Radeon RX 6800 XT And RX 6800 Hands-On Tour: AMD Big Navi In The Flesh
We're of course talking about the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, which we just recently took possession of. The Radeon RX 6800 is most directly comparable to the GeForce RTX 3070, while the Radeon RX 6800 XT will be facing the GeForce RTX 3080; AMD is promising similar (or superior) performance across-the-board at up to 4K gaming resolutions.
As you can see in our hands-on video embed below, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a beast of a card with a 2.5-slot design. This reference card features triple axial fans, one HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, and a USB-C port. There are also two 8-pin power connectors on the board to feed the beast (300W Total Board Power). The Radeon RX 6800 has a 2-slot design, and also uses two 8-pin connectors, but it has a TBP of 250 watts.
When it comes to performance, AMD says that the Big Navi (RDNA 2) GPU powering the Radeon RX 6800 XT has 72 compute units with Game and Boost clocks of 2015MHz and 2250MHz respectively along with 20.74 TFLOPs compute performance. There is also 128MB of Infinity Cache onboard along with a full 16GB of GDDR6 memory (compared to 10GB GDDR6x for the GeForce RTX 3080). The Radeon RX 6800 cuts the compute units down to 60, while game/boost clocks are dialed in at 1,815MHz and 2,105MHz respectively. There's still 16GB of GDDR6 onboard, while compute performance comes in at 16.17 TFLOPs.
At this time, we can only provide you with our hands-on look at the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT, so the highly-anticipated benchmarks will have to wait until later in the week. However, we're eager to share our results with you, so just sit tight and be patient, because it will definitely be worth the wait to see how the card stacks up to its competition.
The Radeon RX 6800 XT officially goes on sale on November 18th and will be priced at $649, undercutting the GeForce RTX 3080 by $50. The Radeon RX 6800 launches the same day priced at $579, or $80 more expensive than the GeForce RTX 3070. We have the feeling that there will be incredible demand for these cards when they officially go on sale on Wednesday. So, be prepared to wait in queues to get your card online along with the high likelihood that you will strike out in your endeavors, just like all recent hardware launches (a la GeForce RTX 30, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and Ryzen 5000).
