Introduction

We have with us the ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D 12 GB OC graphics card. The latest entrant to the custom-design graphics card space debuting with the RX 5000 series, ASRock has established itself as a serious design-house for premium custom Radeon RX graphics cards. The Phantom Gaming D is the company’s top RX 6700 XT product so far. A successor to the Radeon RX 5700 XT, which stirred things up in the sub-$500 segment last year; the new RX 6700 XT is based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture and provides full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including real-time raytracing. It’s being offered as a 1440p maxed out gaming product, and AMD claims competitiveness with not only the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, but also the RTX 3070.

The new RDNA2 graphics architecture powers not just AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series, but also next-generation game consoles. This makes it easier for game developers to optimize for the RX 6000. AMD’s approach to real-time raytracing involves Ray Accelerators, special hardware for ray intersection computation, while compute shaders are used for almost every other raytracing aspect, including denoising. To achieve this, AMD has had to significantly increase the SIMD performance of its new generation GPUs through not just higher IPC for the new RDNA2 compute units, but also significantly higher engine clocks. A side-effect of this approach is that these GPUs offer high levels of performance on the majority of conventional raster 3D games.

With the RX 6700 XT, AMD has increased the standard memory amount for this segment to 12 GB, up from 8 GB on the RX 5700 XT, but the memory bus is narrower, at 192-bit. AMD has attempted to shore up the memory bus width deficit by using the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps memory chips and Infinity Cache, a fast 96 MB on-die cache that speeds up the memory sub-system.

The ASRock RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D comes with a powerful triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution that doesn’t shy away from copious amounts of RGB LED bling. It also has an ARGB header you may use to synchronize the rest of your lighting to the card. ASRock is also packing a factory overclock of up to 2548 MHz Game Clock (vs. 2424 MHz reference).