AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Video Card Review

Radeon RX 6900 XT – The Fastest Video Card AMD Has Ever Made

We’ve waited for AMD to bring a high-end graphics cards for years and now AMD has launched three Radeon RX 6000 Series cards based on ‘Big Navi’ GPUs built using the RDNA2 architecture over the past month. Last month, AMD showed that their new AMD Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards were capable of challenging the high-end GeForce enthusiast cards from NVIDIA. We were excited, but we wanted to see what the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT could do. This is their flagship desktop gaming graphics card and comes priced like one at $999.

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 is priced at $579 and the Radeon RX 6800 XT has a starting price of $649, so moving up to the 6900XT will run you an extra $350. The $999 price point has no real competition right now as the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 is priced at $699 and the GeForce RTX 3090 is $1499.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT features the Navi 21 GPU with 80 compute units for a total of 5,120 stream processors and 128MB of Infinity Cache. This is up 8 compute units and 4,608 stream processors over the Radeon RX 6800 XT. You are paying for those extra compute units and the extra binning that AMD did to produce each and every 6900 XT model. AMD picked the best NAVI GPUs for 6900 XT models as they run a more aggressive clock frequency and voltage curve.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT also comes with 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus offering 512GB/s of memory bandwidth. This large memory figure will likely be a big selling point for AMD as some of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 cards have just 10GB of GDDR6x memory. When it comes to clock speeds the game clock on this card is 2015MHz and the boost clock is 2250MHz. These are identical to the Radeon RX 6800 XT and the total board power is also the same at 300 Watts.

The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT comes in pretty much the same retail packaging as the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT that we covered in great detail when we unboxed that card last month. The only difference is the model number on the top right corner.

Once you open the box though you’ll find the unboxing experience is not the same as a mouse pad is wrapped around the card and held on with cardboard that has the AMD Radeon logo on it.

For a freebie is isn’t bad and it was totally unexpected. Most will likely find it a little thin and won’t be replacing their primary mouse mat with this one.

What is really cool that comes with the Radeon RX 6900 XT is this ‘R’ keycap that is hidden behind the user manual download card. This hidden gem works with most mechanical gaming keyboards and makes an excellent escape key replacement.

Other than that you the same thing as a Radeon RX 6800 XT as the cards share the same PCB, GPU cooler, power connectors, display connectors and so on.

We actually sat the two cards next to one another and they only way we could tell them apart was due to the parts number on the back of the card.

Let’s jump to the test system and then take a look at the benchmark numbers from the 6900 XT!