AMD RX 6800 XT GPU breaks world record and becomes new fire strike champ

AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT has just been launched, but in a benchmark, albeit with a caveat, it has already taken a world record and proved all those rumours about Big Navi having great overclocking potential are true.

Videocardz spotted ‘Lucky n00b’ (Indonesian overclocker Alva Jonathan) driving the RX 6800 XT with a boost overclock to 2.65GHz on-air, in other words, only using the stock fans of the graphics card, with no fancy cooling, which is seriously amazing in itself. Since the CPU was paired with (AMD’s Ryzen 5950X) liquid nitrogen-cooled (and ramped up to 5.4GHz) for the 3DMark Fire Strike record on HWBOT.

On HWBOT, the resulting tally of 47,932 took the top spot, dethroning the reigning champion GPU, the mighty RTX 3090 of Nvidia. However, the Big Navi card was disabled for tessellation, which is not allowed when it comes to 3DMark’s Hall of Fame, so this score did not count for that ranking.

The RX 6800 XT also only sneaked past the 3090 (by just over 200 points), and we have to remember that this is just a single benchmark (modified). The match for this graphics card in terms of price bracket is the RTX 3080, and the 6800 XT beats its Nvidia rival in some tests but gets beaten in others equally (and certainly loses on the ray-tracing front).

Let’s not get carried away, and as Lucky n00b observes, the other caveat here is that the 2.65GHz overclock was the “boost setting applied from the Performance Tuning panel,  not the real clock during load  (GPU is power-limited).”

Nevertheless, this is an impressive feat, and as we said at the beginning, it backs up the stream of speculation we’ve heard in recent times about the new graphics cards from AMD being able to hit overclocks of 2.5GHz or even more.

Of course, the 6800 XT is the fastest current Big Navi GPU, but the flagship RX 6900 XT is still waiting in the wings and will give Nvidia even more competition when it emerges on December 8 in just a few weeks.

Well, we say the performance battle is heating up, but the real competition might be that the GPU giant can actually get graphics cards out there on the shelves as soon as possible because it seems AMD is not doing any better than Nvidia’s poor performance with the available stock of Ampere graphics cards.