The Reference Model that Didn't Overclock

We had previously worked with a reference model that didn't overclock and what I mean by that is if we applied higher clocks to it, it just went to where it was. It remained at the 232 low 2400s. This card is clearly going farther now, let's explain why that is versus something like NVIDIA.

NVIDIA's Founders Edition Cards

I love the fact that I get to compare AMD and NVIDIA, and actually point out something with the AMD cards that we've kind of lost on some of the NVIDIA stuff. The reason why this card is going farther than the reference card is the fact that NVIDIA built a custom PCB for the Founders Edition card. This time around, they had slightly beefier components such as chokes and capacitors, but the layout was identical to the reference design. However, with the custom PCB of the Founders Edition cards being a bit more aggressive in their design, it's clear that NVIDIA has been able to squeeze out more performance from this card.

AMD Binning vs. NVIDIA

On the other hand, AMD bins their GPUs for the reference design, whereas NVIDIA does not. Instead, they use a custom PCB design for the Founders Edition cards, which allows them to optimize the performance of each individual chip. This means that NVIDIA's custom PCB is able to take full advantage of the performance of each and every GPU core, resulting in higher clock speeds and better overall performance.

AIB Cards on NVIDIA's Side

We haven't seen AIB cards on NVIDIA's side really clock any higher than the Founders Edition cards, which is kind of disappointing. It appears that all these high-end models are essentially just tweaked versions of each other, with little to no difference in terms of overclocking potential.

A Break in the Competition

The release of the Radeon VII has been a major breakthrough for AMD, and it's clear that this card is capable of producing higher frame rates than even some NVIDIA cards. This is exciting news for those looking to upgrade their gaming rigs, as it means that there are now options available that can offer better performance at lower prices.

The Importance of Competition

This competition between AMD and NVIDIA has always been a key aspect of the graphics card market. It's what drives innovation and pushes both companies to produce better products. However, with the limited availability of high-end cards, it's become increasingly difficult for enthusiasts to get their hands on these powerful GPUs.

Spot Checking Performance

As we move forward, it's clear that we'll need to start doing our own spot checking to see exactly how these high-end cards perform versus each other and against the reference card. This will be crucial in determining which card is truly the best performer, and whether or not they're worth the extra cost.

The Benefits of Custom Cooling

One feature that's particularly exciting about the Radeon VII is its custom cooling system. The dual-ball bearing fans are a major improvement over traditional cooling systems, allowing for better airflow and reduced noise levels. Additionally, the card's high-quality PCB design provides a solid foundation for overclocking and long-term reliability.

A Reviewer's Guide

In our review guide, we've been saying that we expect hotter temperatures than we're actually getting here. This is likely due to the fact that we're in an air-conditioned warehouse with an open chassis in a computer case, which controls the thermals in this environment. Nevertheless, it's still exciting to see this level of performance from the Radeon VII.

Getting Your Hands on High-End Cards

Unfortunately, getting your hands on these high-end cards is proving to be quite difficult. With the limited availability of NVIDIA and AMD high-end models, it's becoming increasingly hard for enthusiasts to snag a card that meets their needs. This is especially true for those looking to buy a top-tier GPU without breaking the bank.

