The Unboxing and Overview of the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

As we open up the box, we're greeted by a familiar sight - the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT, with its sleek design and robust build. The card is slightly larger than its vanilla counterpart, the 6800, but this is to be expected given the increased power and performance capabilities of the XT variant.

One notable difference between the two cards is the lighting scheme on the front of the 6800 XT. Instead of the red Radeon logo that we saw on the 6800, the RX 6800 XT features a white LED logo that can be controlled using AMD's new software. This adds an extra layer of customization to the card and sets it apart from its predecessor.

Moving on to the technical specifications, the RX 6800 XT boasts a 300-watt TDP, which is 50 watts higher than the vanilla 6800. It also has 72 compute units compared to the 60 found in the standard model. This increase in processing power and memory should result in significant improvements in performance, but it's worth noting that the card will still require more power to run at its maximum capacity.

The RX 6800 XT features two DisplayPort 1.4 ports, one HDMI 2.1 port, and a single USB Type-C port. This selection of ports should be sufficient for most users who want to connect multiple monitors or peripherals to their system. However, those looking to take full advantage of the card's capabilities may find that they need additional adapters or custom designs to accommodate their needs.

In terms of size, the RX 6800 XT is slightly larger than the standard 6800 model, but it should still fit in most standard PC cases with a few minor adjustments. The card weighs a total of 115 grams more than its predecessor, resulting in an overall weight of approximately 1.5 kilograms plus an additional 5 grams.

The RX 6800 XT is positioned as a high-end graphics card, and AMD's pricing strategy reflects this. The card is priced at $1,000, which is significantly higher than the standard model and puts it squarely in competition with NVIDIA's top-tier offerings, such as the GeForce RTX 3070. This aggressive pricing strategy suggests that AMD is looking to make a bold statement in the market and prove that their Radeon brand can hold its own against the industry leader.

Infinity Cache: A Key Differentiator

One of the most interesting aspects of the RX 6800 XT is AMD's Infinity Cache technology, which promises to deliver significant performance improvements. By adding more memory and increasing the clock speed, AMD hopes to achieve faster loading times and improved overall system responsiveness. This technology should also help improve the card's ability to handle complex workloads and games at high resolutions.

Infinity Cache: A Closer Look

AMD has confirmed that their Infinity Cache will increase the effective bandwidth of the RX 6800 XT by more than double compared to its predecessor. With 16 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory running at a relatively slow 14 gigabits per second, this represents a significant improvement in terms of raw processing power.

Infinity Cache: How It Works

According to AMD, Infinity Cache works by adding additional layers of cache memory between the GPU and the system RAM. This allows for faster data transfer and improved performance, especially when dealing with complex workloads or graphics-intensive applications.

The Benefits of Infinity Cache

By incorporating Infinity Cache technology into their Radeon RX 6800 XT, AMD is hoping to address one of the major drawbacks of traditional GPU designs - high latency and slow data transfer times. This should result in improved performance and responsiveness for gamers and content creators alike.

Competing with NVIDIA: A David vs Goliath Story

The release of the RX 6800 XT marks a significant shift in AMD's market strategy, as they position their Radeon brand as a serious competitor to NVIDIA's GeForce lineup. With its Infinity Cache technology and aggressive pricing, AMD is hoping to lure high-end gamers and content creators away from the competition.

AMD's Approach: A Different Path

Unlike NVIDIA, which has focused on developing more powerful GPUs with advanced cooling systems, AMD has taken a different approach by increasing the clock speed and adding additional memory. This allows for faster data transfer times and improved performance, especially in terms of ray tracing capabilities.

The RX 6800 XT: A New Era for Radeon

With the release of the RX 6800 XT, AMD is signaling that their Radeon brand is back in the game, capable of competing with the industry leader. The card's aggressive pricing strategy and Infinity Cache technology promise significant improvements in performance and responsiveness, making it an attractive option for those looking to upgrade or switch to a new graphics solution.

