Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC

[W1zzard]

Gigabyte's Radeon RX 6950 XT comes with a large factory overclock that has the card run faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090, at much better pricing, of course. The card also includes dual-BIOS capability and idle fan stop to reduce noise levels when not gaming.

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[lilhasselhoffer]

So....I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding this. Maybe you can help.

Power draw is comparatively less than the 3090...which is easy. It's then listed as high...which is to be expected from a halo product. I'm down with all of this, including the efficiency per watt from the standard to the 50 variant going down.

Where I'm jumping the tracks is that you list the thing running cool, then you list in the negatives that it runs hot? My question here is that in the review this data seems...unsupported.
I'd like to extrapolate and suggest that you're looking at this from two sides. The first is that it runs cool on the low fan speed bios setting, and the second is that unrestricted performance generates a ton of heat. That said, I am reverse justifying this conclusion.


So, can you elaborate and give us some understanding here? It's a bit weird seeing a review on this site that cannot then be made sense of going through the data...and even more odd that you should highlight the opposing conclusions as both a good and bad thing. It's even more odd that products so often maligned for the lack of new "features" (ray tracing) be recommended for such a dichotomy of delivery. I'm wondering how to square that circle...and hope after reading you can offer some outside vision of what I've failed to understand.

 

[W1zzard]

Where I'm jumping the tracks is that you list the thing running cool, then you list in the negatives that it runs hot? My question here is that in the review this data seems...unsupported.

The temperature of the GPU itself is low, because it has a good cooler sitting on top that can move the heat away from the card into the surrounding air

This means the temperature of your room will go up -> "High heat _output_"

Does that make sense?

 

[jesdals]

I would love to see a reference 6950XT review wonder if the reference cooler is enough for the extra power usage?

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

The temperature of the GPU itself is low, because it has a good cooler sitting on top that can move the heat away from the card into the surrounding air

This means the temperature of your room will go up -> "High heat _output_"

Does that make sense?

Ok.... So what this is saying is that the aftermarket cooler is more than capable of providing adequate heat dissipation to the card.

To then define further, the card itself has a high TDP (in the actual sense of thermally dissipated power, not the black-magic math used to give it a quantitative answer from Intel/AMD).



That makes a lot more sense...and seems significantly less of a qualified statement.


To that end, you commented that basically all of the coolers demonstrated admirable results (admirable is how I put it, adequate for the situation may be less...optimistic but more accurate). That said, is this a function of excessive designs, or a function of the...lessons learned? I'm asking because a generation ago the 5700 models were...prone to thermal issues. I know this is more of an opinion rather than a factual ask, but I've also not had the opportunity to see a bunch of new cards. If AMD's thermal performance figures are necessitating board partners over design these to compensate for old sins it'd be an amusing consideration...beyond the usual rah-rah fanboy love and hate. It would, at least to me, show some learning going on.