Radeon RX 6900XT - Which one?

While I was writing this article, the GPU price has started to come down a bit and availability is rising especially from AMD side, but NVIDIA GPU is still rare and over priced.

I'm a long time NVIDIA fan boy, I use my GPU for CAD and 3D design software. I have tried to use Radeon VII and 5700XT from AMD but they are very bad at my specific software. There were a lot of bugs and crashes and I had to sell it in the next day.

When RTX 3xxx has been newly released, I had a chance to buy MSI VENTUS and AORUS XTREME. The price at time was 1645 USD and 1967 USD respectively.

AORUS XTREME uses binned chip, and it consume more power of 420W comparing with 350W from MSI VENTUS

The price different between these two cards is 322 USD but the Time Spy graphics performance below shows the different of 9.5% in FPS. The margin is big enough and noticeable while gaming at 4k

The both 3090 cards I tested are bad at overclocking, if I would increase the clock speed of just 75MHz, it will crash in some graphic software that I use. So OC these cards does not worth it.

Finally, AMD RX 6xxx cards started to show up and I needed to build a second PC, so I bought this MSI Gaming X Trio 6900XT to try out.

For AMD newbie that want to migrate from NVIDIA, I would suggest to uninstall all of NVIDIA driver and software by using this DDU Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 18.0.4.0 (guru3d.com)

After completely uninstall all of NVIDIA software/driver then you need to down load RADEON SOFTWARE from here Radeon™ Software | Graphics Technologies | AMD

Unlike NVIDIA software and Driver, AMD put these initial setting value that can cause some game/benchmark to crash right after you install the driver. I suggest that you make this adjustment before start rolling out your favorite game.

Press the cog button on the upper right corner then choose Graphics -> Standard, this will disable Aniti Lag and Image Sharpening feature. Call of Duty will crash right away if these settings are enable.

Then you go to Display tab, and if you have Free Sync monitor you should enable Adaptive Sync Compatible. But don't forget to turn is off when you run Time Spy Benchmark, it can also crash while benchmarking. I found that Adaptive Sync feature has not yet cause any problem on all the games that I play.

Then go the the Performance tab and press reset icon on the upper right corner.

That's it. Now you should be ready to game crash free.

Sometime, Windows 10 update will override AMD driver. It will install older version of driver over the newer one you have installed and caused errors. I found this problem once and can be solved by re-install the latest driver.

4k Superposition - Stock setting

MSI 6900XT comes the third place. Ventus 3090 is 4.5% faster and Aorus 3090 is 11% faster.

For CAD software that I use, 6900XT works very well for viewport performance. Bugs and issued I found in earlier version (5700XT) are all gone and it works even faster than Aorus 3090.

For this reason, I went out and buy another 6900XT, The Nitro +.

Comparing with MSI Gaming X, the performance is neck to neck. In game, Nitro + consume less power (260W against 280W) and its fan runs a bit slower and quieter. (1400 rpm vs 1600 rpm)

RTX 3090's fan spin a lot faster, up to 2200-2400 rpm and notably louder.

These two 6900XT cards are both terrible at overclocking. It crashes easily and performance gain is very low.

Nitro + has no different to MSI gaming X, so pick the one you can find at the price you can pay.

There is one unique 6900XT - The Red Devil Ultimate. This card, even though it's called 6900XT but it has different code name. Radeon Software will detect it and it has higher stock clock speed and power limit.

Non ultimate Red devil will cost 1835 USD and Ultimate one will cost 2158 USD, 323 USD more. The external of Red devil cards are all the same even the box. The ultimate one will have a small sticker patch at the front.

Red Devil Ultimate is 3mm shorter than Gaming X TRIO but it's a bit thicker.

RED DEVIL ULTIMATE has BOOST CLOCK of 2454 MHz while GAMING X is 2340 MHz

It seems to run faster than Gaming X variant. Power consumption of Red Devil Ultimate is 303W and it will be 350W if overclocked.

This Red Devil Ultimate card is designed specially for overclocking so I will tested it with this overclock value.

2650 MHz Clock speed (Gaming X will crash right away at this frequency) Memory 2100 MHz and Power limit max out at +15%

The result is interesting. RED DEVIL ULTIMATE is faster than Gaming X Trio by 8.5% but slower than Aorus Xtreme by 2.3% . With 2x price tag, Aorus Xtreme is really in trouble.

Time Spy Graphics score is almost identical.

Fire Strike Graphics score Red Devil is led by 12.8%

While testing, the GPU clock rise up to 2597 MHz!! on air. That's really insane, and in other games the clock will run between 2450-2600 MHz

Gaming performance between these 2 cards are neck to neck. Power consumption of Aorus Xtreme is significant higher (70W) but the major different is the current price of these 2 cards. You can practically buy 2 Red Devil Ultimate cards for the price of one Aorus Xtreme.