Navi Dicussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/digite...5-rx6900xt

Not surprisingly, it looks like AMD's gaming flagship RX 6900 XT will be low in volume and hard to get once the cards launch tomorrow, which is the same story regarding all of AMD's RDNA2 cards at the moment -- and recent Nvidia offerings as well. Swiss retailer Digitec Galaxus has said that they only received 35 RX 6900 XT reference designs from MSI and Asus for distribution.

Although this is one retailer, Digitec can give us a good glimpse into what stock will be like worldwide.

To combat the issue, Digitec won't be selling these cards the usual way. Instead, the company has created a raffle system that anyone can participate in. For added bonus, the retailers has thrown 25 RX 6800s and 17 RX 6800 XTs into the raffle as well. You can choose which model(s) you want to try and win.

Hopefully, more retailers implement this system, as it's almost scalper proof since a raffle system prevents bots from cheating their way into getting the cards first. But this system won't help the fact that 6900 XTs are going to be super rare, much rarer than Nvidia's RTX 3090, at least for now.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapph...us/39.html

With these performance numbers, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is the perfect choice for 4K gaming at 60 FPS. It achieved that mark in nearly all titles in our test suite. Things are different once you turn on raytracing. Just like on NVIDIA, there's a hefty performance hit when running with the DirectX Raytracing API. We only tested two games so far, but it seems the loss in performance is bigger than on NVIDIA, who improved in that area with Ampere. Remember, this is AMD's first-generation raytracing implementation. Performance is still very respectable, reaching roughly RTX 2080 Ti levels. Now that RT hardware is available for both AMD and NVIDIA, and game developers are making console games on AMD's new RDNA2 architecture, it'll be interesting to see how raytracing performance evolves in the coming months.

In our review, AMD's RX 6800 XT reference cooler impressed us with good temperatures and even better noise levels. It's finally a large triple-slot design with three fans. This definitely sets the bar high for AMD's partners and their own cooler designs. We've seen excellent heatsinks from Sapphire before, and the Nitro+ is no exception. In our apples-to-apples cooler testing, we found out that Sapphire's cooler is definitely better than the AMD reference heatsink, sitting roughly between that and the massive NVIDIA RTX 3090 cooler. We've measured gaming temperatures of 75°C, 2°C lower than the AMD reference. Noise levels are pretty much identical, too, so it's safe to say that Sapphire's Nitro+ cooler will give you an experience comparable to the AMD RX 6800 XT reference. Sapphire does have an ace up its sleeve, and that's the dual BIOS. Once you toggle to the silent BIOS, noise levels go down a bit, by 1 dBA. With 30 dBA, the card is almost whisper quiet in heavy gaming—4K is no problem, very impressive. Just like on the AMD reference design, idle fan stop is included on the card to provide the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

AMD surprised us with the power efficiency of their new Navi 21 RDNA 2 graphics processor, beating even NVIDIA's Ampere lineup. Despite the large factory overclock, Sapphire did not go overboard with power consumption. It's 15 W higher for 3% performance gained, a very reasonable tradeoff. The maximum power limit has been increased, too, so AMD's Boost algorithm can boost higher, for longer.

Back in my original review of the reference design, I had to increase the power limit on the AMD RX 6800 XT to see any meaningful performance gains from overclocking. This is not the case on the Sapphire Nitro+ because of the increase in the board power limit I just mentioned. Maximum manual overclock ended up slightly higher than both the PowerColor Red Devil, which we also tested today, and the AMD reference. These differences are small, though. I'm currently reviewing the ASUS RX 6800 XT STRIX Liquid Cooling, it'll be interesting to see the results for that card later today or tomorrow.
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At $770, the Sapphire Nitro+ also goes up against custom-design RTX 3080 cards like the EVGA FTW3 and MSI Gaming X. Now, none of those graphics cards are in stock, of course, and people are paying insane prices to jump on the RDNA2 or Ampere train, so I'm sure Sapphire will sell everything they have even at that price point. No doubt, RX 6800 XT and RTX 3080 are fantastic cards that will give you an amazing gaming experience, but there's only so much that can be worth more. I heard from several board partners that their margins are really thin because AMD is charging so much money for their new GPU, guess while stock is low, we're going to have to pay for that.