Following last week's teaser posted on its Twitter page, Sapphire Technology this week officially introduced its Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series graphics cards. As expected, the boards come with rather fancy triple-fan triple-wide cooling systems that promise higher-than-reference clocks out of the box as well as some additional overclocking potential.
The new family of Sapphire's custom-designed Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series graphics boards consists of three models: the Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800, the Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 XT, and the Nitro Radeon RX 6800 XT SE. All the graphics cards share the impressive cooling system as well as a custom-designed PCB with an eight-phase VRM (according to a picture published by the manufacturer) that relies on two 8-pin auxiliary PCIe power connectors, but the SE version also has addressable RGB lighting and a USB-C display output.
Since Sapphire's Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800 printed circuit boards are covered with the company's cooling system, it is unclear to tell the difference between them and AMD's reference designs. At this point, we can only say that the PCBs appear to be about the same length as AMD's own.
Meanwhile, Sapphire's new cooling systems look like they will be remarkable. They are longer, taller and thicker than those designed by AMD. They are also equipped with multiple heat pipes as well as a high-tech-looking backplate. Furthermore, they feature three fans of different sizes: the smallest one is located in the middle, the largest one is located on the rear side, whereas the medium one is on the front side of the board near the exhaust openings.
The oddest part about Sapphire's Nitro+ Radeon RX 6800-series announcement is that the company does not disclose actual GPU and memory frequencies of its new graphics cards. We have asked Sapphire about specifications of the new products and are awaiting their response.
All three graphics cards are already listed at Sapphire's website, so expect them to ship in the foreseeable future, but given the fact that the company does not disclose clocks of the upcoming products, it is hard to say when exactly these boards will ship.
