[Test] Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT Nitro+ : Review| Specs | Hashrate | Pros & Cons | Set-up

Hi all !

While AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture came up against Nvidia on its top-of-the-range Turing (see our test of the RTX 3080) with the RX 6800, 6800 XT and 6900 XT, it had not yet revealed its less elitist and therefore expensive solutions. The RX 6700 XT is the answer to the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti (€ 419) and 3070 (€ 519) with an official price of € 479. Of course, this is without counting the shortage as well as the custom models which make the prices soar in a completely abusive way. For our test, Sapphire sent us its RX 6700 XT Nitro +, the little sister of the RX 6800 XT Nitro + that we tested previously. How does it behave in practice? This is what we will see!

Technical characteristics

As we can see, the RX 6700 XT is based on a new Navi 22 XT GPU which stands out in several ways compared to its higher-end siblings. First of all, it is much smaller with its 335 m² for 17.2 billion transistors against 520 mm² and 26.8 billion transistors respectively for the RX 6800 (XT). This of course allows AMD to save money when manufacturing these chips. As a result, the number of stream processors, CUs and RT cores are greatly reduced. With 40 CUs and RT cores for 2560 stream processors, it is indeed 33% less than the RX 6800. But in order not to have too large a performance gap between the newcomer RX 6700 XT and its big sister RX 6800 , AMD has significantly boosted the frequencies. Indeed, the reference card goes from 1815 to 2424 MHz in game mode against 2105 to 2528 MHz in boost mode, enough to reduce somewhat the gap between the two GPUs. On the memory side, we are entitled to 12 GB of GDDR6 at 2000 MHz on a 192-bit bus. The manufacturer had little choice, either 6 GB which is very light nowadays in the most demanding games, or 12 GB to cash the largest AA.

As for the Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro +, it is a card much more imposing than the reference design by climbing to 31 cm in length, 13.1 cm in height and 5.1 cm in thickness. It is also very little equivalent to the RX 6800 XT Nitro +. Sapphire has made some changes to the operating frequencies. It has two separate BIOS, one called Performance which climbs to 2548 MHz in game mode for 2622 MHz in boost mode for a TGP of 211 Watts and another Silent which is satisfied respectively with 2433 MHz, 2615 MHz for 186 Watts. And if the reference design displays a TBP (Total Board Power) of 230 Watts, the RX 6700 XT Nitro + can reach 260 Watts. Basically, we are dealing with a slightly overclocked card which should nevertheless not really be a game-changer in the face of AMD’s specifications.