PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Red Devil review - Introduction

AMD and their board partners will equip all 6800/6900 GPUs with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. That is true for all three cards. Thus, a 256-bit wide memory bus is required. AMD, on the other hand, has a few architectural tricks up its sleeve, as they incorporated a large phat whopper of an L3 cache inside the GPU. RDNA2-based graphics processors are compatible with DirectX Ultimate, a term that refers to additional feature levels such as DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Mesh Shaders, and Sampler Feedback.  

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series reference specs
	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800XT	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT	RX 6600 XT	RX 6600
GPU	Navi 21 XT(XH)	Navi 21 XT	Navi 21 XL	Navi 22 XT	Navi 23 XT	Navi 23 XL
Cores	5120	4608	3840	2560	2048	1792
TMUs	320	288	240	160	128	112
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64	64
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB	96 MB	32 MB	32 MB
Boost Clock	2250 MHz	2250 MHz	2105 MHz	2581 MHz	2359 MHz	-
Memory Clock	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps
Memory	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	16 GB GDDR6	12 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6	8 GB GDDR6
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	384 GB/s	256 GB/s	256 GB/s
TBP	300W	300W	250W	230W	160W	-
MSRP	999 USD	649 USD	579 USD	479 USD	379 USD	-
Launch Date	December 2021	November 2021	November 2021	March 2021	August 2021	August 2021

PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Red Devil

You will have noticed that Powercolor will be releasing two revisions in the series, a normal, OC, and Ultimate SKU. The OC one we test runs a faster boost clock and this brings in a notch more performance. Other than that, the hardware and components are 100% identical. The ultimate card is based on that XTXH GPU, it's designated to have an operating frequency of Boost: 2235-2425MHz, it's all a bit confusing sure, but essentially that is a further binned GPU qualified for best performance. As you can see the Red Devil series is receiving the same cooler that you will have noticed on the premium products, aside from an aesthetic tweak that is. The NVIDIA cooler is all dark-themed, the Devil revision has dark-colored insert elements. Other than that, you can expect a product with a nice fast Turbo at 2340 MHZ (2250 MHz reference) and, of course, that 16GB of graphics memory. The product is a bit of a novel because it offers a three fan cooler cooling down all primary elements, that's GPU, DRAM, and the entire VRM segment. The card has a length of 32cm (320x135x62mm) and uses a 2.7 slot design. It holds extensive triple 8-pin PCIe power connectors; so if you do the math here you'll end up at 150+150+150+75(PCIe) yes, 525 Watts of board power. It comes fitted with a backplate and the right amount of RGB bling. In the I/O area, the card includes three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, one HDMI 2.1 connector. The 16GB GDDR6 memory clocks in at 2000 MHz (16 Gbps effective). We have to talk pricing as well, these cards should be spotted in a whopping 1000 USD marker, but they will be hard to find, we do expect prices to hover upwards of 1500 USD due to that. Yeah I know, there's little else we can say on the matter of pricing. We'll talk more about this in conclusion. As always, we have a lot to talk about and show you; next page, please.