX Radeon RX 6900 XT Zero WB graphics card with promised overclocking capacity reaching beyond 3.0 GHz.

XFX uses a custom PCB with AMD's Navi 21 XTXH GPU, then pairs it with with a custom waterblock. Out of the box, the card boasts a 2200 MHz base clock and a boost frequency of 2525 MHz — a 12% increase over the reference card's 2250 MHz boost frequency. The card supposedly can reach over 3000 MHz when overclocking, according to XFX, though the information is quite vague and doesn't specify whether that's sustained or peak frequency.

Naturally, all that clockspeed requires more power, and the XFX Radeon RX 6900 XT Zero WB comes equipped with three 8-pin connectors. The reference card has a 300W TGP while the Zero WB requires 350W, and that's before pushing beyond the factory clocks. Combined with the PCIe slot, the triple PEG connectors can deliver up to 525W of power, which can only be dealt with effectively with extreme cooling solutions.

XFX partnered with Slovenian cooling specialist EK Water Blocks on the Zero WB graphics card. It features a nickel-plated copper cold plate with clear acrylic and RGB lighting to make the coolant glow. It also carries a laser-engraved X branding. The design isn't an all-in-one liquid cooler either, like we've seen with cards like the Asus ROG Strix LC, MSI Seahawk, and EVGA Hybrid cards. You'll need your own custom liquid loop, which means actual cooling potential largely depends on the specific setup.

XFX didn't reveal any pricing or availability details for the card yet, but we expect we'll see few cards and extreme prices. Our GPU price index currently shows an average eBay price of $1,620 for the RX 6900 XT, but that's for any card, and there were still only 64 sold in a two week period. Halo products like custom liquid cooling cards can easily go for $2,000 or more.

Last week, AMD launched its 'Raise the Game' Bundle that includes Far Cry 6, Resident Evil Village, and a three-month trial of Xbox game pass if you purchase a qualifying AMD Ryzen CPU and Radeon RX 6000 series GPU together. Now AMD is expanding its bundle to include one of the Best GPUs, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, as a standalone purchase, meaning you don't have to buy a qualified Ryzen CPU with the GPU to be eligible for AMD's new game bundle.

The new qualification applies to all Radeon RX 6900 XT models as well, including both AIB and reference designs, with either air cooling or liquid cooling. You will receive both Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village, but not the three-month trial of Xbox game pass that's reserved for other qualifying purchases.

Despite AMD making this game bundle more appealing to RX 6900 XT buyers, availability is still sparse, keeping prices high. Current 6900 XT prices are still in the $2000 range or higher, which is still far beyond the card's typical MSRP of $1500. So if do buy AMD's flagship card, at least you'll be getting $100 of video games bundled with it.

AMD will offer this game bundle from today until December 31st, 2021, and the redemption period for all games will end on January 29th, 2022. The bundle is available for North America and Western Europe at participating retailers.

Twitter user CyberPunkCat has shared an alleged AMD slide that reveals a new upcoming addition to the Big Navi family. The Radeon RX 6900 XTX reportedly arrives with higher clock speeds and faster memory to destroy Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090, one of the best graphics cards on the market. The rumored specifications fall in line with the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled, which was only available to OEMs. The age of the leaked slide is unknown. It‘s either old information on the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled that's already released or it a hint for a new SKU, which would mean that AMD may launch the graphics card for the retail market.

AMD's Navi 21 silicon is widely used in the Big Navi family. Currently, there are four variants of the Navi 21 die if we don't take the professional SKUs into account. The Navi 21 XL and Navi 21 XT dies power the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, respectively. On the other hand, the Navi 21 XTX die is at the heart of the vanilla Radeon RX 6900 XT whereas the Navi 21 XTXH gives life to higher-binned models, such as PowerColor's Radeon RX 6900 XT Red Devil Ultimate.

The Radeon RX 6900 XTX will most likely use the Navi 21 XTXH silicon, which is the fastest out of the lot. On this occasion, the graphics card won't just arrive with improved clock speeds, but allegedly with faster memory as well. The slide claims that the Radeon RX 6900 XTX delivers a FP32 performance up to 24.93 TFLOPs. That's an 8% increase in comparison to the regular Radeon RX 6900 XT. Assuming that the amount of stream processors don't change (and they probably won't), the Radeon RX 6900 XTX should debut with a 2,435 MHz boost clock.

While the regular Radeon RX 6900 XT features 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, the slide shows the Radeon RX 6900 XTX with 18 Gbps memory. The maximum theoretical memory bandwidth on the former works out to 512 GBps, while the latter is up to 576 GBps. Therefore, the Radeon RX 6900 XTX offers up to 13% higher throughput.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT's performance was already very close to the GeForce RTX 3090. With the new makeover, the Radeon RX 6900 XTX should have no problem beating the GeForce RTX 3090, but we'll have to wait on concrete benchmarks to find out for sure.

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.

Sapphire's range of Toxic cards are anything but shy, proudly extolling their power via colorful paintjobs and extreme performance. The latest card to the Toxic line-up, the Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Air Cooled, is designed for 4K gaming and features a boost clock of 2425MHz and a game clock of 2235MHz as well as 16GB of GDDR6. Like other AMD RDNA 2 cards, actual clock speeds while gaming can slightly exceed the boost clock. The RX 6900 XT is the fastest consumer part from AMD right now, sitting in third place in our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, and it's one of the best graphics cards (that you still can't buy because they're all sold out).

The Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Air Cooled features a BIOS switch with three settings: performance, silent, and software switch mode. Performance is the default setting, giving you maximum performance for 4K gaming. Should you wish to tweak your settings on the fly, the software switch mode let's you apply your own configuration within Sapphire's Tri-X software. As you can guess, silent mode reduces the fan speeds and runs the card at stock speeds for those who don't need raw performance.

Otherwise, the Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Air Cooled basically gets you some extra bling and a big cooler. The default game clock of 2235 MHz and 2425 MHz boost clock are a bit higher than other factory overclocked cards, but it still uses 16Gbps GDDR6 memory — unlike AMD's pre-builts only RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled. It also features 80 CUs and ray accelerators, has 128MB of infinity cache, and 5120 stream processors.

Sapphire recommends at least an 850W power supply, and the card has a TDP of just under 400W. Power is provided to the card via two eight pin and one six pin power connectors. With great power, comes great cooling. The rather beefy graphics card is a three-slot design, with dimensions of 320 x 134.8 x 58.4mm, so you may want to invest in a GPU brace. It's equipped with three aRGB fans, and a V-shape fin stack within the heatsink to help reduce turbulence and noise.

The fans on the Toxic GPU aren't standard aRGB fans, though. Instead, Sapphire equipped its hybrid fans. The Hybrid fans feature traditional axial fans to keep noise levels as low as possible, while delivering strong air pressure. Unlike the RTX 3090, all of the memory modules are on the same side of the PCB. That allowed Sapphire to use their K6.5 cooling design, which according to Sapphire cools nearly 38% better than their previous K5 memory cooling module.

Sapphire hasn't listed a release date for the Toxic RX 6900 XT Air Cooled, or a price, but the Toxic line generally targets the extreme end of the spectrum. It should cost less than the liquid cooled variants, but those go for over $2,000 so that's not saying much.

German site PCGamesHardware managed to lay their hands on AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics cards that is exclusively available from select system builders and will not be sold in retail. The card features slightly higher clocks than originally advertised and therefore its performance is a bit higher than one might think. But is it radically higher? 

When AMD formally introduced its Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled graphics card last month, it did not reveal all of its specifications. As PCGH discovered, the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC is based on AMD's Navi 21 XTXH silicon with 5120 stream processors, higher TGP (Typical Graphics Power, for the entire board), as well as no clock limitations. This means the card can be pushed to a 400W TGP, opening doors to extreme frequencies.  

By default, the GPU features a game clock of 2250 MHz, but it can boost to 2435 MHz (with a 400W TGP, it will spend more time working in boost mode than a regular Radeon RX 6900 XT board) and has some additional overclocking potential, just like other Navi 21 XTXH-powered cards.  

In addition to the higher TGP and GPU clocks, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled also carries 16GB of GDDR6 memory featuring an 18.5 GT/s data transfer rate, 0.5 Gbps higher than advertised initially. That gives it 591 GB/s peak bandwidth, a 15.6% increase over the regular Radeon RX 6900 XT's 16 GT/s GDDR6 and 512 GB/s bandwidth.

