Radeon RX 6800 (XT) Sneak preview (Unboxing) - AMD Radeon Series 6000

Radeon Series RX 6800 and 6800 XT Unboxing

A quick preview today in this unboxing, we'll be showing the pending Radeon Series 6800 (XT) that AMD announced. This article is a small teaser based on what AMD has been sharing as well as sharing some photos of the products that we have in-house.  

It has been a long wait for AMD; when the original NAVI was launched, it became well respected. The 5600 and 5700 series do offer some good performance. But during that launch everybody was already talking about one thing, where is Big Navi? Here we are a year later, and the world completely changed. Next to everything COVID-19 related, in the world of graphics technology, a new dynamic was added, Raytracing. Or, I should say DirectX Raytracing (DX-R). NVIDIA was pioneering two years ago with their RTX 2000 series already, and AMD made the call to delay that for the original Navi GPU. As the graphics landscape changed somewhere done the line, so this the roadmap for AMD change. Microsoft and Sony consoles embedded with AMD technology revealed that Raytracing was going to be supported. 

	Radeon RX 6900 XT	Radeon RX 6800 XT	Radeon RX 6800	Radeon RX 5700 XT
Architecture	RDNA2			RDNA
GPU	Navi 21			Navi 10
That size	505 mm²			251 mm²
Transistors	26.8 billion			10.3 billion
Manufacturing process	TSMC 7nm
Compute units	80	72	60	40
Raytracing cores	80	72	60	-
Shader processors	5120	4608	3840	2560
Game / boost freq.	2015/2250 MHz	2015/2250 MHz	1815/2105 MHz	1750/1905 MHz
Performance (FP32)	20.6 TFLOPS	18.6 TFLOPS	13.9 TFLOPS	9 TFLOPS
Memory	16 GB GDDR6 @ 16Gbps			8 GB GDDR6 @ 14Gbps
Memory bus	256-bit
Memory bandwidth	512 GB/s			448 GB / s
Infinity Cache	128 MB			-
TBP	300W		250W	225W
Release date	8/12/2020	18/11/2020	18/11/2020	Available
MSRP	$ 999	$ 649	$ 579	$ 399

Radeon RX 6800 XT

Big Navi has been announced with 16GB cards, and the chip will end up in three graphics cards. This Big Navi based chip has 26.8 Billion transistors.  The 6800 XT will get 72 CUs multiplied by 64 shader units is 4608 shading processors. This card gets 16 GB of GDDR6 memory based on a 256-bit memory bus, not to confuse with the new GDDR6X memory NVIDIA is using for RTX 3080 and 3090. So that means 512 GB/s of memory bandwidth and, in fact, would be equal to the bandwidth of the GeForce RTX 3070. The TDP listed is at 300 watts for this product. The 2250 GHz boost clock is spectacular. However, the more average game clock is listed at 2015 MHz. New is a 128 MB infinity cache, which we need to explain in our final review, of course. The card is to battle the GeForce RTX 3080 in performance. This graphics card will cost you a sweet sum of 649,- USD. Both the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 show up in a somewhat premium feel paperboard box. Both cards no longer are based on the outdated blower-style cooler. You'll now see a subtle triple-fan (80 mm ) blow air onto an obtuse aluminum fin-stack heatsink. Hot air exhausts at the top and bottom sides of the cards, nothing goes out through the rear. The cards draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, properly located at the end end of the card.

You are going to notice that the XT version is substantially thicker than the standard 6800, TDP and cooling wise the XT needs a little more, look at the upper photo for that.

Radeon RX 6800 

A derivative is the Radeon RX 6800 (Pro); this actually the same card as the 6800 XT, but let's call this somewhat castrated and probably the favorite card for many BIOS tweakers ;)  It is more restrained with 60 CUs and thus 3840 Shading processors. It's 1815 MHz game clock and 2105 MHz Boost clock frequency is a notch lower as well. This card will battle with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070. The price is a notch better at 579 USD. 

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is to cost 999 USD, the RX 6800 XT costs 649 USD, and the Radeon RX 6800 will cost 579 USD. The cards have been announced but launch on 18th November, the 6900 XT on December 8th. Board partner cards will launch a week later after these respective dates.