Conclusion

As we move forward, it's clear that this competition between AMD and NVIDIA is going to be intense. With both companies pushing out high-end models that offer better performance than ever before, it's going to be tough for enthusiasts to decide which card is truly the best performer. We'll need to keep a close eye on these developments and do our own spot checking to determine which card reigns supreme.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthere ow coming for you steve fantex glacier g30 gp water block and back plates are now available for the asus rtx 3080 and 3090 strix gpus available separately or as a bundle the g30 water blocks unlock your rtx 30 series strix card's full potential while keeping the temps low and the clocks high to see the g30 gpu water blocks and the full lineup of water cooling gear from fantex click the sponsored link in the description below but that's not actually what we're going to be doing today nope today we're going to actually be kicking things off by taking a look at our very first xfx 6800 xt yes i know i know they're not available but just imagine you're online you just happen to go to newegg and then boom there's one in stock oh should i get it wait i don't know i didn't see any reviews about it we asked them not to do reviews of things you can't buy that was a stupid thing to do so we're gonna review it that way you guys at least know if you see it in stock whether or not it's worth it to get it next year this is the xfx mercury is there a math reference in there phil 319 is it 319 celsius nick what's the temperature of liquid mercury siri what's the temperature of liquid so we haven't reviewed an xfx product in quite a while actually i think it was like back when like the 500 series was a thing so these are the cards that everyone is kind of holding out for and not specifically this card from xfx but these are the cards that the audience is holding out for is the saving grace of inventory because amd when they launch only launched their reference boards and obviously once you get these cards out onto the market they are going to help add some more inventory to the world but whether or not that's enough who knows my god this is long holy cow um this is one of our rtx 3090s and this is a big boy by the way whoa i mean the pcb's not that big but the cooler is the pcb is barely slower slower slower slower length than the 30 90. so anyway i just there's our first comparison in terms of size how big that is hold on how big is this let's give a reference yep it's big so it's about 37 of those right 37 of my reference units by the way if you guys liked what you saw on my back you can buy it yourself jasons.com dude that's chunky it's like chunky not chunky chunky there's a difference there and i do need to be careful with this because there's i mean let's let's face it any gpu is hard to get your hands on right now right okay so let's do the peel it's got a matte black front right here it's kind of textured uh not rubberized it looks sort of rubberized but it's not so they got a bit of a little bit of a blow through sort of design like we saw with some of the nvidia cards here where you've got the overhang of the cooler air comes through here which is supposed to add a little bit more efficiency in these coolers and that they don't have to make these crazy 90 degree turns to get out this is a dual bios card as we can see right here so we're gonna have a higher power limit probably and how in a different fan curve we can check the difference in the bios you do have your back plate there are thermal pads touching the heat plate or the back plate it looks like back side of vrm back side of the core and more power delivery right there so it does obviously have um functional back plate if you will because you still you don't want a back plate just to sit here that's solid like this with no cut out for the core right you see there's no hole right here you don't want to just sit there insulating the heat you want to at least allow that heat to transfer to this plate so it's doing something it's not even going to be adding any real rigidity because one of the things that xfx has done right here that i'm a huge fan of you can't really see it i don't want to tear it down but what i'll just tell you guys is that there is a l bracket coming up from the heatsink and the pcb attaching it to here so you have triangulation right here of the cooler so although it is hollow right here there is a piece that is making it rigid that's what causes it to sag believe it or not not the length of the card or the weight of the card it's the fact that if this is not connected to this that's where you get your flex weird flex but okay one of the things that i thought was uh weird about the the cards that we're seeing now is the exclusion of certain connectors so just like on the reference card we've got one hdmi two display ports and a usbc i said in my initial review i wasn't sure how many people were gonna be upset about the removal of the third display port because of the fact that if you're running a three monitor setup and you're running displayport you're now going to need to either have a displayport hdmi adapter crossover cable to put your third display there or you're going to need a usbc to display port breakout cable as well so you need something else doesn't mean you can't do it just means you need something else so we're gonna do right now we're gonna get this thing fired up we'll get it on the test bench get the driver installed we're gonna test this versus the reference card to see how it compares