AMD RX 6800 XT Breaks Record Using Stock Cooler

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Despite having been available for less than three days, AMD's new RX 6800 XT graphics card is quickly starting to live up to the positive hype. One renowned overclocker has already used the card to break the 3D Mark Fire Strike benchmark record, surpassing the far more expensive Nvidia RTX 3090 despite just using the stock cooling fans.

Overclocker Lucky_n00b broke the single GPU record by overclocking the AMD RX 6800 XT to 2.65 GHz. This compares to a standard clock speed of 2.015 GHz, and the standard boost speed of 2.25 GHz. The record-breaking run scored 47932 points, compared to the previous record of 47725, held by overclocker Safedisk using a liquid nitrogen cooled RTX 3090, specifically the Asus ROG Strix OC Edition.

The most impressive part of the result is that it was done using stock fans on the AMD reference card. Meaning that the $649 RX 6800 XT not only beat a $1799 variant of the RTX 3090, but did so without using any aftermarket fans or the liquid cooling that aided the previous record holder. This means that once equipped with liquid nitrogen cooling, the reference RX 6800 XT will almost certainly breeze further past the far more expensive card.

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While the record breaker used a liquid cooled AMD Ryzen 5950X CPU alongside the graphics card, the stock RX 6800 XT demonstrated exactly why it has been so well-received by gamers. Beating a card with more than twice the price tag shows just how significantly AMD have made up the previous generation gap with Nvidia. There are caveats though in terms of comparing performance in a real world gaming scenario: The second generation ray tracing performance of Nvidia's latest cards is markedly better than the performance of AMD's first generation solution; Nvidia is yet to release its alternative to Smart Access Memory; and AMD is working on a competitor to DLSS 2.0 AI super sampling.

It is important to remember that benchmarks such as 3D Mark Fire Strike are not always representative of real world gaming performance, and that the expensive RTX 3090 is aimed more at content creators who can fully utilize the 24 GB of extra fast GDDR6X memory. However, the results are still incredibly impressive, demonstrating that AMD's RX 6800 XT more than holds its own against strong competition from Nvidia.

The main difficulty for gamers looking at one of these new cards is getting hold of them. All of the new cards from AMD, Nvidia, and aftermarket manufacturing partners are in very short supply, meaning that luck and patience are just as important as having money available when it comes to the latest graphics hardware.

AMD RX6800 XT is available now in limited numbers.