PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil Review

1. Introduction2. PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy5. 3DMark DirectX Raytracing6. Control7. F1 20208. Gears 59. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint10. Metro Exodus11. Red Dead Redemption 212. Watch Dogs: Legion13. Clock Speed14. GPU Frequency Response15. Temperatures16. Acoustics17. Noise-Normalised Temperatures18. Power Consumption19. Overclocking20. Closing Thoughts21. View All Pages

A week on from the launch of AMD's RDNA 2-based RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, today we take a look at the first AIB model to come through our labs. The PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil is a huge, triple-slot and triple-fan graphics card, with plenty of RGB lighting, a beefed-up VRM and dual-BIOS functionality. We put the Red Devil through its paces and see how it compares to AMD's reference design.

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.

PowerColor has also sweetened the deal by adding a few extra features which the reference card lacks. There's RGB lighting on the underside, the end of the card and on the backplate, while there's the choice of either the OC or Silent BIOS, and PowerColor has even included an ARGB header to sync the RGB lighting via your motherboard. Factor in the enhanced power delivery, which PowerColor claims is able to deliver ‘well over' 400W, plus the factory overclocked core, and the Red Devil has all the ingredients to be a successful card. Let's find out whether or not that is the case.

	RX 6800 XT	RX 6800	RX 5700 XT	RX 5700
Architecture	RDNA 2	RDNA 2	RDNA	RDNA
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	7nm
Transistor Count	26.8 billion	26.8 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion
Die Size	519 mm²	519 mm²	251 mm²	251mm²
Ray Accelerators	72	60	n/a	n/a
Compute Units	72	60	40	36
Stream Processors	4608	3840	2560	2304
Game GPU Clock	Up to 2015MHz	Up to 1815MHz	Up to 1755MHz	Up to 1625MHz
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 2250MHz	Up to 2105MHz	Up to 1905MHz	Up to 1725MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 20.74 TFLOPS	Up to 16.17 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 41.47 TFLOPS	Up to 32.33 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 648.0 GT/s	Up to 505.2 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s
ROPs	128	96	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 288.0 GP/s	Up to 202.1 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s
AMD Infinity Cache	128MB	128MB	n/a	n/a
Memory	16GB GDDR6	16GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Board Power	300W	250W	225W	185W

As a quick recap, here we can take a high-level overview of the Navi 21 GPU that forms the basis of the RX 6800 XT. While it is still fabricated on TSMC's 7nm process node, as per the RX 5000-series, Navi 21 sports a much larger GPU die, measuring 519 mm². For the RX 6800 XT, it houses 72 Compute Units (CUs), with 64 Stream Processors each, giving a grand total of 4608 shaders.

Rated clock speed has increased significantly for the RX 6000 series. The reference RX 6800 XT, for instance, has a rated game clock of 2015MHz and a rated boost clock of up to 2250MHz. The PowerColor Red Devil has increased this to 2090MHz and 2340MHz, respectively.

AMD has also increased the memory capacity, with 16GB of GDDR6 memory found on every RX 6000 SKU (so far). The memory is clocked at 16Gbps, and operates over a 256-bit memory interface for total bandwidth of 512 GB/s. AMD has also implemented a 128MB Infinity Cache on the Navi 21 GPU, to significantly increase effective memory bandwidth without excess power draw.

Speaking of power, the reference RX 6800 XT has a rated total board power (TBP) of 300W, though PowerColor has increased this for the Red Devil, as we will see later in this review.

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