PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil Review

Name: PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil
Brand: PowerColor
Price: 800 USD

W1zzard

on Nov 25th, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: PowerColor

(62 Comments) »

Introduction

PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil "Big Navi" made landfall today. The Red Devil brand represents PowerColor's most premium custom-design AMD Radeon graphics cards and builds on the legacy of the well-praised RX 5700 XT Red Devil. It launches today alongside the cost-effective Red Dragon series and numerous other custom-design RX 6800 series cards by AMD's board partners. "Big Navi" came out earlier this month as an AMD reference design, today we're reviewing the custom-design cards. The RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 bring AMD's new RDNA 2 graphics architecture to the PC platform, which debuted earlier this year on consoles such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. On the PC, it introduces full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, including support for real-time raytracing.

The RDNA 2 graphics architecture is built on the philosophy of enormous amounts of compute power to accomplish real-time raytracing. While the most compute-intensive part of ray-tracing, ray intersection, is processed by fixed-function hardware, quite a few aspects, such as denoising, are handled via compute shaders. That's why AMD doubled the SIMD resources over the previous-generation RDNA, coupled with a new high-clock-speed silicon design. A side-effect of this approach is an enormous performance uplift with traditional raster 3D rendering performance. As it stands, it will still be some time before we have pure raytraced graphics, and both NVIDIA and AMD are stuck with having to combine raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements. AMD in its launch event claimed that the RX 6800 XT performs in the same league as NVIDIA's flagship RTX 3080, and the RX 6800 goes against the RTX 2080 Ti (or RTX 3070), which should mark AMD's return to the high-end segment on the back of this performance uplift.

PowerColor's Radeon RX 6800 XT Red Devil is based on the new AMD 7 nm "Navi 21" RDNA 2 silicon and armed with 4,608 stream processors, an 80% increase over the RX 5700 XT and 100% increase over the RX 5700. Each of the chip's 72 RDNA 2 compute units has one Ray Accelerator unit. AMD also doubled the memory amount to 16 GB and uses the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The memory bus width is narrower than that of the RTX 3080, at just 256-bit, but AMD found a solution to its memory sub-system bottlenecks in the form of Infinity Cache, an on-die 128 MB L3 cache running at 2 TB/s, which accelerates memory access. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review takes an in-depth look at the RDNA 2 architecture.

The PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil in this review introduces a large triple-slot cooler paired with a vast aluminium fin-stack heatsink. There are also certain cosmetic touches that cleverly use RGB LEDs to give the card the appearance of red-hot metal, which looks very Metal. Bringing it all together is a strong VRM solution supporting factory-overclocked speeds of 2340 MHz (compared to 2250 MHz reference), and premium features, such as dual-BIOS and external ARGB headers. PowerColor hasn't provided us with a price for the Radeon RX 6800 XT RED Devil, citing "market conditions." Their logic is that since retailers will be marking up the price anyway due to limited stock, they rather give no guidance on pricing at all instead of an unrealistic price. Considering the positioning of this card and that PowerColor declared it a limited edition of 1000 pieces, $800 seems appropriate, which I've used throughout this review. Once actual pricing is known, I'll update this review, of course. Apparently there's also a non-Limited Edition Red Devil, with fewer bundled accessories, but that's all we know.

Radeon RX 6800 XT Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$650	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$500	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$580	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$650	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil	$800?	4608	128	2090 MHz	2340 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$700	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RTX 3090	$1500	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

The PowerColor RX 6800 XT Red Devil is a beastly custom-design implementation of "Big Navi." A design focus appears to be on minimizing the aesthetic bits, such as the cooler shroud, and letting its large triple-fan heatsink breathe easy, so the Red Devil isn't afraid to lay bare its guts.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 13.5 cm.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB type-C with DisplayPort passthrough.

No fancy power inputs here as you get two 8-pin PCIe power connectors right where you want them—at the top edge. Here, you can also see the serial number of our card; PowerColor is making the Red Devil a limited edition with just 1000 pieces.

Our PCB photos on the next page show that this design is ready for triple 8-pins; the PCB has the silkscreen for it. I guess this will be used on the RX 6900 XT Red Devil.

The card comes with a dual-BIOS feature, which lets you select between a performance-focused OC BIOS (default) and a low-noise focused "silent" one.

AMD "Navi 21" relies on an external USB 3.2 controller for the USB-C port, supplied by Cypress Semiconductor and labeled "CYPD5137-40LQXI." This controller puts out 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2, DisplayPort passthrough, and 27 W power delivery.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series doesn't support multi-GPU.

Teardown

The main heatsink provides cooling for all components on the card: GPU, memory, and VRM circuitry

PowerColor uses five fat heatpipes to keep the card cool.

The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. There are no hot components on the reverse side of the PCB, so no thermal pads are to be found. There is, however, an LED-illuminated PowerColor Red Devil logo.

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 or forum posts.