Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC Review

Name: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC
Brand: GIGABYTE
Price: 1300 USD

W1zzard

on May 10th, 2022,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: GIGABYTE

(4 Comments) »

Introduction

The GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC is the company's value-ended custom-design rendition of AMD's new flagship GPU, the RX 6950 XT, positioned a notch below the company's AORUS Master series. You still get an advanced air-cooling solution, and a factory-overclock to boot. The Radeon RX 6950 XT leads a product stack update for AMD that sees the entry of three new GPU models for the Summer, as graphics card prices are finally coming down—the other two models are the RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT. It is designed to take the fight to NVIDIA's fastest GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, including the RTX 3090, while probably even trading blows with the RTX 3090 Ti; a launch that was probably triggered by this SKU.

There's no new underlying technology with the RX 6950 XT—no die-shrink to 6 nm, the same 7 nm process and RDNA 2 graphics architecture are used. AMD improved the RX 6950 XT in three ways compared to the RX 6900 XT. First, the company increased the GPU clock speeds, with 2100 MHz being the maximum game clock, compared to 2015 MHz on the RX 6900 XT. This is roughly comparable to the maximum clock the special "XTXH" variants of the RX 6900 XT shipped with, though at higher power limits because board partners were tuning those cards. The typical board power of the RX 6950 XT is 330 W, just 30 W higher than the RX 6950 XT.

The second improvement is memory, with AMD giving the RX 6950 XT faster 18 Gbps memory speeds, compared to 16 Gbps on the RX 6900 XT. This 12.5 percent increase in memory clocks dials up bandwidth, to 576 GB/s from 512 GB/s. The card retains the 128 MB of Infinity Cache memory, which helps overcome the bandwidth shortfall compared to NVIDIA graphics cards with wider 384-bit interfaces. 16 GB is the standard memory size over the chip's 256-bit wide memory bus. AMD is using faster 18 Gbps-rated memory chips, so we're hopeful there will be some memory overclock headroom, too.

The third improvement is at the software or firmware level and all secret-sauce, AMD did not elaborate. The hardware specifications are otherwise the same. You get 5,120 stream processors across 80 RDNA 2 compute units, 80 Ray Accelerators that enable real-time ray tracing, 320 TMUs, and the segment's highest 128 ROPs.

The GIGABYTE RX 6950 XT Gaming OC features an innovative cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses a combination of heat pipes and a vapor-chamber plate to circulate heat through the fin-stack. Three 100 mm fans ventilate the cooler. The middle fan turns in the opposite direction as the other two while still guiding airflow downward through the heatsink underneath. This helps reduce inter-fan turbulence. GIGABYTE gave this card a minor factory overclock to 2116 MHz game clocks (compared to 2100 MHz reference), practically making this a close-to-reference card. GIGABYTE is pricing it at $1,300, which is a rather large premium over the $1,099 baseline.

AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Cores	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RTX 2080	$500	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$600	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$570	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6700 XT	$540	2560	64	2424 MHz	2581 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 6750 XT	$600 MSRP: $550	2560	64	2495 MHz	2600 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 22	17200M	12 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$720	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$650	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3070 Ti	$700	6144	96	1575 MHz	1770 MHz	1188 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6X, 256-bit
RX 6800	$750	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$800	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$900	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3080 Ti	$1,200	10240	112	1365 MHz	1665 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	12 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RX 6900 XT	$1,000	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6950 XT	$1,150 MSRP: $1,100	5120	128	2100 MHz	2310 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC	$1,300	5120	128	2116 MHz	2324 MHz	2250 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$1,500	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit
RTX 3090 Ti	$2,000	10752	112	1560 MHz	1950 MHz	1313 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

Gigabyte's card uses a mix of black and gray highlights paired with a blocky industrial design. On the back, you'll find a high-quality metal backplate. While the front design is very similar to that of the RX 6900 XT Gaming OC, the backplate uses a new, more complex design that looks great.

Dimensions of the card are 33.5 x 14.5 cm, and it weighs 1712 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1.

The card has three 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 525 W of power draw.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series doesn't support multi-GPU. In the top right is the dual BIOS switch, which lets you activate the "silent" BIOS.

Teardown

Gigabyte's heatsink uses a vapor-chamber plate to draw heat from the GPU, while copper heat pipes spread heat from the vapor-chamber across the fin stack.

The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles, videos or forum posts.