The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming OC is our second custom-design RX 6900 XT review, the other one is the MSI RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio. Originally, it was unknown whether AMD would allow custom RX 6900 XT variants at all or if the SKU would be like NVIDIA's TITAN, for which the only available design is the reference version. It's good to see that AMD opened up their design, though there are some limitations. Various manufacturers told me that AMD doesn't allow them to go as high as they want on the RX 6900 XT; rather, there are strict limits to what you can do, similar to NVIDIA's Green Light program back in the day.

Gigabyte has clocked their card to 2285 MHz, which is a moderate factory overclock for the Radeon RX 6900 XT, 35 MHz higher than the reference design. The top-clocked cards, such as the Gigabyte AORUS Master, end up at 2365 MHz. For our whole gaming test suite, we measured an average clock frequency of 2331 MHz, which is only 30 MHz lower than the MSI Gaming X that has a 55 MHz higher boost rating. Averaged over all our gaming tests, we found a 2% performance improvement over the AMD reference RX 6900 XT. 2% doesn't sound like much, but it's a big step towards the GeForce RTX 3090, which is now only 6% faster than the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT. MSI's Gaming X is 1% faster, hard to notice the difference. Compared to the Radeon RX 6800 XT, Gigabyte's card is 10% ahead, dishing out almost 30% more FPS than the RX 6800 non-XT. The performance uplift over NVIDIA's RTX 3080 is 4%, and RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Ti are almost 30% slower. Just to put this into perspective, the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC is more than three times (!) as fast as the Radeon RX 590.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is a great choice for 4K gaming, or lower resolutions at high refresh rates. Just be aware that AMD's DirectX 11 overhead is bigger than on NVIDIA, so you'll tend to get CPU limited a bit sooner than on the green team. On the other hand, AMD has support for the PCIe resizable BAR register feature, which they call Smart Access Memory (SAM). This technology will net a small performance boost because memory transfers between the CPU and GPU are now streamlined. SAM is supported on the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series for now, but it'll come to Intel, too, and NVIDIA is working on their version of it as well.

With this generation, AMD is introducing support for DirectX raytracing—as it stands now, the rendering technology of the future. Currently, game support is fairly limited, and the performance costs are high, so it might not be the most important feature to have today. On the other hand, considering that the 6900 XT is an expensive card in the ultra-high-end segment, you probably want to be prepared for the next years. We only tested two RT games so far, but it seems the loss in performance is bigger than on NVIDIA, who improved in that area with Ampere. Remember, this is AMD's first-generation raytracing implementation. Performance is still very respectable, reaching roughly RTX 2080 levels. Now that RT hardware is available for both AMD and NVIDIA and game developers are making console games on AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture, it'll be interesting to see how raytracing performance evolves in the coming months.

Our new apples-to-apples cooler testing reveals that Gigabyte's heatsink is considerably weaker than the AMD reference design cooler. That's a bit surprising since both are triple-slot with three fans. Taking a closer look at the data, we see that at heat loads below 200 W, the Gigabyte cooler sits roughly in the middle between the RX 6900 XT heatsink and dual-slot RX 6800 non-XT cooler. At higher load, the balance shifts much more towards the RX 6800, resulting in a 7°C temperature increase at 300 W heat load compared to the AMD RX 6900 XT cooler—at noise-normalized 35 dBA. This is certainly not a dealbreaker, but definitely worth keeping in mind.

Having a weaker cooler means higher temperatures or more noise, or both. I think Gigabyte found a pretty good balance between noise and temperatures given the cooler's capabilities. With 74°C, the card runs slightly lower temperatures than the AMD reference card—an important achievement for many. Noise levels are higher; with 37 dBA, the card is noticeably louder than the AMD reference, which is extremely quiet. Those noise levels aren't bad at all. While well audible in your case, it isn't nearly as loud as older AMD designs, like RX 5700 XT or Radeon VII. You also have to take into account the performance offered. Gigabyte includes a dual-BIOS feature with their card—the second BIOS is labeled "silent." Unfortunately, the difference is minimal, just 1 dBA less noise and 2°C higher temperatures. I wish Gigabyte would have gone with a large difference for meaningful user choice. Just like on the AMD reference design, idle fan stop is included, which provides the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

Non-gaming power consumption of the Gigabyte Gaming OC is comparable to the AMD reference card, maybe a tiny bit higher, but still high. The problem is that AMD's energy-saving mechanisms only work when running the card with one monitor at Full HD and 60 Hz or below. Everything above that will have the card switch to full memory speed, which sips a lot of power. Gaming power draw is 30 W higher than the AMD reference—a smaller increase than on the MSI card. While it's always suboptimal to lose energy efficiency, that's the price you have to pay for the factory overclock. Still, NVIDIA's RTX 3090 is significantly less efficient.

Overclocking the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC worked well. We gained over 5% in real-life performance. Just be aware that you must increase the card's power limit to see any meaningful gains. This is yet another AMD limitation—board partners aren't allowed to increase their card's power limit setting beyond a certain point even though the rest of the card has been engineered to handle the additional current. This is on top of the memory clock-speed limitation set by AMD, which limits the maximum memory overclock to 2150 MHz. Maximum power limit after adjustment is 304 W on the Gaming OC, as opposed to 293 W on the AMD reference and 314 W on the MSI Gaming X. This definitely affects maximum OC potential in a measurable way.

AMD's Radeon RX 6900 XT launched in December last year, and there has since been very little supply coming in, which, paired with the high demand, led to an extreme shortage of cards. With few cards available and everybody wanting one, scalpers are listing these cards with a markup to cash in on people willing to pay top dollar to have a card now. The same is happening with all the other AMD RDNA 2 and NVIDIA Ampere products. Officially, AMD claims an MSRP of $1000 for the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which was a fantasy even at launch—board partners wouldn't be able to achieve those prices even if there were enough GPU supply.

Current market conditions have the AMD RX 6900 XT at $1550, more premium custom designs sit at around $1800. Since we can be certain that Gigabyte will be limited by the few GPU chips they receive from AMD, just like everybody else, there's no reason to assume that the supply situation will be any different for the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC. Given Gigabyte's positioning, I feel like the card will be sold at pricing that's comparable to the AMD reference board, at least that's what I would be willing to pay for it. This makes the card a decent alternative to the AMD reference, but there are alternatives with higher OCs and better coolers if you have the money to spend—not worth it to everyone.

The Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC is an RX 6900 XT after all, which means awesome performance, fluid 4K gaming, raytracing, and fantastic energy efficiency. Still, if you want to save some money and can live with slightly lower performance, the GeForce RTX 3080 could be a solid option. It's currently priced at $1100, a lot less and not that much slower.