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Two Monstrous Gigabyte and Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT GPUs Take Flight
Custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards are slowly invading the hardware market, and Gigabyte has just announced a couple of its own. The Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G and Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC 16G are designed to release Big Navi's true power.
The Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G comes with a robust cooling system to keep Big Navi in check. According to Gigabyte, the heat dissipation area on this generation has increased in comparison to the previous generation. A total of seven composite copper heat pipes carry the heat away from the graphics card's Navi 21 die and surrounding memory chips to the huge heatsink. Given the size of the graphics card, the Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G employs a triple-fan setup to ensure maximum airflow.
As a bit of eye candy, the Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G is equipped with a cool LCD screen on one side of the shroud, which allows consumers to display things like text, images or GIFs. The graphics card's product page hasn't gone live yet, so its full specifications and dimensions are unknown.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC 16G, which sports dimensions of 286 x 118 x 58mm, utilizes Gigabyte's WindForce 3X cooler. Unlike the Aorus model, the Gaming OC only has six composite copper heat pipes for heat dissipation. The trio of semi-passive 80mm cooling fans spin in opposite directions that, according to Gigabyte, helps reduce the turbulence generated between adjacent fans and increase air pressure.
As far as specifications go, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC 16G's game and boost clock peaks at 2,050 MHz and 2,285 MHz, respectively. In comparison to the reference edition, Gigabyte's iteration has a 1.7% higher game clock and 1.6% higher boost clock.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC 16G sips its juice from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and the Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G in all likelihood features a similar configuration. Although we can't speak for the latter yet, the first offers two DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and two HDMI 2.1 ports.
Both the Aorus Radeon RX 6900 XT Master 16G and Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC 16G have two BIOS profiles. The switch to alternate bewteen the silent and OC profile is conveniently placed on the side of the graphics card. A reboot is all that's necessary to get the profile up and working.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