With a 12% higher GPU clock and a 15.6% higher peak memory bandwidth, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled is clearly faster than AMD's reference Radeon RX 6900 XT, though it still might be challenged by boards like Sapphire's Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition. But can it beat Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3090/3080 Ti in cases when the original model cannot? 

PCGH found that while there are numerous cases where AMD's limited edition Radeon RX 6900 XT LC can beat the GeForce RTX 3090/3080 Ti where an air-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT cannot, in most cases where Nvidia's Ampere architecture excels relative to AMD's RDNA 2 (i.e., with ray tracing enabled), high clocks are not going to help. 

But while AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled is not the fastest graphics card on the planet, it is clearly among the best graphics cards available today and the fastest RDNA2-powered product available. The board is only sold as part of high-end systems from boutique PC makers, so those who want to get an exclusive RDNA 2 card should look at Navi 21 XTXH-based offerings from Asus, ASRock, Gigabyte, Sapphire, PowerColor that do not have fast memory, but seem to have cooling systems with higher potential and therefore could offer higher GPU clocks.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT is officially AMD's new halo product, surpassing the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 by offering the fully-enabled Navi 21 GPU with 80 Compute Units. The latest generation GPUs sit atop our GPU Benchmarks hierarchy and rate as some of the best graphics cards currently available (if we use the term "available" loosely). The 6900 XT is also the most expensive AMD graphics card we've seen in quite some time — the last time AMD sold a GPU priced at $1,000 or more was the Radeon Pro Duo (2016), a very limited quantity dual-GPU card. With RX 6800 XT taking on RTX 3080, the goal is clear: AMD wants to offer competitive performance to the GeForce RTX 3090 while undercutting Nvidia's price by $500.

All of that is sort of a moot point, of course. Even eight months after the official launch, the RX 6900 XT remains virtually impossible to find in stock, just like all of the other RX 6000 and RTX 30 series graphics cards. Our GPU pricing index looks at eBay prices for the various cards, and while the RX 6900 XT technically only costs 55% more than the MSRP, it's still a lot more than we'd recommend paying. We're refreshing this review with the latest details but keeping the original performance results. You can see the full view of how performance stacks up in more recent reviews like the RTX 3080 Ti, but until prices reach something approaching normalcy, buying a latest generation graphics card remains a serious pain in the nether regions.

Undercutting the 3090 price is all well and good, but there are a couple of problems when comparing the GeForce RTX 3080 and 3090 to the Radeon RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT. First, RTX 3090 more than doubled the VRAM of the 3080. It also has a wider memory bus and 20 percent more shader cores. Finally, it increased the power target by 10 percent and often delivered superior performance in professional workloads. In contrast, the RX 6900 XT has 10 percent more shader cores than the 6800 XT. And that's it.

Let's get straight to the point. On paper, the RX 6900 XT doesn't look like a good deal. We're not saying the RTX 3090 is a better deal for gaming purposes, but at least it offers some tangible benefits over the RTX 3080. Again, all of this is somewhat academic right now, as supplies of the latest generation graphics cards have proven woefully inadequate. If you can find an RX 6900 XT in stock for $999, have at it! But it continues to sell out just as quickly as its lesser siblings — faster, in fact, since supplies of the RX 6900 XT tend to be even more limited considering it requires a fully-enabled Navi 21 chip. Yields of that quality of chip won't be higher than the partially disabled chips in the 6800 XT, which are still nowhere near sufficient to meet demand.

There's really not much to say about the specs that we haven't already covered. The RX 6900 XT has the full 80 CUs and 5120 shader cores that the Navi 21 GPU offers, and the remaining specs, including memory speed and TDP, are the same as the RX 6800 XT. Which isn't to say that there aren't differences in the silicon.

Binning and sorting chips from silicon wafers is nothing new, but the best chips often come from closer to the center of the wafer, where there are fewer defects. Since the 6900 XT requires a fully functioning Navi 21 chip, it almost guarantees other characteristics like power and voltage requirements will be better as well. How much does that matter in practice? If you're hoping to overclock and reach maximum performance, the silicon lottery can get you an extra few percent. Considering the 6900 XT already costs 50 percent more than the 6800 XT, however, that's a big jump in price for a likely minor improvement in overall performance.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT: Unboxed and Unwrapped 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT looks identical to the RX 6800 XT, except for the product label. The packaging isn't quite the same, however. Inside the main box, the RX 6900 XT comes wrapped in a mouse pad. It's a nice little extra if you need a mouse pad or AMD swag. It's a relatively large pad as well — not big enough to cover your entire desk, but much larger than a basic pad.

The RX 6900 XT is a dense graphics card, weighing slightly more than the RTX 3080 while sporting similar dimensions. It's a bit thicker, occupying 2.7 slots, but it's also about 2cm shorter. You could potentially fit it into a smaller build, but we recommend exercising some caution as ejecting 300W (or more) or heat into a small case will hurt performance. Actually, if you're doing a smaller case, just save yourself some money and buy the 6800 XT — we'd bet once thermals level out, the two cards will perform nearly the same.

Like the RX 6800 cards, the 6900 XT includes a single HDMI 2.1, two DisplayPort 1.4, and one USB-C video output. If that doesn't meet your needs, keep an eye out for third party cards. We've heard there will be RX 6900 XT cards from AMD's AIB partners (contrary to some earlier rumors), which makes sense as anyone making an RX 6800 XT could use the same design for RX 6900 XT. We're not sure when those cards will be available for purchase, however.

There are two 8-pin PEG connectors for power, rated for 150W each. Combined with the 75W from the PCIe slot, power should be more than sufficient for normal operation. We did see slight power spikes when starting up certain workloads (FurMark, specifically), but these shouldn't pose a serious problem to any quality power supply that can deliver 850W. We do recommend using a single rail PSU if possible.

Radeon RX 6900 XT Overclocking 

MSI Afterburner still doesn't support RX 6000 series GPUs at present, leaving us with AMD's built-in overclocking tools. We could just use Rage Mode, but all that seems to do is raise the power limit, so we set about doing some manual tuning.

Memory seemed easy enough to max out, and cranking the power slider to maximum as well doesn't generally pose any problems. That leaves the GPU clock, voltage, and fan speeds, the latter of which we tuned to favor cooler temperatures over quieter operation. We set the RAM to 2150 MHz, dropped the GPU voltage to 1125 mV (down from 1175 mV), and set about testing.

We started by looping the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark in a window at 1440p extreme, then bumped up the GPU clock to 2600 MHz to check for stability. We found that the power limit becomes a factor long before the maximum boost clock comes into play. With a 115 percent power limit in place, that gives the GPU up to 345W of power, and that's pretty close to where it landed. Clock speeds then fluctuate according to the demands of whatever game or workload is running, with average clocks in the 2400-2550 MHz range.

While Heaven proved stable in our initial tests, we did encounter some issues in a few other games, which eventually led to the slightly revised overclocks you can see above. We dropped the RAM 10 MHz to 2140, bumped the voltage back to 1150 mV, and that seemed to fix the problems. Additional time spent tuning might eke out a few more MHz, but for most users, simply enabling Rage Mode would do most of the dirty work — or set the RAM speed to 2100 and max out the power slider for a slightly higher result.

It's worth noting that while AMD lists the official boost clock of the RX 6900 XT as 2250 MHz, in AMD's own drivers, the boost clock shows up as 2519 MHz. You won't normally see clocks quite that high, but you could with Rage Mode. In that sense, AMD has taken a page out of Nvidia's book by advertising a lower boost clock than what you'll get in many games. We appreciate this, and the combination of increased power limits and a minor bump to the maximum boost clock gave us a decent result.

Overclocked results are present in our benchmark charts, but not in the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) suite. The net improvement was around 5 percent, and 7 percent at 4K, which isn't that much of a boost to performance. There's a decent chance third party cards may come with better factory overclocks than what we achieved.

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: GPU Benchmarks

MORE: All Graphics Content

As with the recent Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 review, we have multiple test suites we'll be running. Our new suite consists of 13 games and is a superset of the old suite, so we figured this round we'd just go with that. We also have ten DXR tests (DirectX Raytracing) to assess ray tracing performance.