The Unboxing: Next Steps

Now that we've taken a closer look at the RX 6800 XT, we'll be moving on to our benchmarking and testing process. We'll put this card through its paces, comparing its performance to other high-end GPUs like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3070. This will give us a better understanding of just how well the RX 6800 XT stacks up against the competition.

We'll also be putting the RX 6800 XT through various workloads and applications, including games, content creation tools, and scientific simulations. By testing the card in different scenarios, we can get a more comprehensive understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

Conclusion

The AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT is an exciting new addition to their lineup, offering significant improvements in performance and responsiveness thanks to its Infinity Cache technology. With its aggressive pricing strategy and competitive features, this card should appeal to both gamers and content creators looking for a high-end graphics solution.

We'll continue to follow the development of the RX 6800 XT and provide our readers with updates on its performance and capabilities.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi this is jared walton with toms hardware and today we are looking at the unboxing of the amd radeon rx 6800 and the rx 6800 xt you can see that we've got two different boxes here the big box for the xt and the slightly smaller box slightly less fully featured box for the vanilla rx 6800 i'm going to go ahead and start with the little brother here this is the 579 dollar rx 6800 the box is for lack of a better way of putting it it's just not as nice and exciting you know traditional you got to open the flaps and pull stuff out so let's go ahead and do that and here you have the first look at the card so you've got this little cover you can pull off and inside you get the rx 6800 in terms of design this is a traditional triple slot cooling card it's got three fans that are about 77 millimeters in diameter so a little bit of a unique custom design there i'm sure others use that same form factor but you know they've these are definitely custom designed for amd because they've got the r logos on them a little bit of unique fan blade and as we've seen with a lot of other recent cards including nvidia's 30 series founders edition cards the fans all have an integrated rim that spins with the fan that generally helps to improve static pressure and drive better airflow down into the cooling fins but this is you know just an open air design so it will blow down into the heat sink and exhaust out the bottom and top of the card i don't know that i love that type of design it works fine but it does end up causing some dust buildup down on your motherboard over time i've seen that in a lot of my pcs so you know something to be aware of that you'll want to keep it clean and probably do that every three to six month blow out with your compressed air or whatever else you got but let's move on to the video ports on the back here this is where it gets interesting because this is perhaps the least exciting full-featured whatever you want to call it graphics card that i've seen for a high-end graphics card in recent times so there are only two display port connectors and one hdmi 2.1 connector and then there's the usb type-c connector which i guess maybe could be used for virtual link but virtual ink is dead i mean even nvidia nvidia's dropped that for its 30 series almost no one outside of nvidia did much with it on the 20 series so it's interesting to see it show up here maybe there are some upcoming uh vr headsets that will actually make use of it but whatever the case that's that's what amd's going with dimensions the card is about 10 and a half inches long or if you prefer that in millimeters it's around 268 millimeters and then it's it's also around four and a quarter inches tall about 117 millimeters give or take and this is a dual slot design nothing particularly noteworthy there it takes up two slots like just about every other graphics card i've seen in the past decade i mean single slot graphics cards are such a rarity these days um i mean there are definitely larger graphics cards but anything above like the very bare minimum tends to be a dual slot design it also weighs 1 389 grams or about 3 pounds and 1 ounce so it's a chunky little card you know for a relatively compact design it weighs about as much as nvidia's rtx 3080 founders edition nowhere near as massive as 3090 of course just about nothing is that big every time i pick up the 30 90 founders edition i'm still like shocked at how heavy it is that about does it for the major features there are two peg eight pin connectors for power so theoretically through the pci express slot and the two power connectors it could draw up to 370 watts of power 375 watts you're not going to get anywhere near that in normal operation but maybe if you did liquid nitrogen or something in a custom cooler and you tweaked the power delivery to exceed the limits you could potentially overclock it a fair amount but that's not what i'll be