because one of the things that we're really curious about is how the custom boards and the custom coolers are going to fare because i have a feeling that these cards in terms of core clocks have been pushed to their absolute max at the 250 watt plus 15 that you can get if you move that slider and the reason why they did that is because amd is showing that their core architecture is as fast as a 3080 or up to at a significantly more efficient way of doing it because remember the 3080 card is a 320 watt total board power where this is a 250 watt although we were seeing with the reference card it was doing more like 260 to 270 with like rage mode or something enabled but what we're also finding is that the core clock is so dynamic i'm really curious as to what these board partners are doing to enable higher core clocks or or i should say more consistent higher core clocks to get higher scores and higher fps and all of that if you want any idea of how long this is this is a maximus 12 asus motherboard look how far that hangs off the end it's almost as long as the case oh my goodness the nice thing about this too versus like the 3080s the custom 3080s and 3090s that we're seeing and yes you're gonna hear me reference nvidia a lot in an amd video like this because this is what this is the dilemma people have this is the first time in the high end competition area in terms of the market that we are seeing amd have a viable option so that's the thing you're gonna start seeing people have to contend with in their own brains is whether or not they want nvidia or amd so having two eight pin power except not three eight pin power like we're seeing so many of the really high end custom cards for nvidia come out with uh is kind of nice i think that way you don't have to worry about whether or not your power supply can handle it the lighting on top is tasteful see it ah here's the lighting it's like a nice little like thin hyper white with the red xfx or rx logo in there that's tasteful i like it it's not like over the edge on lighting so as you guys can see it's at zero db mode um we've got two larger fans and a smaller fan in the middle this is going to really bug fill he's very like it has to be symmetrical and this asymmetrical stuff he doesn't like this so but it's not as bad as some of the other cards we've seen it's really not so we go into our radeon software here let's see what's available to us this is the bios that it was on by default um so i don't know if that's gonna give us any extra power limit so it's automatic and default out of the box we got some presets here like rage mode it's okay still 15 power limit so so far this is not seeming like it's really any different from our reference card here in terms of temperatures though for sure so let's go ahead and fire up my good old trusty heaven benchmark we don't run our benchmarks on a cold card because then what happens is as time goes on the scores will drop until uh they've reached equilibrium with the temperature so remember lower temperature equals better score and if this if the temperatures are low when you first start a benchmark like we just booted the system it's been sitting off all night you run a benchmark you'll get your highest score and then from there it will go lower so we always preheat the cards to get them into a more realistic scenario the fact that they've been running yes i know it's in an open air test bench and most people say that's not a realistic scenario but at least this way the only thing limiting the card's performance in terms of temperature is the card itself not a chassis giving inadequate airflow to it right off the bat i can tell you though we're looking pretty good here we got 44c on an edge temp and our junction temperature which is the hottest on the die is 62c look at that clock speed consistency yeah look at this like our reference card did not stay like this even when it was cold it did not stay locked is anyone else out there surprised by the fact that the clock king belongs to amd right now imagine if all graphics cards whether it be nvidia or whatnot could go to 2400 megahertz that's insane what what's surprising here and phil can comment on this because phil ran a vega 64 for a long time the edge temp which is current temperature and junction temperature which is the hot temp are normally like as much as like 30 c apart but look how close together those are like vega 64. oh yeah yeah you'd see those be like almost 40c apart at times but this cooler is clearly doing an amazing job at keeping them close so i'm going to do automatic overclock 2514 is where i tried to go in the reference card that's lower you know what though i'll take 24.74 if it's consistent because it never hit 2515 or 2514 on the other card 70c on our edge temp and our fans are still not even really turning one complaint that i have and i said this on our on our reference video i hate the fact that you cannot adjust the fan temperature in a preset i wish it would do auto overclock but then give me a second area to control the fans separate from the presets because if i want to let it auto overclock and i want to just go 100 fan speed let me do that this is the kind of stuff that amd needs to incorporate into their drivers so remember the reference card it was just like that was the core speed it was just like what is it doing so are we pulling more than 250 no 230 how this can't be it's like voodoo how could it be doing this frequency at 255 watts and 238 for a second there 25 90 26 41 what the hell is is this reading right this can't be reading right no no no no okay it crashed