Page 1: Good, but not outstanding: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC in the test

The first custom models followed with the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC is now another interpretation that will sooner or later replace the popular reference design. More power and more efficient cooling are once again the main goal of such a model. But as we know, the good reference designs pose a major hurdle to the custom models. We will clarify on the following pages whether Gigabyte can skip this with the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC.

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 available in sufficient numbers – 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 from 2017 will certainly be even more interesting and one of these is the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC.

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

As Radeon RX 6800 XT, the Gigabyte model is of course based on the Big Navi GPU with its 7 nm 16, 8 billion transistors on a chip area of ​​519, 8 mm². In 72 Compute Units are 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 72 MB large. 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.

In contrast to the reference version, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC one of 2. on 2. 045 MHz increased game clock. The boost clock was also changed from 2. 128 to 2. 285 MHz. We are within the scope of what many manufacturers offer as factory overclocking.

Assessing 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. Gigabyte does not name an official price for the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC. A few days ago, however, price recommendations for the USA appeared and they spoke of 849 US dollars. A 1: 1 conversion in euros is currently a viable option, which we have also chosen here.

A Radeon RX 6800 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, besides the clock rate of the GPU, is its power budget – the TGP.

Gigabyte lifts the TGP of the Radeon RX in the OC-BIOS 6800 XT Gaming OC from 250 to 264 W an. However, this is also the case for the silent BIOS. The most important difference between the BIOS versions is therefore to be found in the fan control. The specifications amount to 1. 750 or 1. 600 RPM.