Introduction

PowerColor announced its top custom design AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card, the RX 6700 XT Red Devil. After surprising everyone with competitive graphics cards in the enthusiast segment with the RX 6800 series and the flagship RX 6900 XT, AMD is turning its attention to the segment that earns NVIDIA the most attention from serious gamers—the sub-$500 performance segment, where it’s looking to take on established rivals, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the RTX 3070. Unlike the last time, AMD has largely leveled up to NVIDIA on the features front, with the RX 6700 XT being full DirectX 12 Ultimate capable, including real-time raytracing. The target user of this card is someone who games at 1440p with settings maxed out.

At the heart of the RX 6700 XT is the new 7 nm Navi 22 silicon by AMD, has half the compute muscle of the Navi 21 powering the RX 6900 XT. The chip has 40 RDNA2 compute units, which mean 2,560 stream processors, 40 Ray Accelerators, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. AMD also increased the memory size to 12 GB compared to the previous generation, but the memory bus width is narrowed to 192-bit. The company attempted to make up for this by increasing the memory clocks and using the new Infinity Cache on-die cache memory that the company claims to significantly improve effective bandwidth. The new RDNA2 graphics architecture uses fixed function hardware to accelerate raytracing intersections, but the tech also heavily relies on the compute shader. A side-effect of this is a massive raster 3D performance gain over the previous generation. We detail the silicon in the next page.

The PowerColor RX 6700 XT Red Devil uses a lavish triple-slot cooling solution that looks a segment above when installed in your case. Thick aluminium fin-stack heatsinks peek through the cooler shroud, giving it an industrial look. All this cooling muscle comes together to support factory overclocked speeds of up to 2.65 GHz max boost engine clocks, a roughly 100 MHz increase over the reference design. You get plenty of goodies, including RGB LED lighting, dual-BIOS, including a noise-optimized Silent BIOS, and a 3-pin addressable-RGB header, letting you sync your lighting to the card. We expect PowerColor to price the card at a roughly $100 premium over the $479 reference MSRP, like most other custom RX 6700 XT cards we’re reviewing today.

Our Radeon RX 6700 XT launch-day coverage includes six articles including this one. Do check them out!

AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (reference) | MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X | ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT OC | Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT NITRO+ | XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319