something happened that's fine okay i just like maxed out that slider to see what the hell it tried to go to 2800 26 89. oh man i don't want this to be a bug this isn't a driver bug is it it's really doing this right 27.07 we'll just do time spy because port royal is rt and this is i want to see how the rasterization performance does oh my god hey nick remember that graphics card just gave you so amd uses this phrase a lot of smooth i don't know if it's just my my mind playing with me but it feels smoother when i look at it on here this is 144hz panel is turn on 244 hertz but it just feels smoother that and smoothness is frame pacing frame pacing is the most important thing of perceived smoothness if you've got frame pacing that's all over the place and jumping all around that those changes in frame pacing is what makes you feel like something is stuttery or laggy that's why locked 30 fps at the exact same frame pace or the exact same milliseconds for frame rendering is going to be a much better experience than a game that's jumping all around 30 fps where it's it's like it's averaging 30fps but then you're getting like 32 millisecond frame and a 12 millisecond frame and then 90 millisecond frame i'm not advocating 38 fps gaming you guys know me i would never do that but that's that's what makes smoothness a thing you stupid stun of it okay so i need to pull back we know the overclock's applying now whether or not the frequency being reported is accurate is one thing so i'm going to reduce this to like 2720 and i'm gonna go down to like six 26 20. so we'll keep it 100 megahertz separated right there you guys heard what i had to say let's see where the numbers land and then we'll test the game steve i get it now somebody the the biggest so because it's forcing the separation of 100 megahertz i can't only go 2700 i gotta lower the other one to 2600. okay so what's our score 18570 wait our previous score was a 17675 so this card is like a thousand points higher than the reference card and our 3080 fe got a 18 125. we didn't overclock those cards though this is overclocked so we just got 181 average fps in shadow of the tomb raider uh 6800 xt on the 10 900k got 177 fps i don't think people realize on a cpu bound title like shadow of the tomb raiders well it's fairly cpu bound gaining 4 fps is significant but that means the overclock on here is truly doing something so to compare now we're going to go back to preset rage mode and no surprise the exact same number we got with our 6800 xt reference model but there's a rage bios mode so things are about to get real real ragey so i'm gonna go ahead and test this right now though compared to the out of the box settings that you just saw so the other bios that we were doing our overclocking with was actually the balanced bios rage mode or the hardware rage bios automatically sets certain perimeters it makes the clocks go higher it makes the fans go faster and so it's not going to change probably where we were with our overclocks that's probably because we did that manually and i'm assuming that's going to go farther than this is going to go but so we want to compare this to these stock numbers that we just showed you the 177 frames per second in shadow of the tomb raider okay so if we go to manual mode power tuning you can see it's still the same 15 power limit that doesn't but what i started to say before i was so rudely interrupted by our ln2 tank is that that doesn't mean that the 100 isn't a higher starting point but anyway like i said i'm leaving this out of the box as it was and i'm not going to manually overclock i am going to just leave it in the hardware rage mode and we're going to go ahead and run shadow of the tomb raider and see if we're any higher than 177 fps i think it should be yeah so you can see the rage mode bios out of the box didn't really have any change but it doesn't mean you should still try your overclocking with that bios one thing i do want to point out though is the reference model that we had did not overclock and what i mean by that is if i applied higher clocks to it it just went to where it was it went to the 232 low 2400s this card is clearly going farther now let's explain why that is versus something like nvidia and i love the fact that i get to compare amd and nvidia and actually point out something with the amd cards that we've kind of lost on some of the nvidia stuff the reason why this card is going farther than the reference card is the fact that nvidia this time around built a custom pcb for the founders edition card where they were always based on the reference design but they had slightly beefier like chokes and capacitors and stuff like that but the layout was identical to the reference however this time around with founders edition cards being a custom pcb they're also bend they're also bending that they're the best performing chips just like you've got right here so instead of amd binning them for the reference design they are truly a reference design with cores as they come down the assembly line are plucked and picked or picked and plucked on the pcbs as they go not like sorted by top ten percent performers top one percent performers etcetera however when brands like xfx get their bin their their gpu dirty add much but when brands like xfx get their chips in and their allocations they do binning so that the top performers go into the top tier models and then the little bit less performers go in the lesser tier models so on and so forth we haven't seen aib cards on nvidia's side really clock any higher be any different than founders edition cards which is kind