man the gpu market what a mess i’m sure you’re frustrated i’m frustrated you’re probably tired hearing people how frustrated they are you know even the rx 6700 xt which was promised to have a bit more availability was grabbed up in no time knowing that mike eber and i decided to give something back to the community and also give you guys a chance to win an rx 6700 xt a custom card that is so the first part of this video is to really give back to this amazing charity ablegamers that support gamers with disabilities because video games allow us to escape into different worlds connect with other people and just have a good time right many of us take it for granted the fact that we can just sit in front the computer or console or even mobile gaming and just enjoy where millions of gamers in north america alone can do that because of their disabilities and it’s those members of the community that might need that gaming escape the most so that’s where the ablegamers charity comes in it’s been around for over a decade and in that time it’s helped countless disabled gamers get access to things like specialized controllers custom setups accessible furniture and assistive technologies they’re using the power of gaming to bring everyone together and that is something we can get behind they’re right in the middle of a 1 million funding drive that we want to help support so we’ve teamed up with xfx sapphire and gigabyte to give you guys a chance to win one of those custom cards while also helping to support this great cause with ablegamers so think of this as a roundup with a nice positive spin for a good cause so here’s the deal contribute with this link it’ll also be listed
below for every five dollar donation you get entered uh to win one of the custom cards from xfx uh sapphire or gigabyte and that gives you one entry so for five dollars that’s one entry for 50 bucks that’s 10 entries and so on unfortunately for regions where this raffle does not apply we still hope that you can still contribute or donate in some way to help a great cause also 100 of proceeds from this video and any gpu contact we make over the next month will be donated to ablegamers so we appreciate your support and spreading the word out all right so now that the important portion is done let’s talk about the custom cards talk about the performance design overclocking and price because that my friend is going to be a huge deal i think we have a pretty good selection here with the gigabyte gaming oc 12g the sapphire nitro plus and the xfx uh merc 319.
Just the size difference between these is pretty darn epic especially compared to the reference model from amd all of these are also listed as oc versions but like with all custom gpus these days they’re all just only a few megahertz higher than aim these reference versions so from a performance standpoint there probably won’t be much of a difference and also either amd is not giving them a lot of flexibility in terms of boost clocks and frequencies in general or board partners are not willing to push that envelope so instead more emphasis is being put on cooling potential and maybe sometime down the road more overclocking headroom if amd gets around unlocking the power limits a bit more now the main problem here is that some board partners seems to be completely in space when it comes to pricing sure some of this is due to tariffs but we’ve seen a lot of these custom cards go way above what’s normal luckily xfx seems to have kept things in check a little bit but then again the retailers ended up marking up those cards too this opens up the conversation about how realistic these
suggested retail prices are and even if the gpu craze was not going on in the world right now all the board partners tells us that that’s very difficult and almost impossible to hit that amd starting price uh without rolling out some form of compromise so instead board partners are focusing on upgrading custom designs with a ton of features at least for now so i want to get the easiest card out of the way first so say hello to the gigabyte rx 6700 xd gaming oc other than the reference design it’s the most compact of the bunch at just over 11 inches long versus amd standard 10.4 inches but it also takes up two and a half slots and it’s quite a bit wider than your regular gpu so fitting it in some compact sff cases will still be a challenge other than that that’s a pretty basic overall card with the triple fan design standard black and grey colors a pretty clean backplate and a small bit of rgb on the side gigabyte has not changed anything with the connectors either so power is with the eight plus pin layout and the io area gets three display ports and a single hdmi which is what every card in this roundup gets that’s amd standard i o layout moving on to the big boys and here we have the monster xfx merc 319 black edition if you’re just looking at it without any context it might seem sleek and compact but it is absolutely ginormous at 2.6 slots over 12 inches in length and over 5 inches wide so don’t expect to be putting this in the vertical orientation in most cases unless you’re water cooling otherwise you’ll bump into the cpu heatsink
there’s some tasteful lighting without any rgb just white and red which actually looks quite tasteful and build quality is awesome flip the card over and you’ll see a solid backplate with a pass-through cooler design that seems to be everywhere these days but that also means the actual pcb is small compared to the rest of the card then there’s the two eight pin power inputs basically it feels like xfx just took the design meant for much harder running gpus and slapped it onto this one that’s a good thing for thermals but it might be overkill and it does add to the overall cost they also added a bias switch but right now both spots have the same settings at least this gives you some bios experimentation in the future when those custom bias roll out and then we have the sapphires nitro plus which is the most expensive but also the most feature-rich card here size-wise is a bit more compact than the xfx at two and a half slots like all other cards in this video it’s got a full coverage backplate and the same tiny pcb as the xfx merc 319 i have to give some credit to sapphire toe because they’ve added some features i wish we would see on more gpus for example the argb lighting looks incredible if you overlook the weird fox face from the nitro brand also while you can control the addressable rgb from their trick software there’s also an addressable argb header for direct motherboard control there’s also a triple bios switch where the position furthest from the back plate has performance oriented setting and the one closest has the one that cuts the car to 186 watts while the middle position allows the software to determine which bios is used now even though all of these three custom cards claim to have higher clock speeds than the reference card they have to be really careful on how they handle frequencies when it comes to amd gpus because there’s many factors that go into contributing that certain frequency with that in mind let’s take a look at how they perform versus our amd reference card with their out of the box default settings and all the bios switch if present set to performance modes so every one of these cards has absolutely no trouble keeping their average temperatures below the reference design as a matter of fact that crazy xfx card never even broke above 67 degrees celsius mark and it was followed pretty close by gigabyte 2.
