Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC Review

For our first custom RX 6900 XT review, we have looked at Gigabyte's RX 6900 XT Gaming OC. Offering a large, triple-fan cooler as well as both an OC and Silent BIOS, on paper the Gaming OC has a lot going for it. In practice, we found it is certainly a decent option, but Gigabyte has perhaps missed a trick or two.

Starting with overall performance, the Gaming OC is a little faster than the reference 6900 XT, but not by a whole lot. Across the seven games we tested today, it is on average 2% faster at both 1440p and 4K resolution. When sat down actually playing games, I don't think anyone would be able to notice the difference.

In my view, Gigabyte missed a trick by not unshackling the 6900 XT GPU from its power constraints and pushing clock speeds higher. While the card's power target is a little higher than reference, both the OC and Silent BIOS drew 314W in our testing, which is barely a 15W increase compared to the reference design. Considering Gigabyte outfitted the Gaming OC with three 8-pin power connectors, I was hoping the OC BIOS would have a 350W power target, if not higher. As it is, the pretty small increase to total board power only results in an 80MHz clock speed improvement for the Gaming OC versus reference.

As for the card's cooler, the Gaming OC is a competent design. It runs between 3-7C cooler than the reference – depending on whether you're using the Silent BIOS or OC BIOS – but it is also a little louder, even when using the quieter of the two BIOS modes. When testing noise-normalised thermals, it did run a little warmer than reference, but only by 3C. It's fine, but nothing earth shattering.

We also enjoyed reasonable success from manual overclocking, but again nothing absolutely superb. With the core dialled in at 2600MHz and the GDDR6 memory at 2120MHz, frame rates improved between 4-6% when testing at 4K. Do bear in mind though, there will be some sample-to-sample variance here as some cards may overclock better (or worse) than our particular sample.

Overall then, the Gigabyte RX 6900 XT Gaming OC is a decent card, but it hasn't blown me away. On the positive side, it does run a little faster than the reference card, it offers dual-BIOS functionality and some may prefer the stealthier black-and-grey design compared to the brighter silver aesthetic of the reference card. I do think Gigabyte needed to push the power target a lot further than it did though, while the cooler isn't really much of an improvement over the reference card either.

Then we come to pricing. Gigabyte told us an MSRP of £1079.99 here in the UK, which is about £180 (+20%) more expensive than AMD's quoted MSRP of £899. You don't need me to tell you that cards are simply not in stock at MSRP – or in stock at all – so those quoted figures don't mean a lot. In fact, the only e-tailer where I saw a price listed for the Gaming OC is from AWD-IT, coming in at £1399.99, but of course it is out of stock.

Our advice is therefore for a time when GPUs are finally back in good supply. We don't know when that will be, but we do feel the Gaming OC would be a good option provided it was priced pretty close to AMD's baseline MSRP. If other 6900 XTs, like the reference design which AMD has confirmed it will not be phasing out, are available at £899 and the Gaming OC is priced at its £1079.99 MSRP, it would be very hard to justify. It's a decent card, it just needs the right pricing to be viable.

The only place we have found the RX 6900 XT Gaming OC listed, with a price, is at AWD-IT.

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Pros

• Attractive, stealthy design.
• Dual-BIOS.
• Slightly faster than reference.

Cons

• Would've liked to see higher power target on the OC BIOS.
• GPU ran slightly warmer than the reference card when noise-normalised.
• MSRP is £180 above AMD's own £899 MSRP.

KitGuru says: It's a decent card, and if there was plenty of stock in the market, we could see this selling for a little over £899. As things stand however, AMD's reference card is your best bet if you want a 6900 XT.

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