Several of the latest additions to our tests suite (specifically, Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Dirt 5) clearly favor AMD's latest GPUs. On the other hand, nearly all of the DXR suite favors Nvidia's RTX cards, so it sort of balances out. We only tested the 6900 XT on our main Core i9-9900K PC, but if you check the GTX 3060 Ti review, you can see that the other CPUs are only slightly faster at 1080p and 1440p, likely due in part to our choice of RAM on the various platforms.

We've run all of the tests at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K ultra. We're not using DLSS on the Nvidia cards, which, as noted in the 3060 Ti review, can boost performance by 50 percent or more in games that support DLSS 2.0. We also ran Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks with DLSS and saw increases of 60 percent or more in some cases. Needless to say, AMD could really benefit from getting more games to use FidelityFX Super Resolution, which has now launched but is only used in a modest collection of shipping games so far — and many of those games don't really need it, particularly on a GPU like the 6900 XT.

Radeon RX 6900 XT — Extended Test Suite 

Our new suite of gaming benchmarks includes all of the games from previous years, plus four newer games from 2020. We're grouping all three resolutions for each game into a single gallery, with 4K results listed first. This is a $1,000 GPU, so we have to assume potential buyers are at least thinking about using it with a 4K display. Barring that, 1440p 144Hz displays remain the gaming sweet spot, and we recommend against spending this much money on any GPU intended for 1080p gaming (even though we're including those results).

Swipe through the galleries to check out the 1440p and 4K results, as well as the fps percentile line charts. We'll provide limited commentary on the individual games, letting the charts speak for themselves.

We've trimmed things down to just the latest generation Ampere and RDNA2 GPUs, though you can refer to our other reviews and GPU hierarchy for additional results. Given the specs, the RX 6900 XT performs just as we expected. It's generally around 5 percent (give or take 2 percent) faster than the RX 6800 XT. The drivers used for testing the RX 6900 XT are slightly newer as well and seem to have helped boost performance even more than the expected amount in a few games (Horizon Zero Dawn, specifically).

Overall, across the entire test suite, the RX 6900 XT is slightly faster than the RTX 3080, and it can beat the 3090 in a few cases. There are games where it falls behind, however, especially if a game supports ray tracing. How important is that? You'll have to decide. We generally like the RT effects in single player games but would leave them off in multiplayer where the fps drop is tough to take.

From a value perspective, of course, the 6900 XT doesn't make any sense. Would you pay hundreds of dollars extra for five percent more performance with otherwise equivalent features and design? We wouldn't recommend that. Unless you really want that custom mouse pad. Or maybe if you use professional software where the boost in performance makes it worth your while (see below).

We'll go through the individual gaming results in alphabetical order, which means Assassin's Creed Valhalla is up first. As a recent release promoted by AMD, it's perhaps not too surprising to see the RX 6900 XT at the top of the charts. Still, that's a significant lead for AMD at 1440p and 1080p. We're not sure what exactly is going on within the game code that would make it favor AMD's architecture this much, but as a DX11 game, it's entirely possible Nvidia will have updated drivers that improve performance with RTX cards. For now, AMD wins this one easily.

Borderlands 3 is another AMD promotional game, and the 6900 XT basically ties the RTX 3090 at 4K ultra. Dropping down to 1440p and 1080p, it even comes out ahead of the top Nvidia chip. We see a similar trend down through the other GPUs, with the 6800 XT leading the 3080, and the 6800 beating the RTX 3070. If BL3 is a game you care about, AMD takes this one as well.

A huge caveat here: Dirt 5 is an AMD promotional game, and we're using a beta / early access DXR patch. Given what we'll see below, either it's possible for game developers to do ray tracing in a way that dramatically favors AMD, or — more likely — the DXR implementation is very suboptimal on Nvidia right now. There are only three games currently being promoted by AMD that feature ray tracing effects, and two of those won't run on Nvidia GPUs right now, so again, these results aren't perhaps the best.

Even though this is yet another AMD promoted game, The Division 2 has been around a while and doesn't actually favor Team Red with the latest GPUs. Both the RTX 3080 and 3090 come out ahead of the 6900 XT at 4K ultra, though the gap narrows as resolution shrinks thanks to CPU bottlenecks.  All of the top GPUs can do 60+ fps at 4K ultra as well, and over 120 fps at 1440p ultra.

Far Cry 5 puts the 6900 XT and 6800 XT between the 3090 and 3080 at 4K, while CPU limits become a factor at 1440p and 1080p. Even though this is yet another game originally promoted by AMD, Nvidia delivers higher fps at CPU-limited resolutions right now. Given this is one of the oldest games in our test suite, we wouldn't put too much emphasis on FC5 — we'll be looking at replacing it with Far Cry 6 when it comes out.

Final Fantasy XIV is our first Nvidia promoted game, or at least a game that specifically makes use of some Nvidia GameWorks libraries. Nvidia's 3090 and 3080 take the top two spots across all three resolutions, though the biggest lead is still only 12 percent at 4K. With 4K fps in the triple digits and 1440p easily breaking 144 fps on the RX 6800 and above, this is another game that's not very representative of the latest releases.

Forza Horizon 4 wasn't promoted by AMD, but it definitely favors AMD GPUs. At 4K ultra, the 3090 technically has a higher average fps, but the minimum fps on the AMD side has enough weight to give AMD the lead. Dropping to 1440p, both the 6900 XT and 6800 XT lead the top Nvidia cards, again with significantly higher minimum fps, and at 1080p, even the RX 6800 tops the RTX 3090. This definitely isn't one of the better showings for the green team.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a port from PS4, so potentially the console roots help AMD a bit, plus it's a DX12 engine (the same game engine as Death Stranding). Performance is mostly a tie at 4K, but the 6900 XT pulls away at 1440p and 1080p. This is also the one game where the latest AMD drivers seem to have given RDNA2 a shot in the arm. We didn't get a chance to retest the 6800 XT, but right now, the 6900 XT is nearly 20 percent faster at 4K, and that's far more than the extra shader cores should provide.

Nvidia redeems itself a bit in Metro Exodus, with the 3080 basically matching the 6900 XT (though with slightly lower minimum fps) and the 3090 taking the top spot. This is also one of the first games to support ray tracing, and we'll look at it again with DXR enabled below. As with most of the other games, even though the 6900 XT and 3090 are higher on the charts, the 6800 XT and RTX 3080 are the better values (provided you can find them at MSRP — or in stock at all).

We didn't max out every setting in Red Dead Redemption 2, leaving the advanced options mostly at their minimum values. Still, as our first Vulkan API game, it's nice to see multiple cards now clearing 60 fps. The 3090 leads the 6900 XT again, though not by enough to warrant a 50 percent increase in price if gaming performance is your primary concern.

Another Nvidia game, the RTX 3090 leads at 4K in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. However, the 6900 XT delivers better minimum fps at 1440p and 1080p, with CPU bottlenecks becoming pronounced at the latter. This is another DXR enabled game that we'll look at again below.

Strange Brigade is our other Vulkan API game, and it strongly favors Nvidia's GPUs, even though it was originally an AMD promotional game. Not that it matters too much, as it's not a particularly popular game, and all of the GPUs hit very high fps at 4K. If you have a 4K 144 Hz display, perhaps Nvidia's GPUs are the better choice. At 1440p and 1080p, where we see frame rates approach and then cross the 300 fps threshold, however, there are better tests of a GPU's capabilities these days.

Our final game is the second with ray tracing. AMD's launch drivers for the 6800 series didn't render DXR effects properly in Watch Dogs Legion, but public drivers and 6900 XT launch drivers have fixed at least many of the rendering errors. As a result, performance has dropped by around 30 percent for the AMD GPUs, giving Nvidia it's biggest lead yet. The 3090 is 70 percent faster than the 6900 XT at 4K, 55 percent faster at 1440p, and 45 percent faster at 1080p — and that's without enabling DLSS! Even the RTX 3080 crushes AMD's top GPU by 30-45 percent in this game when using ray tracing. Turn on DLSS Quality mode, and the Nvidia GPUs can extend their lead by another 20-30 percent. 

MORE: Best Graphics Cards

MORE: GPU Benchmarks

MORE: All Graphics Content

Given what we've seen so far, it's a safe bet that Nvidia will maintain its lead in ray tracing benchmarks. The RX 6900 XT may close the gap a bit, but 10 percent more shader cores can only go so far. For these DXR tests, we'll mostly be looking at the RTX 30-series and the RX 6000-series GPUs, though we do have RTX 2080 Ti results as well. For reference, the RTX 2080 Super is just a bit slower than the RTX 3060 Ti, while the remaining 20-series GPUs scale down from there.

