Introduction

The Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming OC is the company’s factory-overclocked graphics card for those seeking a close-to-reference custom rendition of the RX 6700 XT from Gigabyte without the bells and whistles of the AORUS Gaming brand. The Radeon RX 6700 XT is AMD’s fourth RX 6000 series RDNA2 graphics card, and arguably its most important so far as it targets a sub-$500 (MSRP) price point, bringing the architecture to a wider audience. A successor to the RX 5700 XT, it brings full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, including real-time raytracing, and is suited for maxed out gaming at 1440p. AMD claims that the card is competitive not only against NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 Ti, but also the pricier RTX 3070 in certain games.

The RDNA2 graphics architecture powering the RX 6700 XT is spread far and wide in the current generation, spanning not just the Radeon RX 6000 series, but also the latest game consoles. This makes it easier for game developers to optimize for the architecture on the PC. AMD’s approach to real-time raytracing involves using special hardware called Ray Accelerators to handle the most compute-intensive task in raytracing, of ray intersections, while compute shaders are used for almost everything else, including de-noising. A side effect of this approach is that AMD has had to bolster its SIMD muscle significantly over the previous generation, which can work wonders for conventional raster 3D games.

The Radeon RX 6700 XT is based on and maxes out the new 7 nm Navi 22 silicon, which physically features 40 RDNA2 compute units. This works out to 2,560 stream processors, 40 Ray Accelerators, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The stream processor count is exactly the same as with the RX 5700 XT, but besides having a higher IPC, they run at much higher engine clocks in excess of 2.42 GHz, compared to the 1.77 GHz game clock of the RX 5700 XT.

AMD has increased the standard memory amount to 12 GB, but over a narrow 192-bit GDDR6 memory bus. AMD attempts to overcome the bandwidth deficit compared to the 256-bit GDDR6 interface of the RX 5700 series by increasing the memory clocks to 16 Gbps and deploying its new Infinity Cache technology—a fast 96 MB on-die level 3 cache that accelerates the memory subsystem.

The Gigabyte RX 6700 XT Gaming OC comes with the company’s latest-generation WindForce 3X cooling solution found on several other current-generation products. Three aluminium fin stacks are skewered by five 6 mm-thick copper heat-pipes that make direct contact with the GPU at the base. This heatsink is ventilated by three fans. The cooler is longer than the PCB, so some of the airflow from the third fan flows through a hole in the backplate. The RX 6700 XT comes with factory overclocked speeds of 2514 MHz (game clock) as opposed to the 2424 MHz reference. In this review, we take the card for a spin.