AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Video Card Review
Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB w/ NAVI 22
Tomorrow, the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card will be released with prices starting at $479. Some listings for the cards have already shown up online and the starting bid on eBay is $959 for the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT Eagle. It looks like we are headed to yet another launch of a video card that sells out instantly and many of you will be unable to buy one.
Buying a graphics card in 2021 is a frustrating experience for gamers and we understand that. It is tough to review these cards as it is hard to talk about all the next-gen RDNA 2 features and how great the power and performance is over last-gen when you can’t find them. Our advice to the Legit Reviews community is to bookmark all your favorite e-tailers today, sign in tonight, put your credit card on file, and be ready to buy the Radeon RX 6700 XT on Thursday, March 18 2021, at 6am PT / 9am ET / 2pm GMT. That is your best bet to get one of these cards before the miners and scalpers scoop them up.
That is an odd way to start off a launch article, but these are unprecedented times!
So, what is the Radeon RX 6700 XT and who is it aimed at?
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT is aimed at the sweet spot of 1440p gaming where most users have high refresh rate gaming monitors. Therefore it should also do well for 1080p gaming with max image quality settings. It has 12GB of GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory interface that is good for 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It should easily be able to handle current and future game titles at these resolutions with regards to the frame buffer.
When it comes to specifications the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT has 40 Compute Units & Ray Accelerators for a grand total of 2,560 stream processors and 96 MB of Infinity Cache. The die size of the GPU for the 6700 XT is 336mm^2 with 17.2 million transistors on the 7nm manufacturing process.
While we are getting technical about the under the hood specifications we also should talk about clock speeds. Here the Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card is clocked at 2321 MHz base, 2424 MHz game and up to 2581 MHz boost.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT comes with similar retail packaging as the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series cards.
Once you open the box you’ll find that the card is covered with a piece that highlights the main features of the card:
- Ultimate 1440p Gaming
- AMD FidelityFX
- 12GB Memory
- PCIe 4.0 Ready
Under that you’ll finally find the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card along with the user manual download card.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT looks like the smaller version of the other Radeon RX 6000 models! It measures 267 mm or about 10.51″ in length and has a typical board power rating of 230 Watts. AMD suggests that you have a 650W or greater power supply in your system if you want to use this model.
The AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT reference card is a 2-slot model that has a GPU cooler that utilizes two axial fans with the ‘R’ for Radeon in the middle. The design is clean and the card still has the red ‘race track’ accent ring around the top.
On the top of the Radeon RX 6700 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 and 6-pin PCIe 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.
When it comes to connectivity on the PCI bracket you’ll find a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port and three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors on the 6700 XT reference card. There are no hot air exhaust ports to be seen on the bracket, so good case cooling will be needed.
Let’s jump to the test system and then take a look at the benchmark numbers from the 6700 XT!