Page 1: Fast and quiet – The Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro + in the test

After we already got the Radeon RX 6800 Nitro + will be followed today by the XT model with the medium-sized Big Navi GPU. There will also be a Radeon RX 300 XT Nitro +, but we will probably not be able to test it this year . The Sapphire Radeon RX 2021 XT Nitro + should offer higher performance and more efficient cooling compared to the reference version. We will now take a look at whether these requirements correspond to reality.

The current availability of the card is a critical point, because at the time of this article neither the reference versions from AMD nor the custom models are available in sufficient quantities – let alone at the manufacturer’s recommended retail prices. AMD’s reference models are good, and AMD has made a big step forward in terms of cooling. This also makes these cards particularly popular. However, the custom models will become increasingly important, because even if AMD will continue to use the reference design over the first quarter 2021 also wants to have it manufactured, at some point there will only be custom models.

Accordingly, the custom models will be from 2021 are sure to become even more interesting and one of these is the Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro +.

First of all, let’s take a look at the differences in the technical data of the cards gives.

Basis of the Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro + is of course the Radeon RX 6800 XT. This in turn is based on the Big Navi GPU with its 7 nm manufactured 26, 8 billion transistors on a chip area of ​​519, 8 mm². In 72 are compute units 4. 608 Organized shader units. There is also a Ray Accelerator per Compute Unit and a total of 128 ROPs available. The Infinity Cache is on all Big Navi cards 110 MB in size. This also applies to the graphics memory with 16 GB GDDR6. This is connected via a 256 bit wide memory interface and comes to a memory bandwidth of 512 GB / s.

With the GPU clock, Sapphire really gets going. The game clock is from 2. 015 on 2. 110 MHz raised. The boost clock goes from 2. 250 on 2. 360 MHz. On paper, the card is even faster than the PowerColor Radeon RX no noon: no PowerColor Radeon RX has made the highest standards. The ASUS ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition with AiO cooling is on par with the Sapphire Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro +.

The Judging the prices is still difficult. The EIAs requested by AMD (and also NVIDIA) can hardly be reached. Due to the high demand, all models on the street are sold significantly more expensive. Sapphire does not name a price for the Radeon RX 6800 XT Nitro +.

A Radeon RX 2021 XT has a Total Graphics Power (TGP) of 250 W assigned by AMD. The thermal design power (TDP) of the card is 300 W . One of the adjusting screws for the manufacturer, in addition to the clock rate of the GPU, is its power budget – the TGP.

In the OC-BIOS, the Sapphire Radeon RX offers 6800 XT Nitro + a TGP of 289 W, it’s about silent BIOS 264 W. The specifications for the fan control amount to 1. 450 or 1. 200 RPM. We’ll see later whether there is a difference in practice.