[PLUS] Four custom designs with Radeon RX 6950 XT in a comparison test

It’s hardly bigger

First the disclaimer: We would have liked to present you with further custom designs of the RX 6950 XT. Unfortunately, we only received four tickets at the time of going to press. But now you can expect a very comprehensive consideration of the available designs.

The best even better

The 50s versions of the Radeon RX 6000 released in May are consistently accelerated new editions of existing RDNA 2 graphics cards. AMD only focuses on models with “full fat” GPUs, i.e. the full configuration of the graphics chips used. As before, the 50s are powered by the Navi 21, Navi 22 and Navi 23 graphics processors. The new variants have an internal identifier with “K”, i.e. KXTX and KXT, the meaning of which AMD unfortunately did not want to reveal. Basically, it can be assumed that these are particularly clock-friendly specimens, because the performance increase of the new editions is based purely on clock, additional arithmetic units do not exist in the silicon.

To ensure this, AMD increases the energy budget: The Radeon RX 6950 XT works as a reference card with 284 watts of GPU power, a good eleven percent more than the Radeon RX 6900 XT. That’s not enough for the board partners, they sometimes give their custom designs massively higher power limits. Of course, this results in more waste heat from the chip and memory, so that the inventiveness of Asrock, Gigabyte, MSI and Sapphire was awakened – after all, a good graphics card is not only fast, but also quiet. In view of the high power limits and waste heat, we were surprised at how well the cooling worked in some designs. More on that now in detail.

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You will find the following products in the test:

• Asrock Radeon RX 6950 XT OC Formula
• Gigabyte Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming OC
• MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio
• Sapphire Radeon RX 6950 XT Nitro+ Pure

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