doing let's uh let's go ahead and put this one away and move on to the big brother and literally it is the big brother the box is bigger it's a little more a little bit more uh robust you know it's kind of i don't know that is that much of a big deal but you gotta slit the side open here and then you flip up the flap and then that gets you access to the card after you move this remove this cover and here you go this is the radeon rx 6800 xt at first blush this is nearly identical looking to the 6800 the key difference being it's about two and a half slots thick and the red radeon light up logo on the 6800 has been replaced by well it looks white to the eye but i believe it's an rgb controllable radeon led logo on the side of the 6800 xt i should note that the 6800 xt also does support the rage mode i i don't want to call it overclocking because it's not really overclocking amd's new software has a rage mode that basically removes the power limits or not removes them but it increases the power limit by seven percent or something like that and that allows the card to boost higher and run at faster speeds uh otherwise you know same dimensions other than it's two and a half slots thick it does way more it weighs about 115 grams more so it's 1.5 kilograms plus 5 grams extra and in terms of you know those of us who stick with the old imperial system it's 3 pounds 5.1 ounces same port selection it's got two displayport 1.4 one hdmi 2.1 and a usb type-c so if you wanted to do quad monitors on this you would have to look at adapters and that's kind of a pain but i don't know you could probably anyone who's really interested in quad monitors i think you would probably want to look at a custom design that has the port selection you want that about does it for the overview of these cards the unboxing obviously we can't talk benchmarks or power or any of that other stuff today i can tell you the official specs the rx 6800 xt has a 300 watt tdp so 50 watts higher than the vanilla 6800 and it's also clocked a little bit higher and it has 72 compute units versus 60 compute units so you would expect it to you know all other things being similar it's going to use more power and that's why it's got the higher powered tdp and we'll be back on november 18th with the full review of these cards i'll also hop on the toms hardware live stream and discuss the cards and the review in more detail there we'll actually be able to show benchmarks at that time we will be back on november 18th and i will be on the toms hardware live stream and we'll talk about more of the nuances of this review besides your traditional performance we've also got ray tracing performance that we're going to look at and see how that stacks up to nvidia and yeah it's going to be exciting i've known you know art architecturally amd has taken a very different route than nvidia this round and they've basically thrown a ton of l3 cache at the problem of bandwidth and performance so that's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out you know 16 gigabytes of gddr6 memory running at a relatively tame 14 gigabits per second so on the 256 bit bus this is the same theoretical bandwidth as the previous gen rx 5700 5700 xt except this time amd has infinity cash and it says it can get up to more than double the effective bandwidth thanks to that infinity cache so that is going to be very interesting you know you've got nvidia has an 8 gigabyte 3070 and a 10 gigabyte 3080 and amd counters with 16 gigabyte gddr6 cards i don't know exactly how it's going to play out but it is looking to be one of the most interesting matchups between amd and nvidia of the past decade or more it's been a long time since amd has really had something that could compete with nvidia's best and that seems to be what amd is going after here i mean the the upcoming rx 6900 xt is priced at a thousand dollars and we haven't really seen that since amd's old dual gpu r9 295 x2 so this is a return to the extreme performance and high-end markets for amd and we'll see if they can compete in the meantime thanks for watching please like and subscribe share with your friends and up on the live stream and you can ask us questions and we'll be happy to take your questions and answer them as best as we're able come wednesdayhi this is jared walton with toms hardware and today we are looking at the unboxing of the amd radeon rx 6800 and the rx 6800 xt you can see that we've got two different boxes here the big box for the xt and the slightly smaller box slightly less fully featured box for the vanilla rx 6800 i'm going to go ahead and start with the little brother here this is the 579 dollar rx 6800 the box is for lack of a better way of putting it it's just not as nice and exciting you know traditional you got to open the flaps and pull stuff out so let's go ahead and do that and here you have the first look at the card so you've got this little cover you can pull off and inside you get the rx 6800 in terms of design this is a traditional triple slot cooling card it's got three fans that are about 77 millimeters in diameter so a little bit of a unique custom design there i'm sure others use that same