of disappointing in that they all just sort of land in the same spot overclocked or not but actually seeing an overclock apply to an amd card like this and get us a thousand extra points in time spy and what four extra fps in 1080p slightly cpu bound slash bottleneck title like shadow of the tomb raider is exciting to see it means that there's probably a reason to buy a higher end model from a certain manufacturer where for the longest time speaking of you know just nvidia cards because there was nothing in the high end to compare like this i always just said get whatever card you like because they all perform exactly the same so that means that with the brands that we have sending us cards now i might have to go through and actually do the spot checking like this to see exactly how they're performing versus the the reference card the reference card should usually be the worst performer unless you're talking about just a pure minimalist card that you would find on some of the lower bin cards which is gonna be like here's msrp basic cooler doesn't really overclock very well that gives you money but unfortunately i don't have the price of this card as of making this video i've reached out for the price we'll see what it ends up being but at least with the 6800 xt uh merc or mercury 319 you do get extra stuff for that money now it's not just the bin gpu that can boost tire the dual bios here which has a hardware rage mode which gives you additional limits versus the balance mode uh you get the additional lighting which i like the fact that it's not set to rgb out of the box you get the dual ball bearing fans you get the higher quality pcb design you get the higher quality vrm the higher quality chokes and capacitors and all of those things are going to not only give you a better experience when it comes to overclocking if you care or faster speeds right out of the box it's going to give you longer lifespan and longevity of the card it's funny because we have a reviewer's guide and it basically is expecting hotter temperatures than we're actually getting right here that's probably because of the fact that we are in an air-conditioned warehouse in an open chassis in a computer case the thermals are going to be more controlled by the chassis itself which is why we do it this way so it doesn't impact in the card but it's really exciting to see this competition take place and it's even more disappointing that it's so hard to get your hands on them because now is when so many people might be willing to actually buy a team red graphics card or an amd graphics card without uh the ability to go and buy it really kind of sucks because we need that competition but then again no one can buy nvidia card either so what's it matter anyway thanks for watching guys and huge thanks xfx sfx i always want to say sfx for like special effects xfx uh for sending us this graphics card to take a look at um you'll probably see it again in the future i feel like this is going to be our aib like benchmark now like who can beat the xfxthere ow coming for you steve fantex glacier g30 gp water block and back plates are now available for the asus rtx 3080 and 3090 strix gpus available separately or as a bundle the g30 water blocks unlock your rtx 30 series strix card's full potential while keeping the temps low and the clocks high to see the g30 gpu water blocks and the full lineup of water cooling gear from fantex click the sponsored link in the description below but that's not actually what we're going to be doing today nope today we're going to actually be kicking things off by taking a look at our very first xfx 6800 xt yes i know i know they're not available but just imagine you're online you just happen to go to newegg and then boom there's one in stock oh should i get it wait i don't know i didn't see any reviews about it we asked them not to do reviews of things you can't buy that was a stupid thing to do so we're gonna review it that way you guys at least know if you see it in stock whether or not it's worth it to get it next year this is the xfx mercury is there a math reference in there phil 319 is it 319 celsius nick what's the temperature of liquid mercury siri what's the temperature of liquid so we haven't reviewed an xfx product in quite a while actually i think it was like back when like the 500 series was a thing so these are the cards that everyone is kind of holding out for and not specifically this card from xfx but these are the cards that the audience is holding out for is the saving grace of inventory because amd when they launch only launched their reference boards and obviously once you get these cards out onto the market they are going to help add some more inventory to the world but whether or not that's enough who knows my god this is long holy cow um this is one of our rtx 3090s and this is a big boy by the way whoa i mean the pcb's not that big but the cooler is the pcb is barely slower slower slower slower length than the 30 90. so anyway i just there's our first comparison in terms of size how big that is hold on how big is this let's give a reference yep it's big so it's about 37 of those right 37 of my reference units by the way if you guys liked what you saw on my back you can buy it yourself jasons.com dude that's chunky it's like chunky not chunky chunky there's a difference there and i do need to be careful with this because there's i mean let's let's face it any gpu is hard to get your hands on right now right okay so let's do the peel it's got a matte black front right here it's kind of textured uh not rubberized it looks sort of rubberized