Our format is the same as above, just with eight additional games (tests) — and we'll forego any further commentary on Dirt 5 and Watch Dogs Legion since we already covered those. Considering Nvidia was the only ray tracing solution in town up until the RX 6800 XT launch, most of these games are Nvidia promoted titles. Any ray tracing effects are also inherently targeted at Nvidia's hardware. 

10 Game Average

Ray tracing continues to be extremely demanding, especially at higher resolutions without something like DLSS to help reduce the complexity. The RTX 3090 only averages 41 fps across the test suite, while the 3080 averages 36 fps. The 3080 ends up being 20-30 percent faster than the RX 6900 XT, and the 3090 is 35-50 percent faster than AMD's top GPU. If you're hoping to go all-in on ray tracing games in the next couple of years, you can actually make a pretty good argument for just going whole hog and buying the 3090. We also took an early look at Cyberpunk 2077 performance, which even in not-quite-final code looks great. The RT effects do add something to the game world, but you pretty much need DLSS to get 60 fps with most RTX cards. 

3DMark Port Royal

3DMark Port Royal ends up on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of the performance gap between Nvidia and AMD GPUs. The RTX 3090 is consistently around 35 percent faster than the 6900 XT, while the 3080 is about 18 percent faster. 3DMark isn't a game, though it's a very common benchmark, so we wanted to at least use it as a point of reference. 

Boundary

Boundary is a benchmark of an upcoming game, and it uses Unreal Engine with a bunch of ray tracing effects. The result is very taxing on even the fastest GPUs, especially without DLSS. At 1080p, the 3080 is 47 percent faster than the 6900 XT, and that lead grows to 51 percent at 4K. The 3090 is 67 to 75 percent faster than the 6900 XT. With DLSS Quality mode, performance can improve another 40 percent or more. If this is what the future of ray traced games holds, AMD will absolutely need Super Resolution if it hopes to compete. 

COD: Black Ops Cold War

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War only uses ray tracing effects for shadows and ambient occlusion, and honestly, it doesn't make that big of a difference visually. Even so, it's extremely taxing, and AMD's RX 6000 cards all struggle to keep up with their RTX counterparts. The 3090 is 'only' 46 percent faster at 1080p, but that lead balloons to 88 percent at 4K, where the 3090 maintains a still decent 58 fps while the 6900 XT just barely averages 30 fps. 

Control

Control remains one of our favorite examples of what ray tracing can add to a game, thanks to the office environment with lots of vertical glass surfaces that are partially reflective. Ray tracing is also used for diffuse lighting and ambient occlusion, and the result is once again a significant win for Nvidia's GPUs. The 3080 is 53-59 percent faster than the 6900 XT, depending on the resolution. AMD's top GPU can basically match the RTX 3060 Ti.

Crysis Remastered

Crysis Remastered's hybrid DirectX 11/DXR solution is a bit unusual, both in what was done and how it ends up performing. The 6900 XT ends up with a victory of sorts at 1080p, thanks to better minimum fps results, but then it falls behind the 3080 at 1440p and 4K. There's no DLSS support to boost Nvidia’s lead further, but the overall rendering quality in Crysis Remastered isn't particularly impressive compared to some of the other games.

Dirt 5

We already discussed Dirt 5 with DXR above, so we'll skip the commentary here. 

Fortnite

Turning on RT effects in Fortnite basically demands DLSS or some equivalent. The 3090 manages to break 60 fps at 1080p, but it's the only card to do so. AMD's 6900 XT is relatively close behind the 3080 this time, but it starts at 46 fps at 1080p and drops to sub-30 fps at 1440p before ending in the low-teens at 4K. Fortnite may look cartoony, but with RT enabled, it's one of the most demanding games around — based on its performance, at least. 

Metro

Metro Exodus was the first game to do global illumination via ray tracing, but the latest GPUs tend to run okay even with maxed-out settings. The 6900 XT hits 78 fps at 1080p and 57 fps at 1440p, then drops to 31 fps at 4K. The RTX 3080 is still 25-30 percent faster, but that's less than in some of the other games. Alternatively, AMD's 6900 XT and 6800 XT are just a bit faster than the RTX 3070 in this game. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is another one of the early RT-enabled games, using the tech for shadows only. It's actually not even that big of a visual change in many areas, but it's also not as big of a hit to framerates. Even at native resolution (without DLSS 1.0 on the Nvidia cards), most of the GPUs break 100 fps at 1080p, and the 6900 XT still puts up a solid 85 fps at 1440p. 4K trails off a bit at just 46 fps, but that's still playable, particularly if you have a FreeSync monitor. 

Watch Dogs Legion

Again, we covered Watch Dogs Legion above, so we'll skip the commentary here, other than to note that the 6900 XT comes in just behind the previous-gen RTX 2080 Ti and basically ties the RTX 3070. That's not a great result for a card that has twice as much memory and costs twice as much as well. 

Radeon RX 6900 XT: Blender and SPECviewperf 13 

We weren't able to run the full suite of Proviz benchmarks like we did on the RTX 3090, but we did run the same Blender test along with SPECviewperf 13. The results are interesting, to say the least. Many of the Blender tests have the 6900 XT ranked last, but it does a bit better in the classroom and koro scenes. (It also repeatedly failed on the victor test scene in Blender Benchmark.)

SPECviewperf 13 also shows a mix of high performance and low performance, but AMD's RDNA2 card looks competitive overall. It matches the Titan RTX in catia-06 and places first in the energy-02 and medical-02 tests. It also has strong results compared to the RTX 30-series in snx-03 and sw-04. On the other hand, it doesn't do as well in maya-05, creo-02, or 3dsmax-06. If you use any of these professional applications, AMD's GPUs might be worth a look.

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The RX 6900 XT has the same 300W TBP (Total Board Power) rating as the RX 6800 XT. Using our Powenetics equipment, we've logged power, GPU clocks, temperatures, and fan speeds while looping Metro Exodus at 1440p ultra five times (without ray tracing or DLSS). We also test with FurMark running at 1600x900 in a window using the stress test mode.

Separate from the power testing, we also check noise levels at a distance of 15cm from the graphics card (in an open case). At idle, our PC’s noise floor is 46.0 dB — that's with the GPU fans not spinning, in Zero dB mode. After running Metro for 15 minutes, the RX 6900 XT noise levels were 47.7 dB. That's actually slightly quieter than the RX 6800 XT, which, as we'll see in a moment, appears to be due to differences in the default fan curve.

Clock speeds, temperatures, fan speeds, and power are all interrelated. Drop the clocks, and you reduce the power and temperature. Raise the fan speed, and you reduce the temperature and maybe even power use, potentially allowing for higher clocks. We used AMD's built-in Radeon Settings utility to adjust the fan speeds and other settings on the overclocked card, for example, producing the results seen here.

Like several of Nvidia's latest GPUs, the RX 6900 XT uses just a bit more power than the official TDP rating. Overclocked, it's right up with the RTX 3090 and actually surpasses it in FurMark (by a whole 4W). It's not a big deal, and we suspect a lot of users buying the 6900 XT will end up using Rage Mode since it's basically a free overclock that just raises the power limits.

As we saw with the RX 6800 and 6800 XT, AMD has now started to be a bit more conservative in its official boost clock figures. All of the RX 6000 GPUs have exceeded their boost clocks in our Metro Exodus testing, and we definitely noticed other games going above 2250 MHz. Overclocked, the card even managed a cool 2.5 GHz, which is pretty freaking awesome. We can't wait to see what the extreme overclockers fare with liquid nitrogen.

Temperatures for the RX 6900 XT are okay, though it does end up at the top of our range in stock operation. What's interesting is that the fan speed is actually lower than the RX 6800 XT (see below), so AMD has apparently applied a different fan profile here that favors low noise levels over temperatures. Our overclocking tosses that out the window, of course, and the 6900 XT goes from being one of the quietest but warmest GPUs to having the highest fan speed and lowest temperatures.

