8Packs AMD 6800XT overview... and abit of overclocking ;-)

8 Pack

8 Pack

8 Pack

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I was very lucky to recieve a sample AMD Redeon 6800Xt directly from AMD to evaluate. I have for awhile now offered Threadripper as the default option in my Supernova rig and as an option in my Polaris as these CPUs are by far the best brute force multi thread units available right now. I have also offered Threadripper and Ryzen upgrade bundles aimed at both brute force and gaming.

After testing Ryzen 9 59xx X cpus I decided this new King of gaming needed its own 8Pack system and with the new AMD gpu coming what better time to pull all the full AMD kit out of the locker room...Providing the GPU was good enough to be in an 8Pack system ofcourse... and that was the big question I wanted to answer with this testing.

My first impressions of the card once unpacked was that the cooler was very substancial and certainly more an AIB offfering than an AMD reference design. I was hoping for good enough cooling without mounting a waterblock (yet) which allowed for initial evaluation of the performance.

My test rig for all this benching / gaming was:
5950X OC to all cores 4.7 or PBO boost
ROG Crosshair Impact X570 MB
16gb 8Pack RAM running 3800mhz C16
Windows 10 64 with latest prerelease AMD drivers.

Here are a couple of pics of the test rig.





I did not do much stock clock testing as thats not really my bag, I ofcourse did run stock though just to check the card was running as expected and had arrived without any damage. The first thing I noticed was the cooler was indeed very solid and quiet. It kept the loaded temps well in check so hoped this would give some solid overclocking headroom.

I tried all tests with and without AMD Smart Cache enabled and saw an increase of between 1%and 6% on the overall score / FPS with it enabled..So again I want the highest scoress so I run with... For me Rage Mode / AUTO OC (probably because of the early nature of the driver) was offering me very little in extra performance. With this in mind I wanted to maximise the card through manual OC.

The settings I used for the results I gained where all gaming stable. I maxed out the Power limit ran 105% on memory with 101% minimum clock and 111% maximum clock frequency on the core. This resulted in a boost peak of around 2..6ghz!! a raw clock figure only ever possible with sub ambient cooling on any previous series flagship card by any vendor. All these tests where also done with a stock fan profile very much repeatable by the avaerage gamer.

Below are screens from some of my resukts which I will comment on next:

3D mark Firestrike


3D mark Firstrike Xtreme


3D mark Firestrike Ultra 4k


3D mark Time Spy DX12



3D mark Time Spy 4K


Heaven Valley and Heaven 4.0 both at 1080p with maximum settings




and finally Superposition
1080P medium and 4K optimed settings..





So what conclusions could I draw from these early benches.. The 6800XT is an amazing card in Firestrike at all resolutions. Firestrike is a DX11 bench and in this DX11 workload the 6800XT was beating not the 3080 overclocked but the 3090 overclocked by quite some margin. This for me also translated into gaming performance running Battlefield 5 in DX11 and saw the same result.

In all my other synthetic testing shown above this overclocked 6800XT was trading blows with and often beating a 3080 overclocked on the same platform. I checked my scores against the best in these benches published on this forum by our end users and saw very similar.

I then simply played the games I am enjoying right now so Warzone, Dirt 5 and Forza Horizon 4 withmy typical settings which is almost maxed out , but not quiet....... as I like above 100fps and recorded the results. In Warzone and Dirt 5 the 6800Xt was for me aroudn 5% faster than the 3080 when both are Overclocked and in Forza the 3080 was around 2% faster than the 6800XT.

What could I conclude from this quick and dirty testing was that AMD have made a very good card and at different workloads able to trade blows with and even beat the previous best. I cant wait to try 6900XT as from this the 6800XT is definately 8Pack approved!!!

I also got a chance to try the EK Block for this card and saw further OC headroom unlocked with an extra 6% on GPU and an extra 2% available stable on the memory. This again offered even more performance with max boost now close to 2.65ghz. The EK Block kept loaded temps around the 50C mark with a 360 rad attached and 1400rpm fans.. SO maybe if you want to run the fans at a less than favourable noise level more OC could be unlocked on air cooling!!! Thats something I did not try but certainly worth experimenting with if your gaming with headphones on or just going for that benchmark score.......

Any questions you have about this card let me know below and watch our channels for the 8Pack AMD powered system I use this card in.......
 
Which EK block did you use? The std issue or the AMD branded / inspired one? Looking to water cool one of these cards when I can get my hands on one :)
Thanks for your review and thoughts. Didn't think north of 2.5Ghz was on the cards.
 
It's nice to see AMD actually competing with Nvidia again since the days of the 290's/390's feels like it has been ages, just a shame there's issues with supply for both teams which has tarnished these releases for all but a select lucky few
 
If the 6800xt was trading blows with a oc 3090 then how come my zotac 3090 at stock beat it on superposition with the same settings.
Zotac are around 10% lower than other 3090's as well
 
Very nice. How is it at ray tracing? Do you think the lack of DLSS will hurt it (esp when raytracing) I know AMD are apparently releasing their own equivalent next year but for now........
 
bigmike20vt said:
Very nice. How is it at ray tracing? Do you think the lack of DLSS will hurt it (esp when raytracing) I know AMD are apparently releasing their own equivalent next year but for now........
Click to expand...

Slow, like slower than 2080ti in some games slow, and yes is the answer to your other question, that said not many games currently support it but I think the approach is ultimately the future. It's ultimately the reason why AMD have caught up, Nvidia have dedicated a big chunk of their die to accelerate RT and machine learning workloads at the expense of traditional game rendering paths.

You would be hard pressed to spot the difference when blind A-B testing the image quality under DLSS but its too hard to ignore the performance gains in frame rates. You can effectively achieve far better frames with less GPU grunt while retaining image quality and would be extremely effective on something like a game console where RAW GPU grunt isn't available. Even 4k pc gaming is an expensive endeavour but being able to run 'max settings' on mid range hardware is a huge boost. However I do think we are still a few years away from it becoming the norm so AMD will likely get away without an equivalent this gen on PC. Hopefully consoles will get it in their mid-cycle refresh, they've already held back PC gaming for the best part of 4 years now, we don't need that again.

Back to the 6800XT, it's a good card at traditional rendering approaches, better than most were expecting and good value at RRP if you got one (like a 3080). AIB pricing is another matter and a bit of an unknown how it will compare across the stack until the dust settles next year.
 
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