Parting Thoughts on the Unboxing

Here's a quick size comparison of the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 with other reference design cards from AMD and NVIDIA. Both the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 are 27 cm long, same as the RX 5700 XT, but are about 1 cm taller, at 12 cm. The RX 6800 XT is the first AMD reference-design card that's more than two slots thick.

I'm very much looking forward to reviewing these two new cards, and will pit them against everything NVIDIA has to offer. The plan is not to only look at rasterization performance, but also dive deep into the raytracing implementation, and how it differs on AMD vs. NVIDIA. Last but not least, I'm having high hopes that our new frametime analysis can shed some more light on the performance differences between AMD and NVIDIA.

When we started the RX 6000 series announcement stream, we had no idea that AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su would be announcing graphics cards to compete with the fastest NVIDIA has to offer. At this point, AMD claims that the RX 6800 XT is competitive with the GeForce RTX 3080, and the RX 6800 with the RTX 2080 Ti (in effect the RTX 3070)—claims we will put to the test in our comprehensive review. That said, just the audacity of those claims got us very excited to get our hands on these cards.



Both the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 have a solid product design that uses the same silvery metal bits as the NVIDIA Founders Edition cards prior to Ampere, except that these are more curvy, and the glossy red accent along the top lends it that characteristic "Fisher Price" look which has been defining AMD reference cards for over a decade.



AMD managed to avoid many of the design pitfalls of the RTX 30-series "Ampere" Founders Edition cards, such as the awkwardly located and off-spec 12-pin power connector. You get a pair of industry-standard 8-pin PCIe inputs at the tail end of the card, which should let those among you with cable-management OCD keep your pristine color-matched modular cables. The choice of an axial cooling solution, though not new for AMD, is certainly welcome as both these cards have to cope with board power upwards of 200 W. The packaging we got both the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 in is, well, spartan, with no accessories or disks to speak of. Practically every AMD add-in-board (AIB) partner will be selling the reference design RX 6800 series cards with their own packaging, accessories and, more importantly, their own product warranty terms.

Join us soon for comprehensive reviews of the Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800, where we test not just performance, but also dive deep into the RDNA 2 architecture powering these, and tell you whether AMD is back in the high-end GPU game.