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After the more recent Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 and GeForce RTX 3060 Ti cards, jumping up to a $1000 graphics card feels ludicrous. Sure, it's fast and can sometimes even beat Nvidia's top-shelf RTX 3090. Overall, however, the RX 6900 XT fails to impress relative to the RX 6800 XT. It's such an incremental bump in performance that it hardly seems worth the trouble. That's assuming that there are enough cards to meet the demand, which of course there aren't.

By the numbers, the RX 6900 XT is only 4 to 7 percent faster than the RX 6800 XT, but it officially costs over 50 percent more. Okay, sure, you can't find the 6800 XT in stock for $649 right now, but at some point (hopefully before RDNA3 arrives), that will no longer be the case. If you want the best high-end AMD graphics card, our pick still goes to the RX 6800 XT. But if you're open to other options, AMD has a tougher time of things.

Toss out ray tracing performance, and the RX 6900 XT looks very competitive, chalking up several wins against the RTX 3090. But if you're willing to spend over a grand on a new graphics card for gaming purposes, we simply can't overlook the ray tracing performance, not to mention the large number of games with DLSS support. Yes, FidelityFX Super Resolution is now here, and it works with every GPU, but it doesn't look quite as good as DLSS 2.0 and it's not in nearly as many games, particularly games that really need it. However, even without DLSS, the RTX 3080 already leads the 6900 XT by an average of 25 percent at 1440p in ray tracing games.

It's also interesting to note that, for all the complaints about the lack of RTX 30-series GPUs, all of the Nvidia cards (except the most recent RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti) actually show up in the Steam Hardware Survey. We still don't know what sort of fuzzy statistics Steam might be using, as Valve has never been particularly transparent about the data behind the HW survey. If it's not fully random and instead sent out queries to anyone with a new 'unknown' GPU during the past month or two, that could explain things. Still, not a single RX 6000-series GPU shows up, while the RTX 3070 has basically caught up to the RX 580 (AMD's highest ranked GPU on the list).

As a professional card, the RX 6900 XT again has some potential. There are certain applications where AMD is more generous than Nvidia when it comes to optimized drivers. If you happen to use one of those apps, this could be the best overall value, but again the 6800 XT has the exact same features and specs, only with a few fewer shader cores.

That's the real difficulty with the top of the pecking order. You often get radically diminishing returns going from the second- or third-tier GPU to the fastest card. The RTX 3090 has the same problem, and we don't recommend it as a general gaming solution for the same reasons. But really, anyone wanting a new GPU is likely going to be waiting for prices to come down, whatever their GPU of choice. When even the RTX 3060 and RX 6700 XT sell for over $700, it's best to hang on to whatever you already have.

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AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled is not supposed to be available to general audience, but only to PC builders. Retailers in India are offering this product without the need to purchase a pre-built system. The price dramatically exceeds that of AMD's MSRP for an air-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT, one of the best graphics cards in its own right.

AMD officially said that its Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled was a limited edition product set to be available only to select system integrators (SIs). The part about SIs is important because it indeed means relatively low volume PC builders as opposed to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which are high-volume PC suppliers. 

Apparently, three retail stores in India have Sapphire's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled in stock. The price is approximately $3,000 (which includes India's sales tax). While the price looks extremely high even by today's high prices for graphics cards, it is indeed a very high-end product that has a number of advantages, such as 16 GBs of 18 GT/s GDDR6 memory (a regular version carries 16 GT/s GDDR6 SGRAM). 

Sapphire, which is at least partly owned by Chinese contract maker PC Partner, is a historical manufacturing partner of ATI Technologies (now owned by AMD). The fact that AMD's reference cards are built by PC Partner is well known, yet not discussed widely. To that end, it is surprising to see a Sapphire-branded Radeon RX 6900 XT LC card.

Will AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled be made widely available? Only time will tell.

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled launched earlier this week, and in theory it should place near the top of our GPU benchmarks and earn a spot on our list of the best graphics cards. It has a one significant advantage when compared both to the company's air-cooled reference design as well as custom graphics boards from board makers: faster memory. Unfortunately, DIY enthusiasts will not be able to get this card as it is a limited edition product that will only be supplied to select system integrators. 

Unlike all AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards that are on the market (including those based on the so-called Navi 21 XTXH silicon with no clock-speed limits), AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled uses 18Gbps GDDR6 memory, up from the 16Gbps GDDR6 used on regular boards. With a memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s (up from 512 GB/s on standard cards), AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled will offer higher performance in high resolutions and in rich scenes.

Besides the 12.5% increase in memory clocks, the RX 6900 XT LC also appears to have higher GPU clocks and a 10% increase in TDP. That should help performance as well, though we suspect the memory speed will be the bigger factor, particularly at 4K.

Sadly, AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled isn't just limited to specific pre-built systems, but it's also a limited edition product. We expect only a handful of such boards will be made. We received the following statement from AMD about the product:

"AMD will be making a limited number of Radeon RX 6900 XT liquid cooled reference design graphics cards available to select system integrators. System integrators are a critical part of the gaming ecosystem and offering this this model through their channels helps ensure that as many of these products as possible get into gamers hands."

AMD has not disclosed how many Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled units will be made, but we are probably talking about thousands of units at best, which is hardly anything on a global scale. 

Of course, there are numerous factory-overclocked Radeon RX 6900 XT offerings from companies like ASRock, PowerColor, and Sapphire. Yet, AMD's own Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled has a unique advantage that will not be available to many users. Since it's only availble to system integrators, AMD also has not disclosed pricing, though we'd expect it to come at a decent jump from the already high $999 MSRP for the standard air cooled model.

Not that MSRP has any meaning, with our GPU pricing index showing a typical going rate on eBay of nearly $1,900. Still, GPU prices are trending downward now. Hopefully in the coming months, we'll see graphics cards selling for more reasonable prices.

AMD on Wednesday unveiled a version of its flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card equipped with a closed-loop liquid cooling system (LCS). The new board boasts higher GPU and memory frequencies compared to AMD's reference air-cooled card, which is already among the best graphics cards, but it will (at least initially) be available exclusively to system integrators.

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled carries the company's Navi 21 GPU with 5120 stream processors that is clocked at up to 2250 MHz (game clock) and is accompanied with 16GB of 18Gbps GDDR6 memory. There are some Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards from manufacturers that have a higher GPU clock, but AMD's RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled model is the only one to feature 18Gbps DRAM. 

The board is rated for a 330W thermal design power and is cooled down using AMD's custom liquid cooling system featuring a 120-mm radiator equipped with a fan. This is hardly the most powerful cooler for AMD's Big Navi that is out there, but system integrators will likely appreciate it as it fits into almost any high-end desktop computer.

Unlike high-end Radeon RX 6900 XT from AMD's partners that feature three eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled has two connectors, which are enough to deliver up to 300W of power to the board. Two connectors also mean that the card will be compatible with almost any high-performance PSU. 

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled is clearly one of the world's fastest graphics cards based on AMD's Big Navi GPU, but for some reason the company has no plans to sell it in retail, but will offer it exclusively to system integrators, according to VideoCardz.   

Since the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled will only be available to PC makers, AMD does not disclose its recommended price. Maingear will be one of the first system integrators to offer AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled in the USA and already has a page up about it.

It appears that PowerColor has joined Sapphire in 'leaking'  the unannounced RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled reference card. As tweeted by @momomo_us, PowerColor has officially listed a new reference RX 6900 XT LC card on its site, but with no pictures at this time. (Note: The picture above is the Sapphire version.)

This information comes just 9 days after Sapphire spilled the beans on AMD's liquid-cooled version of the RX 6900XT. This all-new liquid-cooled reference design for the RX 6900 XT remains very similar to the air-cooled model, but it replaces the triple-fan cooling system with a single 120mm AIO, that presumably cools the entire card, including memory.

Another interesting feature is the addition of 18Gbps memory, a noticeable upgrade over the current 16Gbps ICs used on the air-cooled 6900 XT. This would bump up the card's memory bandwidth from 512GBps to 576GBps. That would also be the fastest shipping GDDR6 memory we've seen, as Nvidia moved to GDDR6X for the 3080 and above. However, that could simply be a typo, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, we've successfully overclocked the VRAM on the other RX 6000-series GPUs to 17.2Gbps, so it's possible the extra cooling allows for even higher stock clocks.

So far, PowerColor and Sapphire are the only AMD AIB (add-in board) partners that have revealed this new version of the RX 6900 XT. Assuming these are actual reference designs that have leaked early, we suspect more partners will join the party once we get the official announcement of the card from AMD. Once that happens, we'll also get official specs and details on pricing and 'availability'.

