The Radeon RX 6900/6950 XT Owners Thread.

[Nghtmare]

Well this is the highest Ive got so far with stock MPT table and stock 5800X clocks

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/67453663

 

[LtMatt]

Well this is the highest Ive got so far with stock MPT table and stock 5800X clocks

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/67453663

Good score.

 

[Nghtmare]

Good score.

Thanks. One of these days when its cold outside Im going to open the windows and use MPT lol

 

[naefeart]

Ok, so a massive faff later and it’s in! Had to remove some stuff to make way for the rad and by golly was it a pain to add the extra fans to give push/pull.

However now it’s all in and tidy I’m pretty happy. It’s running nice and cool but I still need to set it up properly in MPT.
https://flic.kr/p/2mDvKZ6

 

[xR00Tx]

Realized I never sent a photo of the rig after blocking my 6900XT Sapphire Nitro+.
Here it goes:

Spoiler

 

[LtMatt]

Ok, so a massive faff later and it’s in! Had to remove some stuff to make way for the rad and by golly was it a pain to add the extra fans to give push/pull.

However now it’s all in and tidy I’m pretty happy. It’s running nice and cool but I still need to set it up properly in MPT.

Looks great, glad to hear you got it all setup okay.

Is that the only place suitable for the rad?

Realized I never sent a photo of the rig after blocking my 6900XT Sapphire Nitro+.
Here it goes:

https://ibb.co/y0H0Ynj

Wow, now I can see where those great benchmark scores come from in Timespy.

Very smart looking water cooled build Root.

EDIT Your second two screenshots are not working.

 

[naefeart]

Looks great, glad to hear you got it all setup okay.

Is that the only place suitable for the rad?

Cheers, I’m quite chuffed with it now.

I’ve got the cpu 360mm rad in the top, which left the front or the bottom of the case for the gpu rad. Putting it in the front would mean removing all the fans, drives and drive cages. Installing the rad in the bottom meant I could keep the intake fans, drives and one of the drive cages.

Now just to tweak it a little bit

 

[xR00Tx]

Wow, now I can see where those great benchmark scores come from in Timespy.

Very smart looking water cooled build Root.

EDIT Your second two screenshots are not working.

Thank you sir!!!

Actually I posted only one photo.
The other 2

"IMG" tags were failed attempts to post the photo... lol

 

[Nghtmare]

Realized I never sent a photo of the rig after blocking my 6900XT Sapphire Nitro+.
Here it goes:

Spoiler

That actually looks really really good.

 

[Divver]

Hi guys, I've been reading through some of the recent threads after struggling with my new 6900 XT a bit and I really like your builds and many of the suggestions made.

I recently upgraded from a 6800 XT Nitro+ SE to a 6900 XT Toxic Extreme which would be my 5th GPU in the last year (5700XT Reference > 3070 Gaming X Trio > 3080 FTW3 ULTRA > 6800 XT Nitro+ > 6900 XT Toxic Extreme)
I'm really happy with my purchase and I really like the XTXH chips!

Using MPT I altered my power limit up to 365W as well as the GFX TDC to 385A and SoC to 75A after reading almost everything I could find across the net about the XTXH chips (which isn't a lot really). Stock settings were 332W PL, 320A GFX and 55A SoC.
Leaving my Radeon settings at +15% power limit my card can pull up to 420W but the most I've seen are peaks of around 400-410W.

I've had good results with Fire Strike Extreme, prior to MPT my first run was 56th in the world for single GPU but I was quickly knocked out of the top 100 and today using MPT and the power limit changes I managed to get back to 68th.
I likely won't get in the top 100 single GPU for Time Spy due to not having a 5950X to make up the CPU score but today I did break the 22k Time Spy barrier after using MPT as I was previous stuck at around 21,500. I can't make it into the top 100 for the "5900X only results" either as about 80 of the results are the same guy with a berserk 2400MHz memory clock on his 6900 XT and a 5.15GHz 5900X so I'm not beating that lol.

