Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT NITRO+ review - Introduction

Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT NITRO+ review

Sapphire is back in the house with the grand design NITRO+ Radeon RX 6700 XT. For something in the WQHD monitor range, this card has been build to impress with that massive beefy triple-fan cooler and a factory tweak. Next to that, the dual BIOS mode will guarantee silent operation (if you want it). Things once again look good for this product series. Armed with a triple-fan cooler and a fully customized design XFX manages to deliver. Armed with 12GB of graphics memory, will it be enough? In this review we start off with of overview and analysis, we'll be discussing the Radeon Series 6700 XT from AMD that stems from the RDNA2 architecture. It certainly took a while for AMD to release it, back in July 2019 AMD announced the NAVI-based Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT. a product series that ever since has been well respected. The 5700 series does offer some good performance. However from there onwards, things were pushed back for various reasons like all COVID-19 related, in the world of graphics technology, also 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 Ray tracing was going to be supported. And that did set the trend for the desktop graphics card we see announced today as well. 

Radeon RX 6700 XT

AMD announced the card at their 'Where Gaming Begins epi3' presentation (March 3, 2021). As earlier indicated, only one NAVI22 SKU is released at this time. The Radeon RX 6700 XT. A Non-XT version may follow at a later date. The RX 6700 XT will be commercially available starting on the 18th of March 2021. Reference cards and customs cards launch on the same date. Navi22 XL, the GPU that resides on the 6700 XT graphics card series has been paired with 12 GB of GDDR6 graphics memory Armed with RDNA2 architecture and 40 CUs this offers 2560 shading processors, the same amount as the Radeon RX 5700 XT, the architecture, however, is much faster. The memory makes use of a 192-bit wide memory bus. The reference boards use 11 phases of power. It will have a base clock of 2321 MHz, a game clock of 2424 MHz, and a boost clock of 2581 MHz. The graphics card features 160 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and 40 Raytracing cores for raytracing hardware acceleration. The graphics card is equipped with a high-quality PCB with an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector. The official TDP is listed at 230W.