The 6800XT was just released about a couple of days back, and an Indonesian overclocker Alva Jonathan managed to get a world record in benchmark testing although with a caveat. This proves that the 6800XT is an overclocker’s dream, and that “Big Navi” has a huge overclocking potential.
6800XT 2.65GHz on air is a mind blowing overclock!
Videocardz had caught a glimpse of renowned overclocker Lucky_Noob pushing the RX 6800 XT with a boost overclock to 2.65GHz on air – in other words, just using the graphics card’s stock fans, with no fancy cooling, which is seriously impressive in itself. Although the CPU it was paired with (AMD’s Ryzen 5950X) for the 3DMark Fire Strike record on HWBOT was liquid nitrogen-cooled (and ramped up to 5.4GHz).
The combined score of 47,932 took the topmost spot on HWBOT, dethroning Nvidia’s champion GPU which was the RTX 3090. However, note that tessellation was disabled for the Big Navi card, which isn’t allowed when it comes to 3DMark’s Hall of Fame, hence this score didn’t count for that ranking.
The RX 6800 XT beat the LN2 cooled 3090 (by just over 200 points), and we must remember that this is just a single (modified) benchmark. Looking at AMD’s newest launched GPU, the matchup for this graphics card in terms of price bracket is the RTX 3080. The 6800 XT beats out its Nvidia rival in some tests, but equally gets beaten in others (and certainly loses on the ray tracing front). The Fire Strike benchmark, incidentally, is also AMD’s strong suit.
The second caveat here, as Lucky_n00b observes, is that the 2.65GHz overclock was using the boost setting applied from Performance Tuning panel, not the real clock during load. Thus the GPU is power-limited.
Overclocking monster
This is still an impressive feat, and it proves that the speculation that AMD’s new graphics cards being able to hit 2.5GHz overclocks, are actually true.
Right now, the 6800 XT is the fastest Big Navi GPU available at the moment, but the RX 6900 XT flagship is still waiting to be launched, and will be giving Nvidia even more serious competition when it emerges in just a few days, which is on December 8.
Well, while the performance battle is heating up, the real competition depends on which GPU giant can actually release graphics cards out there on the shelves in the shortest time, because from what we can see, AMD isn’t doing any better than Nvidia’s poor performance with the available stock of Ampere graphics cards.
Based on a few rumours, AMD will have more stock coming through next month. Unfortunately, Nvidia has admitted that RTX 3000 inventory levels won’t improve at all until 2021 at the earliest. Eventually, that could mean PC gamers in the waiting list for a next-gen GPU would be snapping up a large chunk of AMD cards in the shortest time when fresh stock arrives.