My best Time Spy settings are 2700-2800 Min-Max Freq, 1.2v, 2150 Mem with Fast Timings enabled and a +15% power limit with the altered MPT limit of 365W, 385A GFX TDC and 75A SoC TDC.
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/23769165

My best Fire Strike Extreme settings are the same as Time Spy except with a 2740-2840 Min-Max Freq. Time Spy seems to put a much heavier load on the GPU and didn't like the slightly higher frequencies that FSE didn't mind.
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/26495307

If anyone figures out any more subtle tweaks for free performance then please let me know!

I've also seen people on various OC forums running 6900 XT chips at 460-500W but I'm very hesitant to try and bump the power to such an expensive GPU by 30% over stock and then it's also hard for me to persuade myself the 1-4% gains are worth the extra power usage/heat and degradation.

 

[LtMatt]

Hi guys, I've been reading through some of the recent threads after struggling with my new 6900 XT a bit and I really like your builds and many of the suggestions made.

I recently upgraded from a 6800 XT Nitro+ SE to a 6900 XT Toxic Extreme which would be my 5th GPU in the last year (5700XT Reference > 3070 Gaming X Trio > 3080 FTW3 ULTRA > 6800 XT Nitro+ > 6900 XT Toxic Extreme)
I'm really happy with my purchase and I really like the XTXH chips!

Using MPT I altered my power limit up to 365W as well as the GFX TDC to 385A and SoC to 75A after reading almost everything I could find across the net about the XTXH chips (which isn't a lot really). Stock settings were 332W PL, 320A GFX and 55A SoC.
Leaving my Radeon settings at +15% power limit my card can pull up to 420W but the most I've seen are peaks of around 400-410W.

I've had good results with Fire Strike Extreme, prior to MPT my first run was 56th in the world for single GPU but I was quickly knocked out of the top 100 and today using MPT and the power limit changes I managed to get back to 68th.
I likely won't get in the top 100 single GPU for Time Spy due to not having a 5950X to make up the CPU score but today I did break the 22k Time Spy barrier after using MPT as I was previous stuck at around 21,500. I can't make it into the top 100 for the "5900X only results" either as about 80 of the results are the same guy with a berserk 2400MHz memory clock on his 6900 XT and a 5.15GHz 5900X so I'm not beating that lol.

My best Time Spy settings are 2700-2800 Min-Max Freq, 1.2v, 2150 Mem with Fast Timings enabled and a +15% power limit with the altered MPT limit of 365W, 385A GFX TDC and 75A SoC TDC.
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/23769165

My best Fire Strike Extreme settings are the same as Time Spy except with a 2740-2840 Min-Max Freq. Time Spy seems to put a much heavier load on the GPU and didn't like the slightly higher frequencies that FSE didn't mind.
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/26495307

If anyone figures out any more subtle tweaks for free performance then please let me know!

I've also seen people on various OC forums running 6900 XT chips at 460-500W but I'm very hesitant to try and bump the power to such an expensive GPU by 30% over stock and then it's also hard for me to persuade myself the 1-4% gains are worth the extra power usage/heat and degradation.

You've had more GPUs than I've had hot dinners this past week. Are you happy with the 6900 XT having now tried most GPUs out there?

Good results in Timespy and Firestrike. You can try increase the infinity fabric clock speed in MPT for some extra performance. Try 2177Mhz as shown in the screenshot below. Try 1266Mhz SOC too along with +20Mhz on Vclck and Dclck. Also disable *uncheck) all the DS (deep sleep) and CSTATE options in MPT for benching.





Disable SMT in Timespy for a higher CPU score.
Disable all options in Radeon Software > Preferences, Disable FreeSync, using 6 bit colour depth and ycbcr 4:2:0.
Set Windows to use high performance power plan.
Get everything set then use a cold system with a run first thing in the morning. Lower temps better score.
There are more tweaks out there but afraid I don't know them and the people that do often don't share. However, the above should get you some extra points.

 

[Divver]

Thanks for the info LtMatt, I'll go ahead and give some of those MPT settings a shot as well as the SMT, colour depth and FreeSync changes, I'll give the high performance power plan a go but I think IIRC that doesn't play well with Hydra and it's processor management but no harm in trying!

