so today is the day before the rx 6700 xd officially launches and if you’re lucky enough you might be able to get one uh tomorrow when they go on sale at 9am pst once again that’s 9am pacific time now if you want to know why these cards are so important for amd you can check out this awesome overview that dimitri did right over here but in order for this car to have any success at all it needs three things great performance a competitive price and probably the most important one availability look it’s obvious by now that even a massive amount of stock won’t be enough since demand is just way higher than supply but the radeon team absolutely needs to prove that they can supply more than a trickle of gpus like they did with the rx 6800 and the 6900 series that was a complete disaster in my opinion even if every one of them sells out in the blink of an eye getting regular resupplies out there is a huge part of winning the battle and it’s something that they just haven’t been able to do yet at least in this video we can answer 1080p 1440p and 4k performance and pricing questions of course and throw in some overclocking results as well now remember there are timestamps in the timeline down below if you want to jump to a particular section or you can go to the description if you missed out on a particular chapter because there’s a ton of testing in this one so let’s get started but first a quick message from our sponsor power your system with incredible power the dark power 12 from be quiet this one has the highest efficiency rating possible 80 plus titanium certification impressive frameless fan cooling an overclocking key to switch between single and multi-rail operation and fully modular cables check it out below alright so let’s get right into a quick rundown of the things that you need to know about the rxcc 700 xd first of all it gets 2560 stream processors which is a pretty major cut compared to the rx 6800 and it’s based on the navi 22 core supposedly navi 22 is a lot easier to produce in larger quantities than the rx 6800 series navi 21 and that could lead to more inventory maybe but you just never know there’s also 12 gigabytes of gddr6 operating at 16 gigabits per second on a 192 bit wide memory bus and 96 megabytes of infinity cache but check out those clock speeds guys they’re a lot higher than anything amd’s launched so far
which should make up for some of the rx-6700xt’s stream processor loss now in order to actually hit those frequencies amd needed to push the core to 1.2 volts and that ends up leading to pretty high power consumption meanwhile pricing for the 6700 xt places it a hundred dollars below the 6800 and a lot closer to the rtx 3070 and the rtx 360 ti now a lot of that’s because amd figures their 12 gigabytes of memory will be appealing then eight gigabytes especially for folks rocking high resolution monitors but that might be a bit of a hard sell since in their own slides it shows the 400 360 ti and 6700xc trading blows rather than outright domination from amd even in comparison to the rx 5700 xd’s launch price there’s a hefty 80 or 20 premium so it isn’t a perfectly clear upgrade path either now let’s talk a little bit about this reference card and personally i think it’s one of the best looking gpus around right now initially it looked like you wouldn’t be able to find this design at normal retailers but a lot of board partners will be selling this design alongside their custom gpus or custom cards it’s pretty compact too at just 10.4 inches long and it takes up only two slots so fitting it inside smaller systems won’t be a problem even though it consumes almost the same amount of power as the 6800 it actually has a smaller internal heatsink and only uses two fans now will that end up leading to higher temperatures or increased noise well we’ll see in a bit as for power input it’s handled by an eight plus six pin layout but one of the disappointing things is amd actually illuminated the usb-c port on the rear i o panel even though there’s three displayport 1.4s and a single hdmi 2.1 now speaking of power let’s see how the rx 6700xt behaves from that
perspective one highlight of amd’s navi architecture is its stable power delivery instead of a readout filled with peaks and valleys like the rtx 3070 the rx 6700xt hardly ever hits above its 225 watt board power even when it does it’s only by one or two watts now bringing those results into a bit more readable charts shows the average power consumption actually being right in line with the rtx 3070 and only a few watts behind the reference rx 6800 now amd obviously made some massive strides and performance per watt over the rx 5700 xt as well i hardly ever talk about idle power anymore since modern cars are super efficient in that area but it’s still monitored in every test and i think it’s good that we did here as well you see there was something obviously going on with the rx 6700 xc after we looked into it a bit further i think we found another culprit too you see we were using a 4k 120 hertz display and when doing power consumption testing and whenever it was set to that resolution and refresh rate idle power just jumped meanwhile lowering it to 60 hertz fixed the issue either way amd is aware of this problem and they should be rolling out a driver fix for it really soon even with the chip chewing down about 220 watts with some peaks above 230 watts and a more simplified heat sink design temperatures are still really really well managed remember the worst case hotspot temperature on these cards is set to 110 degrees and the reference design doesn’t get anywhere close to that with a game clock of 2454 megahertz and a maximum boost clock of 2581 megahertz under the best conditions seeing a 2 530 megahertz average means the card’s behaving in a really predictable way now originally i thought that the smaller and more compact cooler with two instead of three fans would cause this thing to be a bit
