Sapphire Reveals Toxic AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Air Cooled

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.

Myles Goldman
Freelancer Writer

Myles Goldman is a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews keyboards and cases.

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  • -Fran-
    The Nitro+ looks better than this thing... In fact, I'd like them to make a Hybrid with Nitro+ branding instead :P

    Then again, it's just a matter of preference.

    Regards.
    Reply
  • TDTT9171111
    1k+ over RD. I'm not sure I want one. Great card but I'll stick with RD at 1k.
    Reply
  • daworstplaya
    I would like to see more RX 6900XTs from AIBs with 18Gbps DDR6 memory. Too bad nobody will be able to buy any of these cards. I mean at this point there has got to be a limit to all these paper launches.
    Reply
  • watzupken
    Pretty sure this will come at a toxic price as well. Hard pass.
    Reply