After some further research I'm a little worried about the differences between my GPU temp and hot spot temp. I'm seeing a GPU temp of around 55-60 with hot spot temps of 80-90 with my current settings and there's a swarm of people using both water blocks and hybrid AIO cards saying they're having similar issues and that the difference should be around 10-15 degrees. Many of them are re-pasting with MX-4/Grizzly/liquid metal and complaining about mounting pressure, which was an issue I had with my 5700 XT reference which I had to solve with plastic washers courtesy of Gamers Nexus and several of them are pushing an extra 50-100MHz after the fix.

Over the past 5 years I went from a 1080 > 1080 Ti > 2080 Ti and then down to an ITX build with a 5700 XT and then onwards.
I've had really bad experiences with NVIDIA if I'm honest. My 1080 and 1080 Ti were solid but the 2080 Ti was an EVGA Hydro Copper in a custom loop with a 9900K and it was a PITA. Battlefield dropped with RTX and the Windows updates and even with RTX disabled performance was drastically lower than before, rollbacks didn't work properly and I had to format several times. The card didn't overclock that well either so it just felt like the entire system wasn't worth the money I'd put into it so I sold it all for a very small loss to a friend who respected the work and effort I'd put into it.
The 5700 XT paired with a Ryzen 3600 afterward felt like an insane amount of power for the money. I built in a Node 202 for that Xbox size and the amount of power it had for 1440p gaming was unreal for the < £1000 cost.

I later grabbed a 3070 Gaming X Trio on release for £536 which wasn't bad but AC Valhalla had just launched and I was having micro stutters all the time because it simply didn't have enough VRAM. I later grabbed the 3080 FTW3 ULTRA for £899 and flashed it with the official EVGA 450W BIOS and I just had that same feeling I had with the 2080 Ti where it didn't feel like it was giving me the performance I wanted for the money and hype surrounding it. DLSS made everything look crap also, like using 60-80% render scale almost and I again had issues with 30 series drivers on launch playing Shadowlands with dungeon floors and walls disappearing and stuff and I sold that card to CeX for £1160 in the first Covid lock down and grabbed a 6800 XT Nitro+ SE from OCUK for £929 at the time.

Taking the 6800 XT card out of the box it just felt better built than the 3080 (much less plastic on the shroud for example) and looked better visually too IMHO. Back to Shadowlands at the time and with some slight driver tweaks and overclocking I squeezed like another 5-8% performance out of it and it was as cool as a cucumber and I had Radeon Image Sharpening back which just makes so many games look spot on for me.

A few weeks back I was advising a friend who has one of the crazy Samsung G9 ultra-wides on what his GPU options are in the current climate and I saw the 6900 XT Toxic Extreme on sale at OCUK for £1499 and after watching a few videos and seeing reviews I just felt like I wanted to buy into the Sapphire Toxic scene because I've always felt like I've had good value and performance with every Radeon purchase I've made. I looked back through some benchmarks for games I play and the engines they're on, for example Battlefield has quite a nice AMD GPU bias without the gimmicks enabled and I'll be playing some Battlefield 2042 at some point so I figured it was safe to assume being on the same engine it will likely still have the AMD bias.
I played the beta and pulled really nice frames on this GPU at ultra settings 1440p, around 110-150. A friend or two as well as several big streamers I watched using top-tier 3090s like the FTW3 ULTRA were struggling to keep 100 FPS and all in all little things like this just make me feel the purchase of the Toxic Extreme was a really good one.

 

[LtMatt]

Thanks for the info LtMatt, I'll go ahead and give some of those MPT settings a shot as well as the SMT, colour depth and FreeSync changes, I'll give the high performance power plan a go but I think IIRC that doesn't play well with Hydra and it's processor management but no harm in trying!

After some further research I'm a little worried about the differences between my GPU temp and hot spot temp. I'm seeing a GPU temp of around 55-60 with hot spot temps of 80-90 with my current settings and there's a swarm of people using both water blocks and hybrid AIO cards saying they're having similar issues and that the difference should be around 10-15 degrees. Many of them are re-pasting with MX-4/Grizzly/liquid metal and complaining about mounting pressure, which was an issue I had with my 5700 XT reference which I had to solve with plastic washers courtesy of Gamers Nexus and several of them are pushing an extra 50-100MHz after the fix.

