Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
The RX 6900 XT GAMING OC 16GB GDDR6 Graphics Card has a boost clock of up to 2285 MHz and a game clock of up to 2050 MHz. It features the WINDFORCE 3X cooling system features 3x 80mm unique blade fans, alternate spinning, 6 composite copper heat pipes, large copper plate direct touch GPU and 3D active fan, which together provide high-efficiency heat dissipation. Alternate Spinning can reduce the turbulence of adjacent fans and increase air pressure. The 3D Active Fan provides semi-passive cooling, and the fans will remain off when the GPU is in a low load or low power game. The airflow is spilt by the triangular fan edge and guided smoothly through the 3D stripe curve on the fan surface. Graphene nano lubricant can extend the life of the fan by 2.1 times, close to the life of double ball bearing, and is quieter.
RX 6900 XT GAMING OC features a large copper plate and heat pipe. With direct contact to the GPU and VRAM, the large copper plate combines the composite heat pipes to efficiently transfer heat generated from the interior cores to the heat sink. It features RGB Fusion 2.0 with 16.7M customizable color options and numerous lighting effects, you can choose lighting effects or synchronize with other AORUS devices. It comes with a protective metal backplate. RX 6900 XT GAMING OC metal back plate not only provides an aesthetical shape but also enhances the structure of the graphics card to provide complete protection. RX 6900 XT GAMING OC supports dual bios. The silent mode will provide a quieter experience. RX 6900 XT GAMING OC mode switch requires a reboot to take effect. The default is OC mode.The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC comes with 2 years of warranty.
Gigabyte Radeon RX 6900 XT GAMING OC 16GB GDDR6 Review
The RX 6900 XT GAMING OC is AMD's flagship graphics card for this generation and tops off a surprisingly fast graphics card series that restores competition to the high-end segment. Along with the RX 6800 series, it debuts the new RDNA2 graphics architecture, which also powers the latest generation of game consoles, meaning optimizing for the architecture is easy since most game studios have a console-first development approach. This is also AMD's first graphics architecture with full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, combining real-time raytracing, variable-rate shading, mesh shaders, and sampler-feedback, uplifting the visual experience from standard DirectX 12.
Full real-time raytraced rendering is the holy-grail of 3D graphics, but beyond the capability of today's hardware. It is, however, possible to combine conventional raster 3D graphics with certain real-time raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, global illumination, etc., to significantly improve realism. Even this much raytracing requires enormous amounts of compute power. The most compute-intensive part, ray intersection, is processed by fixed-function hardware AMD calls Ray Accelerators. A by-product of this approach is the vast raster 3D performance uplift over the previous generation, which enables AMD to compete with NVIDIA at the high-end segment.
The Radeon RX 6900 XT is based on the new 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon, the same chip also powering the RX 6800 series, but maxes it out. It gets all 5,120 stream processors, 80 Ray Accelerators, 320 TMUs, and 128 ROPs that are physically present on the silicon. AMD doubled the memory amount over the past generation, giving the card 16 GB of it; however, the memory bus width remains at 256-bit. The company used the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory chips for 512 GB/s memory bandwidth and a new technology it calls Infinity Cache, a 128 MB on-die Level 3 cache that operates at 2 TB/s in conjunction with the GDDR6 memory to improve memory sub-system performance.
The Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC features a rather simple design. Its WindForce 3X cooling solution consists of a set of aluminium fin stacks skewered by six copper heat pipes which make indirect contact with the GPU through a copper base plate. Three fans ventilate the heatsink. The fans turn in physically opposite directions of each other, yet guide air onto the heatsink. This has been done to reduce turbulence between the fans and lowers noise output. You also get factory-overclocked speeds of 2285 MHz (maximum boost clock) against the 2250 MHz reference. In this review, we take the card for a spin across our test bed to tell you if it has everything you need if all you want is an RX 6900 XT.
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