form factor but you know they've these are definitely custom designed for amd because they've got the r logos on them a little bit of unique fan blade and as we've seen with a lot of other recent cards including nvidia's 30 series founders edition cards the fans all have an integrated rim that spins with the fan that generally helps to improve static pressure and drive better airflow down into the cooling fins but this is you know just an open air design so it will blow down into the heat sink and exhaust out the bottom and top of the card i don't know that i love that type of design it works fine but it does end up causing some dust buildup down on your motherboard over time i've seen that in a lot of my pcs so you know something to be aware of that you'll want to keep it clean and probably do that every three to six month blow out with your compressed air or whatever else you got but let's move on to the video ports on the back here this is where it gets interesting because this is perhaps the least exciting full-featured whatever you want to call it graphics card that i've seen for a high-end graphics card in recent times so there are only two display port connectors and one hdmi 2.1 connector and then there's the usb type-c connector which i guess maybe could be used for virtual link but virtual ink is dead i mean even nvidia nvidia's dropped that for its 30 series almost no one outside of nvidia did much with it on the 20 series so it's interesting to see it show up here maybe there are some upcoming uh vr headsets that will actually make use of it but whatever the case that's that's what amd's going with dimensions the card is about 10 and a half inches long or if you prefer that in millimeters it's around 268 millimeters and then it's it's also around four and a quarter inches tall about 117 millimeters give or take and this is a dual slot design nothing particularly noteworthy there it takes up two slots like just about every other graphics card i've seen in the past decade i mean single slot graphics cards are such a rarity these days um i mean there are definitely larger graphics cards but anything above like the very bare minimum tends to be a dual slot design it also weighs 1 389 grams or about 3 pounds and 1 ounce so it's a chunky little card you know for a relatively compact design it weighs about as much as nvidia's rtx 3080 founders edition nowhere near as massive as 3090 of course just about nothing is that big every time i pick up the 30 90 founders edition i'm still like shocked at how heavy it is that about does it for the major features there are two peg eight pin connectors for power so theoretically through the pci express slot and the two power connectors it could draw up to 370 watts of power 375 watts you're not going to get anywhere near that in normal operation but maybe if you did liquid nitrogen or something in a custom cooler and you tweaked the power delivery to exceed the limits you could potentially overclock it a fair amount but that's not what i'll be doing let's uh let's go ahead and put this one away and move on to the big brother and literally it is the big brother the box is bigger it's a little more a little bit more uh robust you know it's kind of i don't know that is that much of a big deal but you gotta slit the side open here and then you flip up the flap and then that gets you access to the card after you move this remove this cover and here you go this is the radeon rx 6800 xt at first blush this is nearly identical looking to the 6800 the key difference being it's about two and a half slots thick and the red radeon light up logo on the 6800 has been replaced by well it looks white to the eye but i believe it's an rgb controllable radeon led logo on the side of the 6800 xt i should note that the 6800 xt also does support the rage mode i i don't want to call it overclocking because it's not really overclocking amd's new software has a rage mode that basically removes the power limits or not removes them but it increases the power limit by seven percent or something like that and that allows the card to boost higher and run at faster speeds uh otherwise you know same dimensions other than it's two and a half slots thick it does way more it weighs about 115 grams more so it's 1.5 kilograms plus 5 grams extra and in terms of you know those of us who stick with the old imperial system it's 3 pounds 5.1 ounces same port selection it's got two displayport 1.4 one hdmi 2.1 and a usb type-c so if you wanted to do quad monitors on this you would have to look at adapters and that's kind of a pain but i don't know you could probably anyone who's really interested in quad monitors i think you would probably want to look at a custom design that has the port selection you want that about does it for the overview of these cards the unboxing obviously we can't talk benchmarks or power or any of that other stuff today i can tell you the official specs the rx 6800 xt has a 300 watt tdp so 50 watts higher than the vanilla 6800 and it's also clocked a little bit higher and it has 72 compute units versus 60 compute units so you would expect it to you know all other things being