Over the past 5 years I went from a 1080 > 1080 Ti > 2080 Ti and then down to an ITX build with a 5700 XT and then onwards.
I've had really bad experiences with NVIDIA if I'm honest. My 1080 and 1080 Ti were solid but the 2080 Ti was an EVGA Hydro Copper in a custom loop with a 9900K and it was a PITA. Battlefield dropped with RTX and the Windows updates and even with RTX disabled performance was drastically lower than before, rollbacks didn't work properly and I had to format several times. The card didn't overclock that well either so it just felt like the entire system wasn't worth the money I'd put into it so I sold it all for a very small loss to a friend who respected the work and effort I'd put into it.
The 5700 XT paired with a Ryzen 3600 afterward felt like an insane amount of power for the money. I built in a Node 202 for that Xbox size and the amount of power it had for 1440p gaming was unreal for the < £1000 cost.

I later grabbed a 3070 Gaming X Trio on release for £536 which wasn't bad but AC Valhalla had just launched and I was having micro stutters all the time because it simply didn't have enough VRAM. I later grabbed the 3080 FTW3 ULTRA for £899 and flashed it with the official EVGA 450W BIOS and I just had that same feeling I had with the 2080 Ti where it didn't feel like it was giving me the performance I wanted for the money and hype surrounding it. DLSS made everything look crap also, like using 60-80% render scale almost and I again had issues with 30 series drivers on launch playing Shadowlands with dungeon floors and walls disappearing and stuff and I sold that card to CeX for £1160 in the first Covid lock down and grabbed a 6800 XT Nitro+ SE from OCUK for £929 at the time.

Taking the 6800 XT card out of the box it just felt better built than the 3080 (much less plastic on the shroud for example) and looked better visually too IMHO. Back to Shadowlands at the time and with some slight driver tweaks and overclocking I squeezed like another 5-8% performance out of it and it was as cool as a cucumber and I had Radeon Image Sharpening back which just makes so many games look spot on for me.

A few weeks back I was advising a friend who has one of the crazy Samsung G9 ultra-wides on what his GPU options are in the current climate and I saw the 6900 XT Toxic Extreme on sale at OCUK for £1499 and after watching a few videos and seeing reviews I just felt like I wanted to buy into the Sapphire Toxic scene because I've always felt like I've had good value and performance with every Radeon purchase I've made. I looked back through some benchmarks for games I play and the engines they're on, for example Battlefield has quite a nice AMD GPU bias without the gimmicks enabled and I'll be playing some Battlefield 2042 at some point so I figured it was safe to assume being on the same engine it will likely still have the AMD bias.
I played the beta and pulled really nice frames on this GPU at ultra settings 1440p, around 110-150. A friend or two as well as several big streamers I watched using top-tier 3090s like the FTW3 ULTRA were struggling to keep 100 FPS and all in all little things like this just make me feel the purchase of the Toxic Extreme was a really good one.

Good to hear.

Regarding the delta between your edge and junction temperatures, if it's 30c at worst case scenario with 400W or higher going through the GPU that that is not too bad to be honest.

For daily use during gaming with power draw around 300-350W you should see that delta drop to 20c or so.

Most likely your thermal paste is a bit dry, so you could potentially gain a better delta by repasting the graphics card.

I had a similar delta at over 400W and decided to use Liquid Metal on the GPU and it did help and brought my delta down to 15-20c when gaming at 300-400W.

If you do take it apart, make sure you do a half turn on each screw when putting it back together, as I got bad results the first few times as the mount was not great.

You have to hold the pump and the pcb together when securing using the metal PCI bracket (push down on the pci bracket a bit to ensure the screw threads pop through the pcb evenly) to ensure the mount is as even as possible and pressure is applied evenly over the four screw retention bracket If you nail that part then you should see a better delta.

