Mufflore:

The extra headroom is already counted in the +5%. I wouldnt expect much better % overclock than air cooled after that. Modern cards are already pushed near their limits. If water cooling a card yourself, you would get that 5% benefit too.

This is based on XTXH silicon which is higher binned 6900XT. The custom cards based on XTXH were already launched in April. There are some XTXH pushed to 2800MHz. 😀 I own 6900XTU Liquid Devil Ultimate which is also XTXH card and comes factory fitted with EK waterblock. Mine runs 2750MHz@1175mV stable and in games boosts upto 2705MHz. I applied undervolt and OC with defualt voltage being 1200mV. 🙄 This higher binned XTXH chips are garantied to be OCed higher. At least that's what PowerColor promises for their two XTXH cards. I don't know about other brands if they also promise something like that for their XTXH cards. www.powercolor.com/new?id=1618371606 With the PowerColor RED DEVIL ULTIMATE and LIQUID DEVIL ULTIMATE cards, you remove the element of chance and guarantee a specially binned GPU with exceptional overclocking – PowerColor assures performance every time. With regular 6900XT it is more like silicon lottery. If one is lucky then one gets a great OCing 6900XT cards but there is promises there. I had two regular 6900XT in my hands (6900XT Red Devil and Sapphire Toxic LC) and with both cards I was not lucky and they could not be OCed above 2600MHz and for that range also you needed more than 400W on GPU core. 🙁 So only got me about 4% higher performance and consumed around 70W more than my really good 6800XT reference which I could OC to 2750MHz@1020mV. I don't own any of these anymore as I was looking for good Ocing 6900XT. Finally I went for 6900XTU Liquid Devil Ultimate. This card now at 2750MHz@1175mV is about 10% faster than my highly OCed 6800XT at 2750MHz@1020mV. I still would not have bought it if my 6800XT did not get damaged due my mistake with ESD shock. 🙁 Now for this reference LC model, I am not sure how high you can push it although XTXH chip is very capable to OC quite high. There are two limitations. This first one is that it has only 2x8pin PCIe power connector where as custom cards have 3x8pin and also custom cards comes with stronger VRAM implementation with higher number of phases. From my experience this card will need higher power if one want to push it to high frequencies like mine. Mine is set for 415W Core GPU power and 400A TDC using MPT. This means total power target is 460W including about 45W for other components. Second the temperatures will be limiting factor. This card has only 120mm rad. I have 2x360mm radiator space in my loop with 6900XTU and 5900X in the loop but at 2750MHz@1175mV my hotspot temperatures for 6900XTU was already hitting 92°C under water. I had to replace original Thermal paste with Liquid Metal to get hotspot temperatures now staying below 78°C under stress test. So I cannot image that one can push this reference card that high in clock although the chip is very capable due temperatures going in direction of 110°C very quickly. 😳