AMD's liquid-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT appears to be making its way to the retail market. VideoCardz has spotted a Sapphire listing over at a Kabum, a Brazilian retailer.

Speculation around the graphics card world is that the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC could very well be the incarnation of the rumored Radeon RX 6900 XTX. The latter was expected utilize the Navi 21 XTXH silicon, which allegedly brings the highest clock rates out of AMD's RDNA 2 army. Although we've already seen the graphics card in the wild, AMD hasn't formally confirmed the existence of the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT LC, which should employ the Navi 21 XTXH die, comes with 80 Compute Units (CUs) for a total of 5,120 Stream Processors (SPs). Along with those 5,120 SPs, you'll also find 80 ray accelerators for ray tracing workloads. The Radeon RX 6900 XT LC arrives with a 2,250 MHz game clock and a boost clock up to 2,435 MHz. The vanilla Radeon RX 6900 XT has a 2,015 MHz game clock and 2,250 MHz boost clock. Therefore, Sapphire's rendition is offering up to 11.7% and 8.2% higher game and boost clocks, respectively.

Besides the uplift in clock speeds, Kabum's specification table also shows an increase in memory speed for the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC. Apparently, the liquid-cooled version sports 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips as opposed to the 16 Gbps ones on the Radeon RX 6900 XT. It may be a human error, but it's certainly feasible, considering that Samsung produces 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips. If accurate, the extra frequency on the memory chips bumps the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC's maximum theoretical memory bandwidth up to 576 GBps, a 12.5% improvement over the regular version.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT LC Specifications

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

The Sapphire-branded Radeon RX 6900 XT LC (21308-02-10G) shares the same design as the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC that recently popped up inside a gaming PC over in China. Although listed as a Sapphire SKU, there are no signs of the Sapphire logo or any type of third-party marketing on the graphics card itself.

It stands to reason that the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC likely conforms to an AMD reference design where the chipmaker's partners are free to slap their name beside the Big Navi graphics card. It flaunts a dual-slot design with aluminium plates on both sides of the graphics card. For comparison, the Radeon RX 6900 XT reference edition conforms to a 2.5-slot design. Evidently, there are no cooling fans so the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC's only method of staying cool is the included 120mm AIO liquid cooler.

Despite coming with a significant factory overclock, the Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT LC still uses a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. It's uncertain if the liquid-cooled variant still abides by the 300W TDP (thermal design power) limit as the normal Radeon RX 6900 XT, though. One would expect a more generous TDP, given the higher clock speeds on the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC.

The display outputs on the Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT LC, on the other hand, remains unchanged. Like AMD's reference design, the liquid-cooled variant retains support for four monitors. It offers the standard HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort 1.4 outputs and one USB Type-C port.

Kabum has the Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT LC up for preorder at $4,662.40 or $3,368.41 in a single cash payment. Don't pay attention to the pricing since it probably includes VAT (value-added tax) and a huge retailer markup. Kabum claims that it'll start shipping Sapphire Radeon RX 6900 XT LC orders on June 30 so we could see an announcement from AMD very soon.

User from the Chiphell forums has spotted an interesting Radeon RX 6900 XT over in China. The Big Navi graphics card, forms part of a pre-built gaming PC on Tmall, features an exterior that's very similar to AMD's reference design, but with added liquid cooling.

The merchant listed the graphics card as the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT LC, claiming that it's a special edition SKU. The "LC" likely stands for liquid cooling. Although the seller didn't mention the manufacturer, he did claim that this variant offers 10% higher performance than your typical Radeon RX 6900 XT. The statement lends credence to the suspicion that this liquid-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT could be leveraging the Navi 21 XTXH silicon that has been specially binned for high clock rates.

The RDNA 2 graphics card's shroud exhibits two sleek, aluminium plates on both sides, implying that this is probably a strict liquid-cooled design rather than one of those hybrid setups that AMD's partners are so fond of. The illuminated Radeon logo still hands on the side, but it's accompanied by what appears to be a RGB LED bar for added eye candy.

The single 120mm AIO radiator certainly raises an eyebrow, though. Graphics card vendors have released the custom Radeon RX 6900 XT models with 240mm and 360mm radiators. Furthermore, the The Radeon RX 6900 XT is a 300W graphics card so we doubt the Radeon-branded 120mm radiator will suffice. The cooling solution will probably have to work hard to keep the graphics card's temperatures under control and may end up being very noisy.

Whether the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT LC is employing the Navi 21 XTXH or not, the graphics card only commands a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. A 700W power supply is still the minimum capacity recommended to feed the RDNA 2 graphics card.

The jury is still out on whether we'll see the Radeon RX 6800 XT LC outside of the Asian market. Nevertheless, the odds are that this SKU could be exclusive to OEMs or system integrators.

AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT has once again broken the world record for the highest frequency possibly on a GPU. Overclocking group OGS managed to squeeze a whopping 3.3 GHz out of the 6900XT, one of the best graphics cards with liquid nitrogen, breaking the current 3.2 GHz GPU clock speed record held by OCer Der8auer on the same Powercolor Red Devil Ultimate RX 6900XT GPU.

OGS tested the 6900XT in Fire Strike Extreme, where the GPU managed a score of 37618 points. That's an excellent score for a single GPU, and you'll need a multi-GPU setup to beat that score if you aren’t using liquid nitrogen.

3.3 GHz is an amazing achievement for AMD’s TSMC fabricated RDNA2 GPUs. When AMD’s RX 6000 series GPUs first launched, they were already hitting frequencies well above 2.5 GHz, something Nvidia’s latest Ampere GPUs (built on Samsung 8nm) simply cannot compete with (without exotic cooling, Ampere's clock speeds barely hit 2 GHz).

What’s most interesting is that AMD’s RDNA2 architecture could have much more headroom than even 3.3GHz. Overclocker Der8auer, in a video showcasing his 3.2GHz 6900XT overclock, mentioned AMD’s use of an artificial clock limiter on most of the AIB partner cards and reference cards, which limits the cards to around 3 GHz.

However, the PowerColor RX 6900XT Liquid Devil Ultimate card Der8auer used has an artificial clock limit of 4.0 GHz. That means we could see even higher frequencies in the future from the RX 6000 series.

These artificial clock limiters from AMD could also hint at what the future holds for AMD’s RDNA3 and future product lines as well. If RDNA2 can already scale to 3.3 GHz on liquid nitrogen, who knows how quickly we’ll reach the 4.0 GHz barrier on future nodes and architecture, whether that be from AMD or Nvidia.

Asus has introduced its highest-performing AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT-based graphics card to date, the ROG Strix LC RX 6900 XT Top Overclocked Edition. The board features an out-of-box boost clock of 2525 MHz and uses a hybrid air / liquid cooling system to lower temperatures and maximize overclocking potential.  

Asus were among the first vendors to introduce an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT-powered graphics card with a hybrid cooling system, so the new 'Top Overclocked Edition' with the same cooler is almost certainly based on AMD's Navi 21 XTXH silicon that has 5,120 stream processors, no limitations when it comes to clock rates and which has set an absolute GPU frequency record of 3225 MHz.  

Asus' hybrid cooling system is actually pretty regular: it uses a blower-type fan to cool-down VRM and a closed-loop liquid cooling system featuring a large cold plate (that covers both GPU and memory) as well as a 240-mm radiator with two fans. Since the graphics card is designed for enthusiasts who sometimes use large EATX cases, the LCS uses 600 mm tubing to enable compatibility with such chassis. Meanwhile the card itself is not large and measures 27.7×13.1×4.36 cm.  

The board has four display outputs: two DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB Type-C. It also supports the HDCP 2.3 technology for compatibility with content that uses it. 

The product relies on a custom-designed printed circuit board (PCB) with an enhanced voltage regulating module (VRM) that uses quality components like inductors, solid-state capacitors, and high-current power stages. The board features three eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power inputs that can deliver up to 450W of power and in the technical specs we note that Asus recommends an 850W PSU.

Traditionally for ROG Strix-badged products, the ROG Strix LC RX 6900 XT Top Overclocked Edition has numerous addressable RGB LEDs.  

World's Fastest Radeon RX 6900 XT Graphics Cards

High out-of-box clocks and the 'unlocked' processor are the key selling points of the new ROG Strix LC RX 6900 XT Top Overclocked Edition graphics card as Asus has been formally offering an a Radeon RX 6900 XT with a hybrid cooling system for quite a while now.