The gpu hotspot temperatures actually play a huge role in determining on-the-fly clock speeds provided there’s enough power and voltage to go around so technically if these custom cards are allowed enough overhead they should boost to higher frequencies more often every one of these cards is pretty much inaudible when you put it into a case but the sapphire and xfx take the crown gigabyte does trail behind and that’s probably because they sacrificed a bit of noise to get those incredibly low temperatures so how does all this translate into clock speeds and this is where things get interesting but not in a good way as i go through this you can see one huge important point and that’s the pretty pathetic increase the so-called overclocked versions give you there’s only 56 megahertz separating the fastest and slowest cards the reason for this is pretty simple since new gpus are tuned to deliver near maximum frequencies there’s very little room for board partners to play with the sapphire and xfx cards were marginally faster than the others but not by an appreciable amount thankfully the merge 319 actually ended the test at higher speeds than it began the biggest shock was probably the gigabyte card it might have the lowest overall temperature and the highest fan speeds but it was technically the slowest from a clock speed standpoint but why so this is pretty important because it kind of plagues all the modern gpus right many factors go into increasing clock speeds temperature power voltage and other secondary functions so increasing the power limit alone doesn’t necessarily increase your clock speeds if the voltage is limited or locked in simple terms if there’s not enough voltage aimd’s algorithm will step in and clock things back down and that is exactly what is happening here gigabyte is
using reference 1.2 volts but even then power consumption ended up being higher than the stock rx 6800 so our sample is pretty power hungry as a result and it gets slapped down this might be a bad lack of the draw but i’m surprised gigabyte is not binning their cores a bit more carefully for their flagship 6700 xt the other cards behave like you would expect slightly higher power for a bit better performance than the reference version now it’s so easy to criticize something as simple as the less efficient core but when it comes to performance well it really doesn’t matter none of these cards were able to offer any noticeable difference versus a bone stock rx 6700 xt from amd making these some of the most boring charts i think i’ve ever seen just remember these cards from gigabyte sapphire and xfx cost about 100 bucks more than aim these msrp now what about overclocking right we have these massive heatsinks better cooling can we expect anything more than the reference design nope a lot of the blame for this lands firmly on shoulders of amd who is not letting their board partners flex their card’s muscles by opening up higher power voltage or clock speed limits that is a damn shame since until that’s done the amazing cooling power upgrades and whatnot is all pretty much useless versus the reference design the only exception was gigabyte not by much but due to its core limitations it just did not want to overclock all that well and was outdone by the reference card so where does this all leave us well supporting an amazing cause that is with ablegamers and have a chance to win one of these custom cards so check the link support an amazing cause and aside from having a positive spin of doing this for charity it’s very difficult to put these expensive custom cards in a positive light the fact of the matter is that the term oc or overclocked out of the box out of the factory they don’t mean what they used to especially now when amd’s putting these limitations on voltage and power limits so all these upgraded designs for cooling for temperature for acoustics don’t mean anything because the
reference design performs just as good already so spending hundreds more what does that get you maybe the only reason you want to buy a custom card is because availability is there maybe for others it isn’t or maybe it’s like region specific but other than that it’s not worth it or the amd reference design as a matter of fact i would actually pick the reference design because all others are gigantic titanics inside your computer you know it’s a cool thing to look at but going bigger does not always mean better all alright so yeah i hope you enjoyed this little roundup with a cherry uh to go along with it hope you support it and yeah check out this other relevant content make sure to subscribe check out the link below for ablegamers and hopefully yeah this is uh this is going to contribute to their goal for 2021 i’m duetri thanks so much for watching and i’ll talk to you in the next video
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