Biostar Announces First Radeon RX 6700 XT Factory Overclocked Gaming Card

After months of rumors and speculation, and then an accidental slip-up by AMD itself, the company finally announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Wednesday. The new GPU comes with a cut-down version of Big Navi, dubbed Navi 22 (not-so Big Navi?), which has 40 compute units with 12 GB of 192-bit GDDR6 VRAM. AMD targets 1440p with maximum settings as the render target for its newest $479 graphics card. This GPU has a pretty GPU boost high clock speed out of the gate, but BioStar has just announced that its RX 6700 XT models will run even faster. 

The awkwardly named VA67T6TEL9 Ver. RX6700XT M appears to just be a reference design Radeon RX 6700 XT with a slightly higher than normal GPU clock speed. By default, the Radeon RX 6700 XT has a base frequency of 2,321 MHz and a maximum boost speed of 2,581. AMD said at the time of its announcement that gamers could expect these cards to hit 2,424 MHz while gaming. BioStar is one-upping those figures by the smallest possible amount, advertising base, game, and boost clocks of 2,330, 2,433, and 2,615 MHz respectively.


Yes, you read all of that correctly. The retail box says Extreme Edition, but the card doesn't look the part. On the base and game clock speeds, we're looking at an increase of a whopping 9 MHz, and just a 34 MHz boost at the top end. That's not much to get excited about. However, these speeds are probably what we should expect from reference designs. Once partners have some time to whip up high-end cooling, we expect that the speeds will increase in a more noticeable fashion. 

As a reference design, there's not much else different to expect. This card has the same three DisplayPort connectors and HDMI 2.0 slot as the AMD cards. It also has the same 192-bit path to 12 GB of GDDR6 running at 16 GT/sec. While BioStar says that specifications and appearance are subject to change, the Radeon RX 6700 XT is currently scheduled to be available at e-tail on March 18. 

Whether gamers will be able to get their mitts on any of the various Radeon RX 6700 graphics cards at launch is anybody's guess. Ever since NVIDIA's Ampere cards launched in September, next-generation performance has been quite hard to come by. The same has been true of the Radeon RX 6000 series across the line from its launch in late October. Of course, chips are just in short supply everywhere, since AMD's Ryzen 5000 series and the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X are also quite hard to get at retail. In other words, if you're in the market for a new graphics card, it might be wise to just pull an all-nighter after your St. Patrick's Day shenanigans into the early morning of the 18th.