but it's not so they got a bit of a little bit of a blow through sort of design like we saw with some of the nvidia cards here where you've got the overhang of the cooler air comes through here which is supposed to add a little bit more efficiency in these coolers and that they don't have to make these crazy 90 degree turns to get out this is a dual bios card as we can see right here so we're gonna have a higher power limit probably and how in a different fan curve we can check the difference in the bios you do have your back plate there are thermal pads touching the heat plate or the back plate it looks like back side of vrm back side of the core and more power delivery right there so it does obviously have um functional back plate if you will because you still you don't want a back plate just to sit here that's solid like this with no cut out for the core right you see there's no hole right here you don't want to just sit there insulating the heat you want to at least allow that heat to transfer to this plate so it's doing something it's not even going to be adding any real rigidity because one of the things that xfx has done right here that i'm a huge fan of you can't really see it i don't want to tear it down but what i'll just tell you guys is that there is a l bracket coming up from the heatsink and the pcb attaching it to here so you have triangulation right here of the cooler so although it is hollow right here there is a piece that is making it rigid that's what causes it to sag believe it or not not the length of the card or the weight of the card it's the fact that if this is not connected to this that's where you get your flex weird flex but okay one of the things that i thought was uh weird about the the cards that we're seeing now is the exclusion of certain connectors so just like on the reference card we've got one hdmi two display ports and a usbc i said in my initial review i wasn't sure how many people were gonna be upset about the removal of the third display port because of the fact that if you're running a three monitor setup and you're running displayport you're now going to need to either have a displayport hdmi adapter crossover cable to put your third display there or you're going to need a usbc to display port breakout cable as well so you need something else doesn't mean you can't do it just means you need something else so we're gonna do right now we're gonna get this thing fired up we'll get it on the test bench get the driver installed we're gonna test this versus the reference card to see how it compares because one of the things that we're really curious about is how the custom boards and the custom coolers are going to fare because i have a feeling that these cards in terms of core clocks have been pushed to their absolute max at the 250 watt plus 15 that you can get if you move that slider and the reason why they did that is because amd is showing that their core architecture is as fast as a 3080 or up to at a significantly more efficient way of doing it because remember the 3080 card is a 320 watt total board power where this is a 250 watt although we were seeing with the reference card it was doing more like 260 to 270 with like rage mode or something enabled but what we're also finding is that the core clock is so dynamic i'm really curious as to what these board partners are doing to enable higher core clocks or or i should say more consistent higher core clocks to get higher scores and higher fps and all of that if you want any idea of how long this is this is a maximus 12 asus motherboard look how far that hangs off the end it's almost as long as the case oh my goodness the nice thing about this too versus like the 3080s the custom 3080s and 3090s that we're seeing and yes you're gonna hear me reference nvidia a lot in an amd video like this because this is what this is the dilemma people have this is the first time in the high end competition area in terms of the market that we are seeing amd have a viable option so that's the thing you're gonna start seeing people have to contend with in their own brains is whether or not they want nvidia or amd so having two eight pin power except not three eight pin power like we're seeing so many of the really high end custom cards for nvidia come out with uh is kind of nice i think that way you don't have to worry about whether or not your power supply can handle it the lighting on top is tasteful see it ah here's the lighting it's like a nice little like thin hyper white with the red xfx or rx logo in there that's tasteful i like it it's not like over the edge on lighting so as you guys can see it's at zero db mode um we've got two larger fans and a smaller fan in the middle this is going to really bug fill he's very like it has to be symmetrical and this asymmetrical stuff he doesn't like this so but it's not as bad as some of the other cards we've seen it's really not so we go into our radeon software here let's see what's available to us this is the bios that it was on by default um so i don't know if that's gonna give us any extra power limit so it's automatic and default out of the box we got some presets here like rage mode it's okay still 15 power limit so so far this is not seeming like it's really any different from our reference card here in terms of temperatures though for sure so let's go ahead and fire up my good old trusty heaven benchmark we don't run our benchmarks on a cold card because then what happens is as time goes on the scores will drop until uh they've reached equilibrium with the temperature so remember lower temperature equals better