 

[Divver]

Thanks for the awesome info, I couldn't find any tear down or re-pasting info/videos so I was quite hesitant. What liquid metal did you use if you don't mind me asking and I'm aware that can cause stains in the long run but no actual damage. What's the deal with the using LM over normal paste, are there any dangers involved?

 

[LtMatt]

Thanks for the awesome info, I couldn't find any tear down or re-pasting info/videos so I was quite hesitant. What liquid metal did you use if you don't mind me asking and I'm aware that can cause stains in the long run but no actual damage. What's the deal with the using LM over normal paste, are there any dangers involved?

Edited my post a little at the end.

It was fairly easy to dismantle, but a little tricky in places putting it back together as a couple of the wires popped out when I was doing it and has to try and wedge them back under the shroud before I could get some of the shroud screws back in. The hardest part was the last bit of my post above but it was not too bad overall and worth doing If you are comfortable doing such things.

I used Silver King liquid metal you can get it from a worldwide major retailer. It’s supposed to be a little better than the Thermal Grizzly stuff but I am not sure if that is true. Don’t get any metal on anywhere but the GPU die. You can put electrical tape round the edges of the die if needed but I didn’t bother as not my first rodeo.

 

[Divver]

Your recommended MPT settings on a hot run pushed my graphics score up another 200 pts for a 1.5% FPS increase in GPU test 1 and and 0.2% in test 2 so that's a nice one, thanks, I appreciate the help.

I see you locked the min and max FCLK to 2177MHz, should I return my min freq to stock for daily driving/gaming? Also the Power Play features I adjusted to match yours, should they be adjusted for daily/gaming also?

 

[LtMatt]

Your recommended MPT settings on a hot run pushed my graphics score up another 200 pts for a 1.5% FPS increase in GPU test 1 and and 0.2% in test 2 so that's a nice one, thanks, I appreciate the help.

I see you locked the min and max FCLK to 2177MHz, should I return my min freq to stock for daily driving/gaming? Also the Power Play features I adjusted to match yours, should they be adjusted for daily/gaming also?

I use this for daily gaming. I don't believe this does any damage, but I cannot guarantee it as its running above factory spec so its at your own risk.

My personal belief is that daily gaming usage below 400W is fine with this type of pcb and cooling solution.






I don't touch the power limit in Radeon Software.

This is my daily gaming profile when i want max performance. 35% fan speed, silent 991RPM. Allows a clock speed of 2725Mhz or higher in games.



I sometimes drop fan speed to 25% if the GPU power draw is below 325W as the hotspot temperature does not go past 85c at only 25% fan speed which is like 750 RPM. To use fan speeds below 38% you need to switch to the Quiet BIOS.

95c is the throttle temp for hotspot so I always use enough fan speed to stay 5-10c+ below that.

 

[LtMatt]

Oof, looks like it is possible to increase voltage after all using MPT. Credit here.

2900Mhz core clock in Far Cry 6, interesting.

Spoiler

EDIT - Overlay is wrong, Had my 6700 XT in there recently but that is my 6900 XT running 2900Mhz core clock.

Just be aware of the risks here folks.

 

[Kaapstad]

Ok, so a massive faff later and it’s in! Had to remove some stuff to make way for the rad and by golly was it a pain to add the extra fans to give push/pull.

However now it’s all in and tidy I’m pretty happy. It’s running nice and cool but I still need to set it up properly in MPT.

Which card do you have?

 

[Divver]

Oof, looks like it is possible to increase voltage after all using MPT. Credit here.

2900Mhz core clock in Far Cry 6, interesting.

Spoiler

EDIT - Overlay is wrong, Had my 6700 XT in there recently but that is my 6900 XT running 2900Mhz core clock.

Just be aware of the risks here folks.

This is pretty cool but also a little worry inducing

I'm sure I heard/read somewhere before that AMD and Nvidia set the specification that partner cards must not exceed in order to be licensed.
Is this why partners never push an extra 25mv for higher boosts to compete with each other?
Would it be worth firing an email to sapphire tech support to ask if we could safely overvolt these cards another 50-100mv without causing long term damage or are they already pushed to their absolute brink?
There must be a factor or safety in their design for overclocking surely?