AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT Unboxing

By Nathan Kirsch November 16, 2020

First Look at Big Navi with Radeon RX 6800 Series

We are just days away from the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics card coming to market on November 18th and we finally can share a little bit more about the upcoming cards! For starters, we have them in our possession and we are allowed to cover unboxing with our audience. This basically means that unboxing thoughts are fair game about the retail packaging and the cards themselves. AMD still has an embargo on teardowns and everything related to performance that is not already public. Our cards are still in the middle of being tested, but everything is going smoothly and we can’t wait to share our results with you when that embargo lifts on November 18th, 2020!

AMD is ready to release its next-generation Radeon RX 6000 Series based on ‘Big Navi’ that is set to challenge the high-end enthusiast cards from NVIDIA. NVIDIA has held the performance crown for discrete graphics cards for a number of years now without any hardware from AMD to give them a battle at the top of the performance stack. With the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards they finally have something in the arsenal to take on NVIDIA at the higher price points.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 is priced at $579 and the Radeon RX 6800 XT has a starting price of $649. That means both cards fall in-between the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 ($499) and the GeForce RTX 3080 ($699) when it comes to pricing. AMD says they offer similar or superior performance to these cards at 1440P and 4K display resolutions.

The first card that we want to unbox and talk to you about is the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT. This card comes in new retail packaging that has a front cover that flips up to reveal the card inside. The front of the box shows a teaser of the front of the Radeon RX 6800 XT and simply says what it is.

Once you open the cover you are greeted with the following message from the AMD Red Team:

“You’ve joined a select community with an uncompromising passion for premium gaming. That shared desire is at the heart of everything we do. It’s why we’ve engineered the fastest AMD Radeon RX graphics card ever – to deliver a powerful gaming experience. Have fun. #AMDRedTeam”

The main box has a cover that again shows off the Radeon RX 6800 XT and highlights the main features of the card:

Uncompromised 4K Gaming
AMD FidelityFX Optimized
16GB Memory
PCIe 4.0 Ready

Under that you’ll finally find the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reference card! Under the hood the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT has 72 compute units and 128MB of Infinity Cache. Big Navi is the first GPU to use RDNA 2 technologies. The game clock on this card is 2015MHz and the boost clock is 2250MHz. This combination allows for 20.74 TFLOPs compute performance! The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT also comes with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and that will likely be a big selling point for some as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 comes with 10GB of GDDR6x memory.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT reference card is a beefy little bugger that takes up 2.5-slots and has a GPU cooler that utilizes triple axial fans. The design looks great in person and we like the silver/black front with the red accent ‘race track’ accent ring around the top of the card.

On the top of the Radeon RX 6800 XT you can see that it uses one large heatsink to keep everything cool spreading the entire length of the card. The only break in the array would be the two 8-pin power connectors on right hand side.

Looking at the bottom of the card you can again see the massive heatsink as well as the power cables for the cards LED lighting and the cooling fans.

A full coverage backplate adorns the back of the card and a large letter ‘R’ can be seen on the bottom right corner to let people know that you are rocking a Radeon GPU in your gaming PC.

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 launch got enthusiasts talking about POSCAP versus MLCC. They both have pros and cons, but AMD appears to have gone full MLCC on their reference card.

When it comes to connectivity on the PCI bracket you’ll find a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, two DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, and a USB-C port on the 6800 XT reference card.

Let’s move along and take a look a closer look at the AMD Radeon RX 6800!