Unboxing the Radeon RX 6800 XT

As we mentioned earlier, the Radeon RX 6800 XT ships in a more upscale box made out of thicker paperboard with a matte finish and embossing for the images and logos. To begin opening it, turn the box around and cut out the factory seal tape holding the top lid in place.


Once you cut through the tape, the top lid comes off. The inner side of the lid holds a greeting, welcoming you to the red team. With RDNA 2 purported by AMD to restore competitiveness with NVIDIA's high-end, the RX 6800 series could be the first AMD Radeon card for many from this generation. Besides this message, you're greeted with another inner lid that's essentially identical to the face of the box, but it lists the four key features of this generation. Interestingly, AMD chose not to scream "raytracing" here.


This inner lid flips around to reveal the "accessory package," which doubles up as a top cushion for the card. On the other side is what you're paying $649 for—the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card seated snug in Styrofoam cushioning.


Besides the card, you only get a fold-out quick start guide. There are absolutely no hard accessories—no dongles, power adapters, driver disks, nothing. We peeled the lid a little to reveal a bit of hidden print that reads "ARES High." While this could be their internal codename of the RX 6800 XT for the company manufacturing the MBA (made by AMD) reference design cards, it could also just be a name for this packaging design variant.


The Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 are physically different cards—not just in design, like the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 reference, but also in size. The RX 6800 XT is the thicker card of the two and easily distinguished from the RX 6800, although both cards are based on essentially the same design scheme. The RX 6800 XT is a significant step up in industrial design and build quality from past generations of reference design AMD Radeon cards. Other than the fans and power inputs, there's not a single plastic surface to touch. The cooler shroud seamlessly fuses with the backplate in one continuous silver-metallic shape with red accents. The top of the shroud has contrasting matte black metal bits with a few chrome accents between the fan intakes.

For both the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 reference design cards, AMD has ditched the lateral blower design of the previous generation in favor of a triple-fan axial airflow design which sees three large 80 mm fans blow air onto a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink. The fins are arranged such that all hot exhaust is put out through the top and bottom of the cards, nothing goes out laterally. This isn't AMD's first lateral blower reference design—the first AMD Radeon to ship with such a cooler was the Radeon VII.


Since AMD has used a purely lateral airflow heatsink, none of the air leaves through the rear I/O bracket, which is sealed much like the Radeon R9 Fury X. Display connectors include two standard DisplayPorts, one HDMI, and a USB type-C port. Given the rest of the bracket is made out of metal, we feel like this is a missed opportunity to add another row of ports, at least another DisplayPort. The RX 6800 has the same set of display connectors.


The card draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors situated towards the tail end of the card—right where you'd want them.


As it's about 2.5 slots thick, the RX 6800 XT is visually bulkier than the RX 6800. The heatsink underneath is thicker to cope with the higher typical board power of this SKU.


Here's a refresher of the product specifications for the Radeon RX 6800 XT AMD put out. The RX 6800 XT almost maxes out the 7 nm "Big Navi" silicon by enabling 72 out of 80 RDNA 2 compute units, backing it with up to 2.20 GHz boost clock speeds. The card offers 16 GB of GDDR6 memory that is cushioned by AMD's on-die Infinity Cache. These come with the 300 W typical board power metric, which warrants the thicker cooler for this card in comparison to the RX 6800. AMD in its announcement presentation also claimed that the RX 6800 XT performs competitively with the GeForce RTX 3080, marking AMD's return to the high-end considering NVIDIA markets the RTX 3080 as its "flagship" product.