Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Assassin's Creed Valhalla7. Control8. Cyberpunk 20779. Dirt 510. The Division 211. F1 202012. Gears 513. Hitman 314. Metro Exodus15. Red Dead Redemption 216. Total War Saga: Troy17. Watch Dogs: Legion18. Performance Summary (12 Game Average)19. Clock Speed20. Temperatures21. Acoustics22. Noise-Normalised Temperatures23. Power Consumption24. Overclocking25. Closing Thoughts26. View All Pages

After the launch of AMD's RX 6700 XT earlier this month, today we are checking out Sapphire's RX 6700 XT Nitro+. A huge triple-fan card, it comes factory overclocked with dual-BIOS functionality and a dedicated heatsink for the GDDR6 memory. We put it to the test against the reference design to find out how much better it really is.

We've already reviewed one Sapphire Nitro+ card this generation, specifically the RX 6800 XT. This RX 6700 XT Nitro+ is almost identical in terms of appearance, but it's not the exact same PCB and cooler. The PCB used here is slightly thinner for instance, and the dedicated memory heatsink is lacking a heatpipe which is present for the RX 6800 XT model.

Still, the RX 6700 XT is a lower power GPU compared to the 6800 XT, and this cooler still looks more than big enough to deal with the heat, so let's dive in and find out how it got on in our testing.

	RX 6900 XT	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 6700 XT	RX 5700 XT
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	17.2 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	519 mm²	336 mm²	251 mm²
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60	40	n/a
Compute Units	80	72	60	40	40
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840	2560	2560
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 2424MHz	Up to 1755MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 2581MHz	Up to 1905MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 23.04 TFLOPS	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 13.21 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 46.08 TFLOPS	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 26.43 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 720 GT/s	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 413.0 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s
ROPs	128	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 165.2 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	128MB	96MB	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	12GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	384 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	300W	250W	230W	225W

RX 6700 XT is built using the Navi 22 GPU, a physically smaller die than Navi 21, measuring 336 mm². It houses 40 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 stream processors per CU, giving a total of 2560. RX 6700 XT features a fully populated Navi 22 GPU, but we can expect cut-down versions to appear with the RX 6700, and potentially RX 6600 XT if that comes to market.

RDNA 2 houses one ray accelerator per CU, so there's a total of 40 with the RX 6700 XT. Four texture units per CU gives a total of 160, while there's also 64 ROPs. The reference 6700 XT has a rated game clock of 2424MHz, but Sapphire has increased this to 2548MHz.

As for the memory configuration, AMD has opted to use a 192-bit memory interface paired with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. Using 16Gbps modules, total memory bandwidth hits 384 GB/s, which is lower than its predecessor, the RX 5700 XT. RDNA 2 GPUs, however, have the benefit of AMD's Infinity Cache, with a 96MB cache used here.

Lastly, reference total board power (TBP) is rated at 230W, but Sapphire has increased this to 260W when using the Performance BIOS. This is something we test later in the review.

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