Sunday, November 29th 2020

3.00 GHz OC Possible on AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT; RX 6800 XT Capped at 2.80 GHz

It's becoming clear that AMD's new "Big Navi" Radeon RX 6800 XT is a treat for overclockers, and that it launched with much lower engine clocks than the silicon is capable of, resulting in what is possibly the largest overclocking headroom on an AMD GPU in a long time. This has been highlighted by recent conquests of the 3DMark Fire Strike leaderboard by RX 6800 XT cards, displacing even the RTX 3090 from the top. It's becoming even more clear now just how far the RX 6800 XT can be pushed. Patrick Schur on Twitter reports that the RX 6800 XT engine clocks are capped at 2.80 GHz, which is possibly why we're yet to see anything faster than that. The upcoming RX 6900 XT, on the other hand, is a better-endowed beast.

According to Schur, the RX 6900 XT has a raised engine clocked limit to 3.00 GHz in comparison to the 2.80 GHz of the RX 6800 XT. This 200 MHz increase, coupled with the 8 additional RDNA2 compute units, should mean that the Fire Strike leaderboards will get another shake-up in December, when these cards are released to market. The memory clock on both cards is capped at 1075 MHz (real), or 17.2 Gbps GDDR6-effective, although this should depend heavily on the overclocking headroom of the memory chips. It's important to note here that neither the 3.00 GHz of the RX 6900 XT, nor the 2.80 GHz for the RX 6800 XT, are advertised clock speeds for the cards, and are achievable only by manual overclocking, in some cases employing extreme cooling solutions such as liquid nitrogen.
Source: Patrick Schur (Twitter)
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30 Comments on 3.00 GHz OC Possible on AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT; RX 6800 XT Capped at 2.80 GHz

#26
phanbuey
I see a return of the 7950/7970 competitiveness in the form of the 7800xt and 7900xt lol. Just shows this architecture has a ton of room to grow without too much additional R&D
Posted on Reply
#27
agentnathan009
metalfiberI don't know why AMD and Nvidia doesn't build up a healthy inventory then release the cards. It would take some of the wind out of the scalper's sails anyhow.
This is really simple. If they wait until after holiday season when they have better supply, they miss holiday sales. They are in business to make money and make things that people want. If they release earlier than they have supply for, then scalpers may get a hot item earlier and sell some of those items, and some lucky few will get a shiny new piece of hardware for the holidays. The other part that you need to comprehend is that no matter whether AMD or any other company waits or releases early, you won't likely be getting that product early due to price and demand, thus your wait time for the product will be the same in the end whether they release early or later. So it does not really matter other than you are sour because you can't get what you want right now since it is available right now rather than later release with more product.

Also, this year has been a perfect storm of product release from AMD and hardware utilizing AMD chips, so TSMC can only supply as much as was contracted and all that supply that was contracted has to be divided up between consoles (two major releases), GPUs (6000 series) and CPUs (5000 series). So many hot new products and not enough supply for all that new stuff.

nVidia on the other hand just screwed you by having supply but selling a healthy amount of it to miners. How much hot new hardware did they release? They released the 30 series of GPUs. See above for comparison and see who loves gamers more.

I'm excited to buy new gear, but I can wait and let the I-can't-wait-must-have-now people buy the scalper priced hardware and when prices finally drop to reasonable levels then I can upgrade.
Posted on Reply
#28
TheoneandonlyMrK
medi01Miners of what? At least for bitcoin it was not an option for ages.
If you have zero knowledge of what people would mine as you clearly do why comment, no one mines bitcoin with GPU, they mine alt coins like Ethereum etc and convert sometimes to bitcoin.

It happened, I've no doubt, just like a lot of Xfx amd card's went to miners.

But step back and both big GPU makers ffd this release up.
Both will happily sell to miners, scalpers whoever buys first and fastest, that's what they're there for, to sell stuff.

As for a 6900 @3Ghz ,do want but can't pay so it doesn't matter to much to me.

Good for the future though.
Posted on Reply
#29
Mysteoa
theoneandonlymrkIf you have zero knowledge of what people would mine as you clearly do why comment, no one mines bitcoin with GPU, they mine alt coins like Ethereum etc and convert sometimes to bitcoin.

It happened, I've no doubt, just like a lot of Xfx amd card's went to miners.

But step back and both big GPU makers ffd this release up.
Both will happily sell to miners, scalpers whoever buys first and fastest, that's what they're there for, to sell stuff.

As for a 6900 @3Ghz ,do want but can't pay so it doesn't matter to much to me.

Good for the future though.
AMD when specifically out of the way to nerf the mining performance, the 6800XT has slightly better mining than 5700XT.
Posted on Reply
#30
ratirt
AMD jumped in the clocks for cards very much. from previous Navi 1.8Ghz to RDNA2 with 3Ghz. that's really impressive.
Not to mention, these cards scale well with the clocks. No wonder AMD had to lock the clocks artificially.
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