With the flip of a switch, you can choose OC Mode which allows you to easily handle top-of-the-line games by pushing the limit of the power and performance, while Silent Mode provides an excellent quiet-gaming experience.

Moving on to technical details we can see the PCB looks like a slightly cut down 6900XT which shouldn’t really be much of a surprise, the memory used is Samsung K4ZAF325BM HC16, and the MOSFETs used are International Rectifier TDA21472 rated for 70A with a 1500KHz switching frequency. The author of Sandra 2020 informed us that while NVIDIA has sent some optimizations, they are generic for all cards, not Ampere specific. The tensors for FP64 & TF32 have not been enabled in Sandra 2020 so GEMM & convolution running on tensors will get faster using Ampere’s tensor cores. BF16 is supposed to be faster than FP16/half-float, but since precision losses are unknown it has not yet been enabled either. And finally, once the updated CUDA SDK for Ampere gets publicly released, Sandra GPGPU performance should improve also.

KitGuru says: The PowerColor RX 6800 XT is a great card and clearly improves on the reference design.

Here we see the Red Devil RX 6800 XT performance compared with nine other cards on recent drivers. This time the Red Devil RX 6800 XT has all of its performance results in yellow text so it stands out. We also use Nvidia PCAT to measure power draw of the graphics card only, with readings from both the PCIe slot and the PCIe power cables combined into a single figure. This provides us with significantly more accurate data to work with as it is measuring only the GPU power, and not total system power which is a fundamentally imprecise measurement. As for the Silent BIOS, this drops fan speed down to 35%, or about 1060rpm. At this speed, the fans are effectively inaudible, and I am sure we would have actually seen a lower noise reading than 35dBa, were it not for a small amount of coil whine which was louder than the fan noise in this mode. In normal operation, this coil whine wasn’t noticeable over our system fans, but we obviously disable these for the noise tests, making the coil whine audible.

UNVEILING THE NEW POWERCOLOR AMD RADEON™ RX 6800 XT AND RADEON™ RX 6800 GRAPHICS CARDS

Sound levels have been measured with a digital sound meter here, if you are a gamer who uses headphones you could likely turn those fans almost right up and not hear anything intrusive as you can see here noise levels with the 6800XT Red Devil were not all that intrusive, 60% is probably going to be the practical limit for most people who don’t game with headphones. There is no doubt that the PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil was one of the best aftermarket RX 5700 XT cards that we reviewed, delivering hugely significant improvements compared to AMD's reference blower-style cooler. That means expectations are fairly high for the RX 6800 XT Red Devil, and considering the sheer size of the thing, we are certainly looking for some thermal and acoustic improvements compared to the reference 6800 XT. The first thing to note is that since the 2020 edition drivers AMD revamped the UI (again) and instead of the wonderful, compact design of the 2019 edition drivers we now have this over inflated and bloated monstrosity of an interface. It is unpleasant and at the extreme least needs a proper scaling option so people who want a more compact UI have that option. One thing that is a blessing though is the ability to directly report bugs and issues from the software, this option hasn’t been in the drivers that long but I can already tell that it does appear to be making a difference from remembering old bugs and glitches and looking for them during testing for this review a good number of them do seem to have been fixed. There is still a long way to go though to get everything ironed out for the architectures the Radeon drivers currently support but early signs are promising.