Triple cooling Powered Red Dragon !
When it comes to Radeon series of cards, there’s a lot to be chosen from, gamers and enthusiasts will always go to the price to performance value with great FPS balance on the system. Today we will look at the PowerColor AMD Radeon RX6800 XT Red Dragon 16GB, which is a higher end of the RX 6xxx series of cards, especially those who wanted a good 1440P or 4K gaming experience.
Specifications (Compared to RX 5700 XT)
| RX6800 XT Red Dragon | RX5700 XT | |
| PCI-E Interface | 4.0 | 4.0 |
| Compute Units | 72 | 40 |
| Memory size | 16GB | 8GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR 6 | GDDR 6 |
| Engine Clock | 2065MHz(Game) / up to 2310MHz(Boost) | 1605/1905Mhz |
| Memory Speed | 16GBPS | 14GBPS |
| Memory Interface | 256Bit | 256Bit |
| Ports | 1 X HDMI, 3X Displayport | 1 X HDMI, 3X Displayport |
| Power Connector | 2 x 8 Pin | 2 X 8 Pin |
Unboxing & Contents
The Card detail specifications and features
- 12+2 phase VRM
- Ray Tracing Support
- Protection Back Plate
Generally all RX 6800 XT cards are based on the BIG NAVI RDNA 2 architecture built on a 7nm structure, and the product is meant to replace the Polaris and 1st generation NAVI base cards in the Radeon lineup, which is the RX470, 480, 570, 580 and RX 5xxx series of cards. Another new highlight feature is the PCI-E 4.0 interface with Ray Tracing, which gives better transfer speeds, whether it is for gaming, editing, or advanced content creation & with Ray Tracing, it gives even better support on RT based titles such as games like Control or GodFall.
Test Setup
We will be using the below as a test setup for the Red Dragon RX 6800 XT 16GB and RX 5700 XT as comparison
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 9 5900X |
| Motherboard | Asrock Taichi X570 BIOS P4.00 |
| System Memory | ADATA XPG D41 3200MHz 8GB X 4 |
| Primary Drive | PNY NVME SSD 256GB |
| Secondary Drive | WD RED 3TB HDD |
| PSU | Thermaltake 650w PSU |
| Operating System | Windows 10 64bit Professional |
Benchmark Scores (With BAR Enabled)
Verdict & thoughts
With its retail price of RM4,299 , we can recommend this card for those who wanted a system with a Ryzen 7 to give a good performance in gaming or intensive work, especially when it comes to 1440P gaming. Esports titles like CS:GO, Rocket League, DOTA 2, Call Of Duty : Warzone, League of Legends will run perfectly fine and work well if you pair it up till 165hz monitor . Ray Tracing wise, bumping the settings to RT Medium or above should still hold over 75FPS over 1440P on most titles. It is also a good choice if you wish to buy and use it for editing on Photoshop, Illustrator, even 4K editing on Premiere Pro with 16GB of system RAM. Overall we are happy with the performance of this card especially on the synthetic benchmark side as it shows a good comparison improvements on scores, but those are just synthetic benchmarks. If you wish to buy this card for VR gameplay and applications, this card will perform very well on heavier title such as Half-Life Alyx.
Pros
- 16GB of VRAM
- 3 Cooling Fans !!!
- A capable 1440p/4K card on High/Very High settings on gaming
- A good card for higher quality VR gameplay
Cons
- Card weight is a little bit heavy and long, may not fix on certain PC case
- Price is still slightly on the higher side
Special thanks to AMD & Powercolor for loaning the review unit