The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT NITRO+ is the company's flagship air-cooled custom-design RX 6800 XT "Big Navi" graphics card. It launches today alongside the slightly more value-oriented RX 6800 XT Pulse and numerous other custom RX 6800 series graphics cards by AMD's board partners. The NITRO+ represents Sapphire's highest grade of custom engineering, with the most capable cooling solution, best aesthetics, and fastest factory-overclocked speeds. AMD debuted the RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 earlier this month, marking the advent of the RDNA2 graphics architecture to the PC. It meets all requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate features, including raytracing, and shares its DNA with popular next-gen game consoles, such as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Real-time raytracing is the next frontier for consumer 3D graphics, and as NVIDIA's "Turing" and "Ampere" architectures have shown, it takes enormous amounts of compute power and fixed-function hardware. The RDNA2 architecture also calls for a doubling in SIMD power over the previous-generation RDNA architecture and introduces hardware to accelerate certain stages of the GPU's raytracing processing. Enormous amounts of raster 3D performance make for the obvious dividend in chasing down raytracing goals, and this is where AMD claims to have caught up with NVIDIA's fastest, stating that the RX 6800 XT plays in the same league as the flagship RTX 3080, and that it has the RTX 2080 Ti, effectively the RTX 3070, beat with the RX 6800.
The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro+ is based on the 7 nm "Navi 21" RDNA2 silicon and comes with an 80% increase in compute units over the RX 5700 XT, each with Ray Accelerators. The memory amount is doubled to 16 GB, and AMD is using the fastest JEDEC-standard GDDR6 memory running at 16 Gbps. The memory bus width, however, is unchanged from 256-bit. To make up ground, AMD devised an ingenious solution it calls Infinity Cache, which is a 128 MB on-die level 3 cache that runs at an astounding 2 TB/s, accelerating most workloads that aren't too data-intensive. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review goes into the details on the RDNA2 architecture as implemented on the RX 6800 series.
The Sapphire RX 6800 XT NITRO+ builds on the solid thermal and noise foundations laid down by the reference design, giving the chip a large triple-slot cooling solution with multiple aluminium fin-stack heatsinks that use both heat pipes and a vapor-chamber base-plate, a trio of fans, and a design that ensures much of the airflow from the third fan flows through. As Sapphire's premium custom-design RX 6800 XT offering, the NITRO+ also features lavish use of RGB LED embellishments, a dual-BIOS, external RGB headers, and a factory-overclock that boosts the GPU up to 2360 MHz, compared to the 2250 MHz reference. Sapphire is pricing the RX 6800 XT NITRO+ at $770, a $120 premium over the $650 baseline price for the RX 6800 XT. There's also the $800 Special Edition, which adds RGB fans, and the RX 6800 non-XT Nitro+ costs $640.
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
Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+
$770
4608
128
2015 MHz
2360 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
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.
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.
High-res versions are also available (front, back).