Just like other makers of graphics cards these days, Asus does not talk about recommended pricing of its latest product since its real-world price tag will differ significantly from its MSRP. 

According to reports from VideoCardz, Gigabyte is readying an Aorus-branded AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card equipped with a water block. The Aorus Xtreme WaterForce WB Radeon RX 6900 XT will feature multiple addressable RGB LEDs and will be aimed at those who already have a custom liquid cooling system (LCS). Right now details are sparse, so take them with a pinch of salt.

Gigabyte's Aorus Xtreme WaterForce WB Radeon RX 6900 XT will carry AMD's top-of-the-range Navi 21 GPU with 5,120 stream processors, though it is unknown whether the GPU will come in its XTX variant (with certain limitations for clocks and voltages) or in the unlocked XTXH version with no limits. Exact specifications of the board are unknown at this point, reports VideoCardz. 

Just like Gigabyte's Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G, the upcoming Aorus Xtreme WaterForce WB Radeon RX 6900 XT features three eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors that can deliver up to 450W of power to the card but right now there are no details on actual power requirements. Since we have no idea which GPU version the card uses, it is hard to make guesses about exact clocks that can be expected.

Gigabyte's Aorus WaterForce water block has a transparent acrylic cover and seems to be slightly more than one slot thick. Therefore, the card still comes with a dual-slot bracket. Traditionally for custom water blocks, this one has multiple integrated addressable RGB LEDs. As for outputs, they are pretty standard: two DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1.  

When it comes to launches of new graphics cards, Gigabyte's usual strategy is to release reference boards first, then follow up with a custom design, and then proceed with models featuring a liquid cooling solution. This was the case with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090, but as far as AMD's Radeon RX 6800/6900-series is concerned, Gigabyte just released three custom cards with the Aorus brand (RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT) and never offered anything with liquid cooling. But at least it now looks that Gigabyte's liquid-cooled RDNA2 product is on the way. All we need to know now are when to expect it, and how much it will cost.

Almost every SKU of the RTX 30-series line returns in today's Newegg Shuffle, save for the RTX 3090. But making up for that high-end absence are new bundles for some of AMD's best graphics cards, giving you a total selection between not only the RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070 and RTX 3080, but also the RX 6700 XT and RX 6900 XT.

Like most of Newegg's recent shuffles, all of today's cards do come bundled with another component. For the most part, that's a power supply or motherboard, though there are a few RAM bundles in today's shuffle as well. There's also a bundle for an RTX 3070 and EVGA XR1 Capture Card that might interest streamers.

These bundles, unfortunately, don't represent savings. Instead, Newegg's just taking the opportunity to sell loosely related components by forcing prospective graphics card buyers to get them with their purchase. These additional parts aren't overpriced, but you can't opt out of buying them if you don't need them. Certain parts, like the Gigabyte Power Supplies, also have low ratings and could prove unreliable over time.

Still, even with the extra parts, our eBay GPU pricing index shows that you're still likely to pay less for a GPU here than you would with a scalper. You could probably trash the bundled item and still come out ahead, though reselling might be the wiser choice.

And that's not a horrible tradeoff to be able to buy cards from all over the top half of our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. For an idea of the power we're looking at here, know that RTX 3060 cards are about as fast as the RTX 2070 from 2018, but with more memory (and less memory bandwidth). The RTX 3080, meanwhile, is the Ampere flagship and offers the best performance you can find without going into the RTX 3090's Titan RTX-level power.

AMD's Radeon cards are also powerful when it comes to rasterized games, but our ray tracing face-off shows that they still have a ways to go when it comes to matching Nvidia's ray-tracing and DLSS prowess.

For those unfamiliar with the process, Newegg Shuffle uses a lottery format. Just select the component(s) you'd like to potentially buy. Then Newegg will hold a drawing later today, after which the 'winners' will be notified by email with the chance to purchase an item (only one) within a several-hour period. Based on our experience, you won't get selected most of the time. But hey, it's free to try.

Here's the full list of today's options:

• EVGA RTX 3060 with EVGA Supernova 750W Power Supply for $522
• EVGA RTX 3060 with EVGA 750W Power Supply for $505
• MSI RTX 3060 Ventus OC with OLOy WarHawk RGB 2 x 8GB RAM for $600
• MSI RTX 3060 Ventus OC with OLOy 2 x 8GB RAM for $580
• MSI RTX 3060 Ventus OC with OLOy 2 x 8GB RAM for $588
• Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3060 OC with Asus TUF Gaming B450M Motherboard for $604
• Asus TUF Gaming RTX 3060 OC with Asus ROG Strix GB450-F Motherboard for $644
• EVGA RTX 3070 with EVGA Supernova 750W Power Supply for $761
• EVGA RTX 3070 with EVGA XR1 Capture Card for $824
• Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti with Gigabyte 750W Power Supply for $759
• Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti with Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite Motherboard for $804
• Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti OC with Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite Motherboard for $814
• Gigabyte RTX 3060 Ti OC with Gigabyte 750W Power Supply for $769
• Gigabyte RX 6700 XT with Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite Wifi Motherboard for $1,084
• Gigabyte RX 6700 XT with Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite Motherboard for $1,084
• Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT with Asus TUF Gaming B450M Motherboard for $1,044
• Asus ROG Strix RX 6700 XT with Asus ROG Strix B450-F Motherboard for $1,084
• Gigabyte Aorus RTX 3080 with Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite Wifi Motherboard for $1,304
• Gigabyte Aorus RTX 3080 with Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite Motherboard for $1,304
• AsRock RX 6900 XT with ASRock B550M Steel Legend Motherboard for $1,859

With component shortages plaguing the PC industry, not to mention the smartphone and automotive industries, the latest word is that prices aren't likely to return to 'normal' throughout 2021. If you can keep chugging along with whatever your PC currently has, that's the best option, as otherwise prices are painful for all of the Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA2 GPUs.

Today's Newegg shuffle starts at 1 pm EST/10 am PST. The Newegg Shuffle normally lasts for 2 hours, so if you're interested in any of these components, act fast!

For other ways to get hard-to-find graphics cards, check out our RTX 3080 stock tracker and our feature on where to buy RTX 30-series cards. And for more Newegg savings, visit out page of Newegg promo codes.

Last year, AMD finally released a family of graphics processors that can compete against Nvidia's high-end offerings in terms of performance. Unfortunately, AMD could not meet demand for new GPUs. But apparently there is light at the end of the tunnel as AMD is ramping up production.

"We introduced our Radeon 6700 XT desktop CPU with leadership 1440p gaming performance in March, and are on track for the first notebooks featuring our leading edge mobile RDNA 2 architecture to launch later this quarter," said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, during the company's latest earnings call. "We expect Radeon 6000 series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production." 

Increasing GPU supply is not a particularly easy task. AMD's manufacturing partner TSMC operates at a nearly 100% load. Furthermore, production cycle of a modern process is around three months long, so a chip AMD orders today may not be shipped until sometime this summer.

"We see good customer ordering patterns and strong backlog," said Su. "Then, we have also seen that the supply chain has been tight overall for the semiconductor industry. And we’ve been working very closely with our supply chain partners. So, we also have good visibility to additional supply as we go throughout the year."

AMD's graphics revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 increased by "a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year and sequentially" due to the success of its Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs. 

Sadly for AMD, all graphics cards today are sold at prices that are dramatically higher than their MSRPs, so increasing its sales might be a difficult task since even graphics boards meant to be inexpensive are priced unreasonably high due to demand amidst component shortages.

Two newly leaked images suggest that AMD considered building an extreme flagship for its Big Navi family featuring a liquid cooling system and called Radeon RX 6900 XTX. The Navi 21 GPUs already rank near the top of the best graphics cards, and also place high on our GPU benchmarks hierarchy. Adding liquid cooling to the mix, similar to what's been done in the past with the RX Vega 64 Liquid, R9 Fury X and R9 295X2, would allow AMD to reach higher clocks and performance.

A member of the Chiphell forums published two pictures claiming to be the reference design of AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XTX graphics card. The images were then republished by a Weibo user. The images show a board with a large heatsink with the letter "R" on its shroud, hiding a waterblock underneath.