similar it's going to use more power and that's why it's got the higher powered tdp and we'll be back on november 18th with the full review of these cards i'll also hop on the toms hardware live stream and discuss the cards and the review in more detail there we'll actually be able to show benchmarks at that time we will be back on november 18th and i will be on the toms hardware live stream and we'll talk about more of the nuances of this review besides your traditional performance we've also got ray tracing performance that we're going to look at and see how that stacks up to nvidia and yeah it's going to be exciting i've known you know art architecturally amd has taken a very different route than nvidia this round and they've basically thrown a ton of l3 cache at the problem of bandwidth and performance so that's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out you know 16 gigabytes of gddr6 memory running at a relatively tame 14 gigabits per second so on the 256 bit bus this is the same theoretical bandwidth as the previous gen rx 5700 5700 xt except this time amd has infinity cash and it says it can get up to more than double the effective bandwidth thanks to that infinity cache so that is going to be very interesting you know you've got nvidia has an 8 gigabyte 3070 and a 10 gigabyte 3080 and amd counters with 16 gigabyte gddr6 cards i don't know exactly how it's going to play out but it is looking to be one of the most interesting matchups between amd and nvidia of the past decade or more it's been a long time since amd has really had something that could compete with nvidia's best and that seems to be what amd is going after here i mean the the upcoming rx 6900 xt is priced at a thousand dollars and we haven't really seen that since amd's old dual gpu r9 295 x2 so this is a return to the extreme performance and high-end markets for amd and we'll see if they can compete in the meantime thanks for watching please like and subscribe share with your friends and up on the live stream and you can ask us questions and we'll be happy to take your questions and answer them as best as we're able come wednesdayhi this is jared walton with toms hardware and today we are looking at the unboxing of the amd radeon rx 6800 and the rx 6800 xt you can see that we've got two different boxes here the big box for the xt and the slightly smaller box slightly less fully featured box for the vanilla rx 6800 i'm going to go ahead and start with the little brother here this is the 579 dollar rx 6800 the box is for lack of a better way of putting it it's just not as nice and exciting you know traditional you got to open the flaps and pull stuff out so let's go ahead and do that and here you have the first look at the card so you've got this little cover you can pull off and inside you get the rx 6800 in terms of design this is a traditional triple slot cooling card it's got three fans that are about 77 millimeters in diameter so a little bit of a unique custom design there i'm sure others use that same form factor but you know they've these are definitely custom designed for amd because they've got the r logos on them a little bit of unique fan blade and as we've seen with a lot of other recent cards including nvidia's 30 series founders edition cards the fans all have an integrated rim that spins with the fan that generally helps to improve static pressure and drive better airflow down into the cooling fins but this is you know just an open air design so it will blow down into the heat sink and exhaust out the bottom and top of the card i don't know that i love that type of design it works fine but it does end up causing some dust buildup down on your motherboard over time i've seen that in a lot of my pcs so you know something to be aware of that you'll want to keep it clean and probably do that every three to six month blow out with your compressed air or whatever else you got but let's move on to the video ports on the back here this is where it gets interesting because this is perhaps the least exciting full-featured whatever you want to call it graphics card that i've seen for a high-end graphics card in recent times so there are only two display port connectors and one hdmi 2.1 connector and then there's the usb type-c connector which i guess maybe could be used for virtual link but virtual ink is dead i mean even nvidia nvidia's dropped that for its 30 series almost no one outside of nvidia did much with it on the 20 series so it's interesting to see it show up here maybe there are some upcoming uh vr headsets that will actually make use of it but whatever the case that's that's what amd's going with dimensions the card is about 10 and a half inches long or if you prefer that in millimeters it's around 268 millimeters and then it's it's also around four and a quarter inches tall about 117 millimeters give or take and this is a dual slot design nothing particularly noteworthy there it takes up two slots like just about every other graphics card i've seen in the past decade i mean single slot graphics cards are such a rarity these days um i mean there are definitely larger graphics cards but anything above