Ahead of our Radeon RX 6800XT and RX 6800 graphics cards review tomorrow, let's take a look at the cards and how they compare to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 Founders Edition.
The RX 6800XT is AMD's newest Radeon flagship. Unlike NVIDIA and their Founders Edition cards, AMD doesn't make and sell their own BBA (Built By AMD) cards. So the card here is based on the red company's reference board design - don't be surprised to see partners' cards adopting a similar cooling design as AMD.
Flip the card the other side and we see the board fully encased in a heatsink block, a little similar to NVIDIA's RTX 30-series Founders Edition cards, but also quite different which I'll show later.
AMD has ditched the lateral blower design of the previous generation in favour of a triple-fan axial airflow design. Three 80mm fans blow air onto a dense aluminium fin-stack heatsink. The card has a total board power (TBP) of 300W. Two 8-pin connectors are located at the PCB edge's, what AMD is calling "Edge Cable Management", which is quite a big deal if you recall the awkward power connectors location on the RTX 30-series Founders Edition cards.
Taking the cooler apart will be a cinch.
Interestingly, AMD has stuck with a USB Type-C port for their new Radeon cards. For the unintiated, this enables one cable power for head mounted VR displays. Oh, by comparisons NVIDIA nixed it on their latest card. So if you're still an avid VR user, this could be a key selling point.
Here's a look at how both AMD and NVIDIA's flagships compare. Personally, AMD's conventional design is a safe bet but I like how NVIDIA up the game with not only their 'brutalistic' design but also how they managed to jam so much power in a smaller PCB with their Founders Edition cards.
Note the different power connectors. The RTX 30-series Founders Edition requires a power cable adapter (which, thankfully, comes with each card) that can potentially ruin your PC cable management.
AMD's RX Radeon 6800XT will occupy about two and half PCI slots. The heatsink underneath is thicker, to cope with the higher TBP (total board power) of this card.
AMD is also launching the RX 6800 graphics card - a tier down below its XT sibling. The card looks almost identical, and the model name can make it a tad confusing to identify between the RX 6800 and RX 6800XT.
Can you spot the difference?
Of course there are some differences. For one, the RX 6800 sports a shorter height - remember I mentioned earlier about the RX 6800XT sporting a thicker heatsink? As far as ports go, both cards come with 1x HDMI 2.1, 2x DisplayPort and 1x USB-C that was mentioned earlier. Partners' cards may or may not add additional HDMI/DisplayPort ports.