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.
