AMD Radeon RX 6800 Overclocking

[Brent_Justice]

Introduction



AMD launched the Radeon RX 6000 series of video cards on November 18th, 2020 known as Big Navi.  At the very high-end is the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT.  Right below that is the $649 Radeon RX 6800 XT and then below that is the $579 Radeon RX 6800.  We just recently overclocked the Radeon RX 6800 XT and achieved better performance that made it compete well with the GeForce RTX 3080 FE.  Now it is time to overclock the $579 Radeon RX 6800 video card.



At $579 the Radeon RX 6800 is in an odd place.  It is much more expensive than NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX...

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[Captindecisive]

I find the temperature testing of the new AMD cards a bit interesting. It seems they do really well in open environments as far as temperatures go. Inside a case, even with good airflow, the temperatures are far outside of what I've seen in bench reviews.

For instance, I have a 6800 inside a Lian Li O11D-XL | 3 x Noctua NF-S12 at the bottom as intake, 1 x Noctua NF-S12 rear exhaust, top dust filter removed; the 6800 on the stock cooler at stock settings hit 84C GPU and 101C junction (hot spot). With a 6900XT cooler swapped onto it, also at stock settings, it hit 72C GPU and 86C junction (hot spot). With the 6900XT cooler on, I was able to put the GPU slider all the way to 2600MHz and VRAM to 2150MHz with a 76C GPU and 91C junction (hot spot) temp.

 

[Stoly]

While I prefer the 3070 myself and hopefully get one in the near future. I think the 6800 is a great value. Its substantially faster than the RTX3070 on pretty much all counts except RT.

Overclocking brings it close to its bigger brother and can even beat the 3080 in a few cases.

BTW from what I've seen both the 6800 and 3070 can be found at over $900 so the retail price difference is moot.

 

[hubaduba]

Now that I've taken some tips from the reviews here I can add my results. With my case closed, the only airflow is the 3 fans on a 360mm radiator at the front for intake and 3 fans on another 360mm radiator in the back for exhaust. The fans are set to adjust speed according to the CPU temp (currently the only part cooled by the loop). I have an aggressive fan curve on the 6800, starting at 30% ( no zero fan) and hitting 100% by 60C.

I keep the power limit and memory maxed at +15%. With the case closed I can actually undervolt the chip to 975 mV and set the max to 2450, which seems to average about 2350 in game. In the closed case, Tjunction gets as high as 106C ( usually 101-102) and Tchip runs 84-86C.

To go higher I have to open the case and set the voltage to stock 1025 mV. Then the chip will run with a max speed of 2550 and averages about 2450 in game. Temps are much better with the case open - Tjunction maxes out at 86C and Tchip stays below 70C - usually around 64C.

I'm still hoping to grab a 6800XT or 6900XT, but if that doesn't happen in the next couple of weeks, I'll add the 6800 to the water loop and see how it does.

Igor's lab has some BIOS mod tools that might unlock the real potential, but the current versions seem to still be targeted toward the 5700 cards. If they update to add explicit 6800 support, I may get to try unlocking the memory and power limit boosts.