score and if this if the temperatures are low when you first start a benchmark like we just booted the system it's been sitting off all night you run a benchmark you'll get your highest score and then from there it will go lower so we always preheat the cards to get them into a more realistic scenario the fact that they've been running yes i know it's in an open air test bench and most people say that's not a realistic scenario but at least this way the only thing limiting the card's performance in terms of temperature is the card itself not a chassis giving inadequate airflow to it right off the bat i can tell you though we're looking pretty good here we got 44c on an edge temp and our junction temperature which is the hottest on the die is 62c look at that clock speed consistency yeah look at this like our reference card did not stay like this even when it was cold it did not stay locked is anyone else out there surprised by the fact that the clock king belongs to amd right now imagine if all graphics cards whether it be nvidia or whatnot could go to 2400 megahertz that's insane what what's surprising here and phil can comment on this because phil ran a vega 64 for a long time the edge temp which is current temperature and junction temperature which is the hot temp are normally like as much as like 30 c apart but look how close together those are like vega 64. oh yeah yeah you'd see those be like almost 40c apart at times but this cooler is clearly doing an amazing job at keeping them close so i'm going to do automatic overclock 2514 is where i tried to go in the reference card that's lower you know what though i'll take 24.74 if it's consistent because it never hit 2515 or 2514 on the other card 70c on our edge temp and our fans are still not even really turning one complaint that i have and i said this on our on our reference video i hate the fact that you cannot adjust the fan temperature in a preset i wish it would do auto overclock but then give me a second area to control the fans separate from the presets because if i want to let it auto overclock and i want to just go 100 fan speed let me do that this is the kind of stuff that amd needs to incorporate into their drivers so remember the reference card it was just like that was the core speed it was just like what is it doing so are we pulling more than 250 no 230 how this can't be it's like voodoo how could it be doing this frequency at 255 watts and 238 for a second there 25 90 26 41 what the hell is is this reading right this can't be reading right no no no no okay it crashed something happened that's fine okay i just like maxed out that slider to see what the hell it tried to go to 2800 26 89. oh man i don't want this to be a bug this isn't a driver bug is it it's really doing this right 27.07 we'll just do time spy because port royal is rt and this is i want to see how the rasterization performance does oh my god hey nick remember that graphics card just gave you so amd uses this phrase a lot of smooth i don't know if it's just my my mind playing with me but it feels smoother when i look at it on here this is 144hz panel is turn on 244 hertz but it just feels smoother that and smoothness is frame pacing frame pacing is the most important thing of perceived smoothness if you've got frame pacing that's all over the place and jumping all around that those changes in frame pacing is what makes you feel like something is stuttery or laggy that's why locked 30 fps at the exact same frame pace or the exact same milliseconds for frame rendering is going to be a much better experience than a game that's jumping all around 30 fps where it's it's like it's averaging 30fps but then you're getting like 32 millisecond frame and a 12 millisecond frame and then 90 millisecond frame i'm not advocating 38 fps gaming you guys know me i would never do that but that's that's what makes smoothness a thing you stupid stun of it okay so i need to pull back we know the overclock's applying now whether or not the frequency being reported is accurate is one thing so i'm going to reduce this to like 2720 and i'm gonna go down to like six 26 20. so we'll keep it 100 megahertz separated right there you guys heard what i had to say let's see where the numbers land and then we'll test the game steve i get it now somebody the the biggest so because it's forcing the separation of 100 megahertz i can't only go 2700 i gotta lower the other one to 2600. okay so what's our score 18570 wait our previous score was a 17675 so this card is like a thousand points higher than the reference card and our 3080 fe got a 18 125. we didn't overclock those cards though this is overclocked so we just got 181 average fps in shadow of the tomb raider uh 6800 xt on the 10 900k got 177 fps i don't think people realize on a cpu bound title like shadow of the tomb raiders well it's fairly cpu bound gaining 4 fps is significant but that means the overclock on here is truly doing something so to compare now we're going to go back to preset rage mode and no surprise the exact same number we got with our 6800 xt reference model but there's a rage bios mode so things are about to get real real ragey so i'm gonna go ahead and test this right now though compared to the out of the box settings that you just saw so the other bios that we were doing our overclocking with was actually the balanced bios rage mode or the hardware rage bios automatically sets certain perimeters it makes the clocks go higher it makes the fans go faster and so it's not going to change probably where we were with our overclocks that's probably because we did that manually