AMD’s Upgraded RDNA2 GPUs Will Crank up The Power

There haven’t been a lot of rumors floating around about AMD’s revised RDNA2 GPUs. We figured they’d arrive before summer, but we didn’t have a ton of info on what was changed aside from the usual suspects: higher clocks and faster memory. New reports say the GPUs are quite close, and should be launching next week. Their specs are confirmed as well, and AMD apparently wasn’t afraid to add some extra juice to the entire lineup.

It’s not clear when the upgraded GPUs will officially launch. However, according to Wccfetech they appear to be mild upgrades to several of the company’s existing GPUs. That’s not a slight against AMD; Nvidia has done the same thing with its Super and Ti variants. AMD’s new soldiers will do battle with Nvidia’s existing product line, notably the RTX 3090 Ti, and RTX 3060/3070. What’s interesting is AMD is pumping up the cards’ Total Board Power (TBP) by a decent amount across the board. It appears the high-end cards’ existing cooling mechanisms were over-engineered though, as they don’t appear to have been changed.

The flagship RX 6950 XT will be getting a 35W TBP boost over the RX 6900 XT. This will make it a 335W GPU, which is still 115W less than its direct competitor, the RTX 3090 Ti. It’ll feature the same 5,120 Stream Processors as the 6900 XT, but will have faster memory and four percent higher clocks. On the memory side its 16GB of GDDR6 is being upgraded from 16Gb/s to 18Gb/s modules. It’ll feature the same 128MB of Infinity Cache as the previous model, for an effective 3x memory bandwidth boost. This will be will be a fascinating David vs. Goliath showdown. The Nvidia GPU is $1,999 (at least), and 450W. We don’t know pricing for the AMD card yet but since the RX 6900 XT is $999, we’d guess it’ll land around $1,399 or so.

There won’t be a revised RX 6800 XT, so the next card in the lineup is the RX 6750 XT. This GPU is getting a 20W bump over its predecessor, making it a 250W GPU. Like the rest of the GPU its stream processor count is unchanged at 2,560. It will receive three percent higher clock speeds, and the faster 18Gb/s memory. It has 96MB of Infinity Cache, delivering 1.3TB of memory bandwidth. For context, the RTX 3070 is a 220W GPU, with the RTX 3070 Ti being a 290W GPU. The RX 6750 XT will naturally land somewhere in between these GPUs, and requires dual 8-pin power connectors.

Finally we come to the RX 6650 XT, which will take on the RTX 3060/Ti. It was the original “mainstream” GPU in the family, priced at just $379. The baby Navi card is also getting a 20W boost in TBP, taking it to 180W. It’ll offer 8GB of 18Gb/s GDDR6 and requires a lone eight-pin power connector. It’ll be getting an upgraded dual-fan cooling apparatus. The previous version sported just a single fan.

Though AMD’s reference designs sound potent, its partner cards will be even more so per tradition. For example, a Sapphire RX 6950X Toxic spec sheet has leaked via Chiphell. It shows an optional OC Bios indicating it’s a 346W GPU with a max boost clock of 2,565Mhz. That’s a surprising 255Mhz overclock over reference. Also, Wccfetech released preliminary synthetic benchmarks for the GPUs too. They show the flagship 6950XT beating the RTX 3090 Ti, making it the heir apparent in the GPU world.

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