louder than the reference 6800 but it actually ended up being quieter and there wasn’t any inductor wine i kept hearing on higher end radeon cards all right so now that the stage has been set let’s get into seeing how this all translates into performance now this is the test system that we’re going to be using this time but you’ll notice some of the results have been updated for older cards uh since there’s been a few game updates that modified frame rates in a few titles also this is the first card that we’re testing in all three resolutions so that’s 1080p 1440p and 4k let’s start with 1080p [Music] at 1080p the rx 6700 xt really isn’t anything special but that’s likely due to the fact that some games like cs go and valerian tend to be cpu limited which artificially caps frame rates but even then this card trades blows with the rtx 360 ti rather than the rtx 3070 what you can expect is a good bump over the rx 5700 xd now that leads to it having a pretty poor overall value if you’re gaming at 1080p though it doesn’t fare better than the rx 6800 then again all of this is only valid if you can actually find one for 480 now let’s see if it’ll improve at 1440p [Music] [Music] so this is supposed to be a 1440p champion but the 6700xt ended up showing performance that was all over the place in some games it dominated while in others it got whipped pretty bad especially in the one percent lows the lack of consistency resulted in it narrowly edging out the 360 ti on average while being pretty far behind in 99 percentile frame rates the end result
from a value perspective is a bit narrower but this really does show how the rtx 360 ti is almost too good of a gpu it’s just so far out in front when it comes to delivering on the dollar per fps front even with eight gigabytes of memory but will the rtx 3060 ti’s memory limitation finally come up in 4k let’s check it out [Music] well it turns out that increasing resolution can make the 6700 xd look a lot better especially when it comes to the one percent lows which are now better than the rtx 3060 ti but man it’s the lack of consistency that keeps coming up i mean sometimes the xd beats the rtx 3070 cleanly and then in the next game it gets owned by the 3060 ti based on overall results i wouldn’t buy anything under a 6800 or 3070 for 4k gaming but the 6700 xd does deliver an okay value here it just struggles to justify its overall cost at any resolution though ray tracing performance is well like you’d expect not all that great this generation of amd cards really isn’t geared towards high levels of rt so if you want to run with ray tracing on then nvidia is just a much better option right now personally though i think in most cases turning the feature on really isn’t worth it unless you use nvidia’s dlss to improve overall performance on games that support it so now that we know the baseline performance i guess it’s time to head into some other areas starting with smart access memory now i need to remind everyone that sam is which is a short term is only officially available on 500 series motherboards paired with 3000 or 5000 series cpus so it’s not like
everyone would have access to it either way in games we tested there are some benefits at 1080p but there are also situations where something’s obviously not going right and smart access memory ends up hurting rather than improving performance i’m guessing amd’s only validated it with a handful of titles so far so yeah take that for what it is 1440p shows even smaller benefits or even larger frame rate drop-offs so if you are one of a few using a 500 series motherboard right now and recommend testing your favorite games with this enabled and disabled just to see which would benefit you more 4k proves smart access memory has a diminishing law of returns as resolutions and detail settings increase here there are only either identical results or lower frame rates when it comes to squeezing a bit more value out of any gpu overclocking can sometimes lead to some pretty big benefits so let’s see what this little card can actually do starting off with limits amd’s putting on it first of all amd is limiting the maximum clock to 2950 megahertz so just shy of three gigahertz but i’m sure there’s going to be a third-party software that allows for more than that we were able to max this thing out on the reference card without any issues the minimum frequency on the other hand is a lot more picky since it locks the gpu at a minimum speed rather than allowing amd’s boost algorithms to modulate in real time so we just ended up setting it to 2600 megahertz since anything more than that and the card just hard locks like i mentioned earlier voltage is set by default to about 1.2 volts so in this section it isn’t really necessary until amd unlocks higher values i also need to mention that on our sample
increasing the power limit didn’t really help with clock speeds in any way which could point towards voltage being the major limiting factor on the other hand we were able to completely max out the memory to just over 17 gigabits per second and what does this all lead in terms of clock speeds well that’s where things get really really interesting clock speeds went from an average of 2 530 megahertz up to 2834 megahertz which is an increase of just over 10 percent and this was done without a massive increase in temperatures or noise either i mean 10 isn’t a lot but finding a stable overclock took less than an hour using amd’s built-in tools so it’s definitely novice friendly typically a 10 clock speed increase will only lead to pretty limited returns but it seems like the memory overclock is probably the reason behind some of the larger increases i’d say the biggest benefit was that it firmed up those one percent lows really well and allowed a lot better competition within the nvidia cards the nice thing is that this was all done within 80s limits and if board partners come out with cards or bios’s that allow for even more headroom the 6700xt could become a little monster of a card so i guess this all leads me to summing this all up and i think i’m going to go back on a riff off of a famous quote there’s no bad gpus only bad prices and that’s where the 6700 xd lands you see this isn’t a bad gpu by any stretch of imagination but amd is making a big statement with their 480 price point with a cost that high we’d expect it to hit near rtx 3070 performance levels but unfortunately it doesn’t simply put the xt’s performance inconsistencies really hurt amd here sometimes it’s amazing while at others it just gets defeated by the rtx 360 ti by a big margin now enabling smart access memory does narrow the gap a bit but only by a few percentage points in the games we tested and it’s only available for a very narrow range of platforms i think all of this highlights how the market’s going right now amd does pretty well in their sponsored games while nvidia does better in theirs and then in others it’s just a toss-up and that’s exactly what our results show but i guess at this point if you’re looking to buy one of these new gpus all i want to say is good luck if you find one especially at that price point and for everyone else spend responsibly
Read More: AMD RX 6700 XT Roundup – Are these cards worth it!?