The shroud also has red accents and the 'Radeon' inscription on its side, which is very similar to those on the reference Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon 6900 XT graphics cards. 

But unlike the 6900 XT, the so-called Radeon RX 6900 XTX does not have a backplate (not that it is particularly surprising for a pre-release product). The board also appears to come with a 120mm radiator and one fan.

While AMD has not yet released a Radeon RX 6900 XTX product, it has worked to deliver the ultimate version of the 6900 XT with 5,120 stream processors and very high clocks. AMD Recently started supplying partners with its "unlocked and unleashed" Navi 21 XTXH silicon that can boost all the way to 2.73 GHz on Sapphire's Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition, and to about 2.50 GHz on AIBs by ASRock and PowerColor (up from 2.25 GHz recommended by AMD). 

Assuming AMD did play around with a RX 6900 XTX card, it'd be interesting to know how far it was willing to push the GPU. Some of the extreme cooling systems designed by AMD's partners seem more capable than its liquid cooler at first glance. 

In general, while the Radeon RX 6900 XTX speaks the same design language as AMD's reference Radeon RX 6800 and 6900-series graphics cards, it's unclear if the card in the images was meant to be a commercial product, a sample for game developers, or a one-off prototype.

AMD is not new to liquid cooling. The company offered the Radeon R9 Fury X and Radeon Vega 64 Liquid Cooling boards with a closed-loop liquid cooling system. Ultimately, the company moved to a triple-fan cooler with a large heatsink as a more practical cooling solution.

While we still don't have hard proof of a 6900 XTX under consideration or in the works, it would make sense for AMD to allow its partners to release extreme specced Radeon RX 6900 XT SKUs that could push the Navi 21 silicon even further, especially with rumors of Nvidia planning to announce a GeForce RTX 3080 Ti in the near future.

Nvidia's flagship GeForce RTX 3090 nearly always outperforms AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT, but a heavily factory-overclocked Navi 21 XTXH can successfully compete against a slightly cut-down GA102 that carries 'only' 12GB of memory. Whether either card will be available for purchase at reasonable prices this year is another matter entirely.

Being one of AMD's closest partners, Sapphire has historically offered the fastest factory-overclocked Radeon graphics cards with exotic cooling systems. AMD's 'quiet' launch of the 'unlocked' Navi 21 XTXH GPU opened doors to makers of graphics cards to release ultimate versions of their Radeon RX 6900 XT products with high clocks and Sapphire went above and beyond with its Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition that can clock the GPU at up to 2.73 GHz right out-of-box. 

Sapphire's Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition graphics card carries AMD's 'unlocked' Navi 21 XTXH GPU with 5120 stream processors that is powered by a custom voltage regulating module (VRM) enabled by one six-pin and two eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors (which can deliver up to 375W of power, another ~75W can be drawn from a PCIe x16 slot). The board uses a custom-built hybrid all-in-one cooling system that uses a fan to cool down the VRM (which is covered with die-cast heatsinks and heat pipes) as well as a closed-loop liquid cooling system featuring a 360-mm radiator with three fans to cool down the GPU. Sapphire says that its cooler "keeps the GPU temperature lower than 85°C and noise levels below 36 dBA."

The Toxic Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition comes with a default Game clock of 2375 MHz and Toxic Boost clock of 2500 MHz, which is 250 MHz higher than AMD's recommendations for its Radeon RX 6900 XT in boost mode. Meanwhile, in Performance mode the Toxic Boost clock increases all the way to 2730 MHz, which is a whopping 480 MHz higher than AMD's recommendations. By contrast, competing graphics cards can hit around 2500 MHz out-of-box. Meanwhile, the world's record GPU clock ever achieved is 3225 MHz.

World's Fastest Radeon RX 6900 XT Graphics Cards

Sapphire's Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition is not only one of the world's highest-performing graphics card, but it also looks good as it has multiple addressable RGB LEDs and an overall stylish look.

Since the graphics board uses a hybrid cooling system, it is not very large itself and measures 270 × 130 × 45mm, which can be considered modest by today's standards. It will not fit into compact chassis, but buyers of extreme graphics cards generally favor larger cases, so this is hardly a limitation.

Sapphire has not disclosed recommended pricing of its Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Extreme Edition graphics board, but one can be fairly certain that its retail price will be just as extreme as its clocks given the scarcity of GPUs at this present time.

Der8auer, a star overclocker from Germany, has managed to set a new GPU frequency record with PowerColor's custom-designed AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. With the help of liquid nitrogen cooling, the specialist managed to boost the clock rate of 6900 XT, which made our list of best graphics cards thanks to its 26.8 billion transistors, to a whopping 3,225 MHz. 

While all 6900 XT-based cards are fast, PowerColor's LiquidDevil Ultimate Radeon RX goes above and beyond with a 16-phase VRM, three eight-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, and some liquid nitrogen. The board does not appear to have any clock speed cap, which is why it was possible to push it all the way to 3.225 GHz without modifying its VRM. Previous GPU overclocking records involved graphics cards with power delivery modifications or usage of K|NGP|N-branded boards with a configurable VRM.

When AMD introduced its Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT graphics cards about half of a year ago, users soon discovered that the company had capped the maximum frequency of the RX 6800 XT (Navi 21 XT) at 2.80 GHz and the maximum clock of the Radeon RX 6900 XT (Naxi 21 XTX) at 3.0 GHz.  

More recently, unofficial sources said that AMD began to offer its partners its Navi 21 XTXH GPU with a higher frequency potential, yet it was not completely clear whether AMD binned the new processors itself, or just let its partners factory overclock them. ASRock and PowerColor indeed started to offer Radeon RX 6900 XT products with a maximum boost clock of up to 2,500 MHz, up from 2250 MHz maximum boost clock that AMD recommends for its Radeon RX 6800 XT & RX 6900 XT products. 

As it turns out, the Navi 21 XTXH silicon is a real thing, though looks like its main difference from the regular Navi 21 XTX GPU is the absence of a frequency cap. 

Overclocking databases, such as HWBot.org, do not keep GPU frequency records, though a quick check with overclockers actually indicates that der8auer has indeed managed to set the new world's GPU frequency record as no graphics processor has ever hit a clock significantly higher than 3.0 GHz.

AMD this week made select capabilities of its FidelityFX package available to Microsoft Xbox Series X|S developers. For Xbox Series X|S, AMD makes available FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, and ray-traced shadow Denoiser technologies, which are already supported by numerous PC games. 

AMD's FidelityFX is a collection of technologies that can greatly enhance visual quality of games or improve their performance without noticeable degradation of image quality. AMD has introduced eight FidelityFX technologies.

• Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS)
• Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO)
• Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
• Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR)
• Ray-traced shadow Denoiser
• AMD's Luminance Preserving Mapper for HDR-supporting FreeSync Premium Pro monitors
• Single Pass Downsampler (SPD)
• Parallel Sort (optimized version of the radix sort algorithm)

So far, game developers have implemented support for CAS, CACAO, and SPD on PCs, but eventually AMD expects developers to adopt more technologies from the package. One of the most anticipated FidelityFX technologies is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), a rival for Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Unfortunately, this technology is currently not supported either on PC or Xbox X|S. 

Making ingredients from the FidelityFX package available on Microsoft's latest game consoles has a lot of rationale for AMD. Firstly, the consoles come in two configurations and it is easier for developers to make sure everything works on them as they do not have to test over a dozen of different RDNA/RDNA2-based graphics cards that are used by gamers. This is barely important for those 40 games that already support CAS (as well as CACAO and SPD) on Windows PCs, but for those titles that yet have to support CAS, variable shading, and ray-traced shadow denoiser supporting them on consoles first makes quite a lot of sense. 

Secondly, at around 4.5 million consoles sold to date, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S have a larger installed base that AMD's entire RDNA2 lineup, so game developers are more inclined to use the collection of FidelityFX technologies (well, three of them at this point) for the new consoles rather than for the latest graphics cards. Of course, it would make even more sense for AMD to get its FidelityFX to the latest Xbox Series X|S and to PlayStation 5 (i.e., to over 11.5 million systems) to popularize the package, but right now the collection seems to be a more PC centric.  

Earlier AMD said that it was going to support arguably the most anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution technology available on all RDNA/RDNA2 platforms, which includes PCs running AMD's Radeon RX 5000 and Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S, and Sony's PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, the company has not disclosed when it plans to roll out its FSR.