Radeon RX 6950 XT vBIOS Shows 5 GHz Cap, 332W Power Limit

AMD
(Image credit: AMD)

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.

(Image credit: VideoCardz)

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.

Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • Phaaze88
    Meanwhile, over in RTX 3090Ti vbios... 450w or more power limits...
    AMD's newest halo card has a vbios power limit in the range of the RTX 3070Ti - 3080.
    But who cares how it's done as long as Ampere dominates Navi 21? Unfortunately, it doesn't.
    Rather embarrassing, IMO.
    Reply
  • gg83
    5ghz is crazy right? I thought they stayed around 2 3ghz
    Reply
  • Sleepy_Hollowed
    Wow, this might be a beast before their new architecture drops.
    Reply
  • Foxlum
    Phaaze88 said:
    Meanwhile, over in RTX 3090Ti vbios... 450w or more power limits...
    AMD's newest halo card has a vbios power limit in the range of the RTX 3070Ti - 3080.
    But who cares how it's done as long as Ampere dominates Navi 21? Unfortunately, it doesn't.
    Rather embarrassing, IMO.
    AMD RX 7000 is going to be a proper competition to Nvidia's long standing reign, and much more efficient overall compared to what are going to be factory overclocked, higher cuda cored, even more power hungry versions of the RTX 3xxx series.

    I am here for it.
    Reply
  • OldManYellingAtClouds
    My 3080 pulls 425w in full draw, will gladly upgrade to use less power and get another 20FPS or so in the games I play. Will be the first time not owning an nvidia card since the radeon 8500. Feels a little dirty...
    Reply
  • Eg0
    But why pay full price for this when you can grab the 6900xt toxic at newegg for $1100. It has the same gpu and overclocks past 2.6 Ghz. This one may beat it at 4k with the faster memory but probably not.
    Reply
  • OldManYellingAtClouds
    Eg0 said:
    But why pay full price for this when you can grab the 6900xt toxic at newegg for $1100. It has the same gpu and overclocks past 2.6 Ghz. This one may beat it at 4k with the faster memory but probably not.
    So you come here telling me to buy an older card for less performance that doesn't clock as high and to you it's the same thing? Did you read the article or even know that benchmarks are already in the wild showing a 10-25% increase over the 6900xt. So sick of the people who tell you this is good enough for you, when it's barely an upgrade over what I have.
    Reply