Introduction

The GIGABYTE Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC is the company’s value-ended custom-design rendition of AMD’s new flagship GPU, the RX 6950 XT, positioned a notch below the company’s AORUS Master series. You still get an advanced air-cooling solution, and a factory-overclock to boot. The Radeon RX 6950 XT leads a product stack update for AMD that sees the entry of three new GPU models for the Summer, as graphics card prices are finally coming down—the other two models are the RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT. It is designed to take the fight to NVIDIA’s fastest GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards, including the RTX 3090, while probably even trading blows with the RTX 3090 Ti; a launch that was probably triggered by this SKU.

There’s no new underlying technology with the RX 6950 XT—no die-shrink to 6 nm, the same 7 nm process and RDNA2 graphics architecture are used. AMD improved the RX 6950 XT in three ways compared to the RX 6900 XT. First, the company increased the GPU clock speeds, with 2100 MHz being the maximum game clock, compared to 2015 MHz on the RX 6900 XT. This is roughly comparable to the maximum clock the special “XTXH” variants of the RX 6900 XT shipped with, though at higher power limits because board partners were tuning those cards. The typical board power of the RX 6950 XT is 330 W, just 30 W higher than the RX 6950 XT.

The second improvement is memory, with AMD giving the RX 6950 XT faster 18 Gbps memory speeds, compared to 16 Gbps on the RX 6900 XT. This 12.5 percent increase in memory clocks dials up bandwidth, to 576 GB/s from 512 GB/s. The card retains the 128 MB of Infinity Cache memory, which helps overcome the bandwidth shortfall compared to NVIDIA graphics cards with wider 384-bit interfaces. 16 GB is the standard memory size over the chip’s 256-bit wide memory bus. AMD is using faster 18 Gbps-rated memory chips, so we’re hopeful there will be some memory overclock headroom, too.

The third improvement is at the software or firmware level and all secret-sauce, AMD did not elaborate. The hardware specifications are otherwise the same. You get 5,120 stream processors across 80 RDNA2 compute units, 80 Ray Accelerators that enable real-time ray tracing, 320 TMUs, and the segment’s highest 128 ROPs.

The GIGABYTE RX 6950 XT Gaming OC features an innovative cooling solution with an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses a combination of heat pipes and a vapor-chamber plate to circulate heat through the fin-stack. Three 100 mm fans ventilate the cooler. The middle fan turns in the opposite direction as the other two while still guiding airflow downward through the heatsink underneath. This helps reduce inter-fan turbulence. GIGABYTE gave this card a minor factory overclock to 2116 MHz game clocks (compared to 2100 MHz reference), practically making this a close-to-reference card. GIGABYTE is pricing it at $1300, which is a rather large premium over the $1,099 baseline.