Packaging

The Card

Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ comes in a racy-looking board design with an apparent focus on low noise and temperature. While the AMD reference card uses a metal cooler shroud, the Sapphire design is plastic. The metal back-plate with its cutouts and RGB looks great, too.


Dimensions of the card are 31 cm x 13.5 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4, and one HDMI 2.1. This card lacks the USB type-C found in reference-design and certain other custom-design cards.


No fancy power inputs here as you get two 8-pin PCIe power connectors right where you want them—at the top edge.


The card comes with a dual-BIOS feature that lets you select the default BIOS with 2360 MHz boost clocks and a 289 W power limits or the "quiet" BIOS, which runs the card at 2285 MHz boost with a 264 W power limit. There's a third selection for this switch, which enables their "software BIOS selection." With it enabled, you can select between the two BIOSes in the TriXX software and won't have to open the case to do so manually.


The Nitro+ puts out an addressable-RGB header, letting you synchronize your lighting to the card's. You can control the two using the TriXX software.


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

Teardown

Sapphire's Nitro+ cooling solution looks surprisingly simple tcompared to the AMD reference design. It's also a two-part solution with the pictured part taking care of GPU cooling exclusively.


Six heatpipes are installed under a copper base to soak up heat from the GPU.


This secondary heatsink takes care of cooling the memory chips and VRM ciruitry.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. It has an LED illuminated Nitro logo and cutouts for airflow from the third fan to go through.