It appears that PowerColor has joined Sapphire in ‘leaking’ the unannounced RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled reference card. As tweeted by @momomo_us, PowerColor has officially listed a new reference RX 6900 XT LC card on its site, but with no pictures at this time. (Note: The picture above is the Sapphire version.)
This information comes just 9 days after Sapphire spilled the beans on AMD’s liquid-cooled version of the RX 6900XT. This all-new liquid-cooled reference design for the RX 6900 XT remains very similar to the air-cooled model, but it replaces the triple-fan cooling system with a single 120mm AIO, that presumably cools the entire card, including memory.
Another interesting feature is the addition of 18Gbps memory, a noticeable upgrade over the current 16Gbps ICs used on the air-cooled 6900 XT. This would bump up the card’s memory bandwidth from 512GBps to 576GBps. That would also be the fastest shipping GDDR6 memory we’ve seen, as Nvidia moved to GDDR6X for the 3080 and above. However, that could simply be a typo, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, we’ve successfully overclocked the VRAM on the other RX 6000-series GPUs to 17.2Gbps, so it’s possible the extra cooling allows for even higher stock clocks.
So far, PowerColor and Sapphire are the only AMD AIB (add-in board) partners that have revealed this new version of the RX 6900 XT. Assuming these are actual reference designs that have leaked early, we suspect more partners will join the party once we get the official announcement of the card from AMD. Once that happens, we’ll also get official specs and details on pricing and ‘availability’.