CHEAPEST RDNA 2 CARD YET

Radeon RX 6700 XT joins the family

AMD HAS A NEW RDNA 2 CARD, the RX 6700 XT, which joins the range at the bottom. Essentially a replacement for the 5700 XT, it competes between the Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, or so AMD would have it. The GPU has 40 compute units, 160 texture units, 2,560 stream processors, and 64 ROPs. The base clock speed is 2,321MHz, with a maximum boost of 2,581MHz. It carries 12GB of GDDR6 over a 192-bit bus, giving a maximum memory bandwidth of 384GB/s. You also get 96MB of zippy Infinity Cache. This equates to a peak single precision computing power of 13.21TFLOPs. AMD quotes frames rates at 1440p of up to 126fps for Fortnite, and 71fps for Dirt5 in Ultra High, and it’ll chew through 230W at full throttle.

The RX 6700 XT has less memory than its bigger siblings, which all carry 16GB, but it has 4GB more than the Nvidia rivals. While it has two thirds of the compute units of the RX 6800, it runs at significantly faster clock rates. The upshot is a card geared toward 1440p gaming, rather than 4K. If you fire up the ray-tracing option, AMD recommends 1080p. Initial benchmarks look adequate— stick to 1440p, and it’ll trade blows with the RTX 3060 Ti, and can match the RTX 3070 at times. The cost is $479—not cheap considering the cut-down chip and relative performance. We’ll give you a full review next month.

Nvidia made a fuss about limiting crypto-mining on its newest card, but AMD says it has no plans to limit mining capabilities on its RDNA 2 cards. It claims they are tuned to gaming, and don’t make cost-effective mining cards. It has a point, but when there’s a quick profit to be had, and a shortage of high-power cards, you can bet 6000-series cards will be worked to death mining digital coins, rather than doing their proper job: entertaining us.