and i'm assuming that's going to go farther than this is going to go but so we want to compare this to these stock numbers that we just showed you the 177 frames per second in shadow of the tomb raider okay so if we go to manual mode power tuning you can see it's still the same 15 power limit that doesn't but what i started to say before i was so rudely interrupted by our ln2 tank is that that doesn't mean that the 100 isn't a higher starting point but anyway like i said i'm leaving this out of the box as it was and i'm not going to manually overclock i am going to just leave it in the hardware rage mode and we're going to go ahead and run shadow of the tomb raider and see if we're any higher than 177 fps i think it should be yeah so you can see the rage mode bios out of the box didn't really have any change but it doesn't mean you should still try your overclocking with that bios one thing i do want to point out though is the reference model that we had did not overclock and what i mean by that is if i applied higher clocks to it it just went to where it was it went to the 232 low 2400s this card is clearly going farther now let's explain why that is versus something like nvidia and i love the fact that i get to compare amd and nvidia and actually point out something with the amd cards that we've kind of lost on some of the nvidia stuff the reason why this card is going farther than the reference card is the fact that nvidia this time around built a custom pcb for the founders edition card where they were always based on the reference design but they had slightly beefier like chokes and capacitors and stuff like that but the layout was identical to the reference however this time around with founders edition cards being a custom pcb they're also bend they're also bending that they're the best performing chips just like you've got right here so instead of amd binning them for the reference design they are truly a reference design with cores as they come down the assembly line are plucked and picked or picked and plucked on the pcbs as they go not like sorted by top ten percent performers top one percent performers etcetera however when brands like xfx get their bin their their gpu dirty add much but when brands like xfx get their chips in and their allocations they do binning so that the top performers go into the top tier models and then the little bit less performers go in the lesser tier models so on and so forth we haven't seen aib cards on nvidia's side really clock any higher be any different than founders edition cards which is kind of disappointing in that they all just sort of land in the same spot overclocked or not but actually seeing an overclock apply to an amd card like this and get us a thousand extra points in time spy and what four extra fps in 1080p slightly cpu bound slash bottleneck title like shadow of the tomb raider is exciting to see it means that there's probably a reason to buy a higher end model from a certain manufacturer where for the longest time speaking of you know just nvidia cards because there was nothing in the high end to compare like this i always just said get whatever card you like because they all perform exactly the same so that means that with the brands that we have sending us cards now i might have to go through and actually do the spot checking like this to see exactly how they're performing versus the the reference card the reference card should usually be the worst performer unless you're talking about just a pure minimalist card that you would find on some of the lower bin cards which is gonna be like here's msrp basic cooler doesn't really overclock very well that gives you money but unfortunately i don't have the price of this card as of making this video i've reached out for the price we'll see what it ends up being but at least with the 6800 xt uh merc or mercury 319 you do get extra stuff for that money now it's not just the bin gpu that can boost tire the dual bios here which has a hardware rage mode which gives you additional limits versus the balance mode uh you get the additional lighting which i like the fact that it's not set to rgb out of the box you get the dual ball bearing fans you get the higher quality pcb design you get the higher quality vrm the higher quality chokes and capacitors and all of those things are going to not only give you a better experience when it comes to overclocking if you care or faster speeds right out of the box it's going to give you longer lifespan and longevity of the card it's funny because we have a reviewer's guide and it basically is expecting hotter temperatures than we're actually getting right here that's probably because of the fact that we are in an air-conditioned warehouse in an open chassis in a computer case the thermals are going to be more controlled by the chassis itself which is why we do it this way so it doesn't impact in the card but it's really exciting to see this competition take place and it's even more disappointing that it's so hard to get your hands on them because now is when so many people might be willing to actually buy a team red graphics card or an amd graphics card without uh the ability to go and buy it really kind of sucks because we need that competition but then again no one can buy nvidia card either so what's it matter anyway thanks for watching guys and huge thanks xfx sfx i always want to say sfx for like special effects xfx uh for sending us this graphics card to take a look at um you'll probably see it again in the future i feel like this is going to be our aib like benchmark now like who can beat the xfx\n"