like the very bare minimum tends to be a dual slot design it also weighs 1 389 grams or about 3 pounds and 1 ounce so it's a chunky little card you know for a relatively compact design it weighs about as much as nvidia's rtx 3080 founders edition nowhere near as massive as 3090 of course just about nothing is that big every time i pick up the 30 90 founders edition i'm still like shocked at how heavy it is that about does it for the major features there are two peg eight pin connectors for power so theoretically through the pci express slot and the two power connectors it could draw up to 370 watts of power 375 watts you're not going to get anywhere near that in normal operation but maybe if you did liquid nitrogen or something in a custom cooler and you tweaked the power delivery to exceed the limits you could potentially overclock it a fair amount but that's not what i'll be doing let's uh let's go ahead and put this one away and move on to the big brother and literally it is the big brother the box is bigger it's a little more a little bit more uh robust you know it's kind of i don't know that is that much of a big deal but you gotta slit the side open here and then you flip up the flap and then that gets you access to the card after you move this remove this cover and here you go this is the radeon rx 6800 xt at first blush this is nearly identical looking to the 6800 the key difference being it's about two and a half slots thick and the red radeon light up logo on the 6800 has been replaced by well it looks white to the eye but i believe it's an rgb controllable radeon led logo on the side of the 6800 xt i should note that the 6800 xt also does support the rage mode i i don't want to call it overclocking because it's not really overclocking amd's new software has a rage mode that basically removes the power limits or not removes them but it increases the power limit by seven percent or something like that and that allows the card to boost higher and run at faster speeds uh otherwise you know same dimensions other than it's two and a half slots thick it does way more it weighs about 115 grams more so it's 1.5 kilograms plus 5 grams extra and in terms of you know those of us who stick with the old imperial system it's 3 pounds 5.1 ounces same port selection it's got two displayport 1.4 one hdmi 2.1 and a usb type-c so if you wanted to do quad monitors on this you would have to look at adapters and that's kind of a pain but i don't know you could probably anyone who's really interested in quad monitors i think you would probably want to look at a custom design that has the port selection you want that about does it for the overview of these cards the unboxing obviously we can't talk benchmarks or power or any of that other stuff today i can tell you the official specs the rx 6800 xt has a 300 watt tdp so 50 watts higher than the vanilla 6800 and it's also clocked a little bit higher and it has 72 compute units versus 60 compute units so you would expect it to you know all other things being similar it's going to use more power and that's why it's got the higher powered tdp and we'll be back on november 18th with the full review of these cards i'll also hop on the toms hardware live stream and discuss the cards and the review in more detail there we'll actually be able to show benchmarks at that time we will be back on november 18th and i will be on the toms hardware live stream and we'll talk about more of the nuances of this review besides your traditional performance we've also got ray tracing performance that we're going to look at and see how that stacks up to nvidia and yeah it's going to be exciting i've known you know art architecturally amd has taken a very different route than nvidia this round and they've basically thrown a ton of l3 cache at the problem of bandwidth and performance so that's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out you know 16 gigabytes of gddr6 memory running at a relatively tame 14 gigabits per second so on the 256 bit bus this is the same theoretical bandwidth as the previous gen rx 5700 5700 xt except this time amd has infinity cash and it says it can get up to more than double the effective bandwidth thanks to that infinity cache so that is going to be very interesting you know you've got nvidia has an 8 gigabyte 3070 and a 10 gigabyte 3080 and amd counters with 16 gigabyte gddr6 cards i don't know exactly how it's going to play out but it is looking to be one of the most interesting matchups between amd and nvidia of the past decade or more it's been a long time since amd has really had something that could compete with nvidia's best and that seems to be what amd is going after here i mean the the upcoming rx 6900 xt is priced at a thousand dollars and we haven't really seen that since amd's old dual gpu r9 295 x2 so this is a return to the extreme performance and high-end markets for amd and we'll see if they can compete in the meantime thanks for watching please like and subscribe share with your friends and up on the live stream and you can ask us questions and we'll be happy to take your questions and answer them as best as we're able come wednesday\n"