So, here it is, the unobtainium, RX 6800 XT in particular, I’ll skip over what this graphics card brings in architecture-wise, it being 7 nm Navi 21 GPU and so on because that was talked about multiple times, after all, it has been few months since it launched, and there’s a lot to cover beside it, so let’s take a closer look at this particular model from Sapphire – the RX 6800 XT Nitro Plus.
The elephant in the room is of course the fact that this is one huge graphics card, a triple-fan, two and a half, actually 2,7 slot behemoth, that weighs in at around 1,2 kilograms and is just a bit above the 300 mm in length. Despite this sheer size, It actually doesn’t flex that much, if it all, so the structural rigidity is on point here. I do like its black and silver looks, it’s pretty true to Sapphire’s design language.
The back of it looks like something that came from a science fiction movie, as an electrical panel on a spaceship, with these straight lines, cutouts, and design details. The back overhangs a bit and here they went with an airier-looking solution, you can actually see how a part of the heatsink goes past the PCB of the card.
RX 6800 XT Nitro+ – Beast with a pedigree
It also pretty wide, so have that mind in relation to the chassis you plan to put it in, and since we back here, you can see three DisplayPorts 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1, while there’s no USB Type-C here, although they can be found on the reference models. Speaking of connectors, you will find two 8-pin PCI-express power connections for hooking up the GPU to the power supply, while I saw it pulling anywhere from 270-300W. As for other non-standard bits and bobs, there’s a switch with three-position, two of them are for different BIOS, OC profile, which I’m using throughout my whole use of this card, and quiet profile, while the third option being a software control mode where you manage BIOS via sapphire Trixx utility in Window 10. Lastly, it also carries an ARGB header, so you can sync it up with the cards RGB lighting, and speaking of it, they did a pretty good job with this long side stripe and a couple details and logo being lit up, turned up being really uniform looking and not that much in your face.
Taking a closer look to check out what is hidden below that outer metal/plastic shroud and two 100 mm fans and middle, opposite rotating 90 mm fans, I was greeted by a big aluminum heatsink separated into three compartments and interconnect with a total of six nickel-copper heat pipes. These are all meant for GPU cooling, where the middle compartment carries the completely copper contact plate, while for the 16-phase power design and memory chips we have a separate piece of the aluminum heatsink with three smaller heatsinks on it. Strangely enough, there is no thermal pads on the backplate itself for transferring some heat onto the components behind.
Since we are already talking about cooling, checking out the temperatures, when everything is set to auto, on an open testbed the GPU wouldn’t pass 70°C. I was planning to do noise normalized testing at 40 dB, but it turns out that under load, at least on the open testbed, It was hitting exactly 40 dB, so I didn’t have to do that. BTW. I’m doing that type of noise normalized 40 dB test setup so you can go back and forward between future and former reviews. And here is how that sounds.
Performance at 4K with RX 6800 XT Nitro
Checking out the performance, with a 4608 shader count and 16 GB of GDDR6 video memory on a 256-bit wide memory bus, this card is a true beast. Although we are all pretty much familiar with the RX 6800 XT series general performance, as it has been a while since it launched, I had to convince myself of it, as this the first RX 6800 XT graphic card that found its way to my testbed. Ever. And due to the whole situation, I do not think I will get another that soon, if at all.
Anyhow, as you can see here for yourself, 4K is no feet for this GPU, while you can push a more than decent amount of frames out in a way it makes everything playable in relation to the high-refresh rate monitors, especially in terms of lower resolutions like 1440p. I don’t think you need my input in terms of the 1080p resolution, how that would like, there’s really no point in testing it out with this GPU, that’s pretty much clear based on these results. Obviously, the raytracing performance is lacking, but that’s not something that I would be too stressed about it at all, it’s not worthy of the performance hit in general, even with the GeForce RTX graphics cards.
The overall performance is a bit up compared to a reference model as this one is factory overclocked, and bumping up the memory and GPU clocks even more with some manual overclocking will bring in around 3-5% of additional performance gain at 1440p, which is, yeah, all right, nothing mind-blowing, it’s how it has been for the last couple of generations, both with the red and green team – average.
Great buy if you could get one
As for the Price? What price? For this? Availability? What availability? Yeah, you know what I mean, and I hope that you, a future viewer who is watching this video 6, 12-months from now, will have a much better situation than what we’re in at this moment.
I ended up really liking this particular RX 6800 XT aftermarket model from Sapphire, and although I don’t have any comparison points in relation to other aftermarket models out there based on this same GPU, not even with AMD’s reference model, I do feel like somebody did a good job on it. It shows in multiple areas, plus their Nitro series tends to hit even more right notes from generation to generation.
That’s it for this time, thanks for checking out this Sapphire RX 6800 XT Nitro+ review, if you have any questions feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
