It's ben almost impossible to find any modern graphics card these days, let alone a top-end RX 6900 XT from AMD. But if you do manage to find one (hopefully at a reasonable price), then you should feel good knowing that it just broke another world record.
VideoCardz just reported of a PowerColor RX 6900 XT Liquid Devil GPU that set a brand-new world record in the 3DMark FireStrike Extreme benchmark. Overclocked to an insane 3.3 GHz, a clock speed never achieved before, for the AMD RDNA2 beast, it tallied a crazy-looking 41609 graphics score and an overall score of 37618 points.
The second placer in terms of overall score is another AMD RX 6900 XT, which tallied 34744 points. Weirdly, there's no sight of the competing NVIDIA RTX 3090 anywhere in the FireStrike Extreme Top 10, which adds a little bit more clout for the Radeon behemoth.
Previously, the old record for the Big Navi GPU was just over 3.2 GHz, which was achieved by the star German overclocker Der8auer.
Smashing World Records Like It's Nothing
When AMD released the RX 6900 XT, it went up directly against the monstrous RTX 3090 from NVIDIA, which was touted as the world's first legitimate 8K-capable graphics card. Most of the time, it fell short of Team Green's beast in several benchmarks, but especially in the ray-tracing enabled tests.
What NVIDIA didn't plan about, though, is the overclocking capability of AMD's RDNA 2 "Big Navi."
These chips can overclock like nobody's business, and the top-end SKUs are even more capable. The PowerColor RX 6900 XT Liquid Devil is one of those cards, which actually features a far more powerful, pre-binned Navi 21 XTXH die.
OGS, the team that set the FireStrike Extreme record, had what's essentially a card that can go far beyond what even the fastest consumer 6900 XTs can go.
The Navi 21 XTXH GPU is so much of a behemoth that with LN2 cooling, it can hit a theoretical maximum clock speed of 4 GHz, according to WCCFTech. If you're a computer hardware enthusiast, then you know how nuts that max clock speed sounds.
A Quick Look At The World Of Extreme Overclocking
That AMD RX 6900 XT would never have reached world-record-breaking speeds without specialized cooling. In order to achieve such a feat, you'll have to use liquid nitrogen to tame the chip's sky-high heat output and keep it stable. And that, friends, is something that you learn to do in the field of extreme overclocking.
There is a massive community of overclockers all over the globe.
In there, enthusiasts participate in competitions to see which one of them is the best at pushing their silicon to the absolute limit. Aside from smashing world records, extreme overclockers can also make a career out of the field.
It took a considerable amount of experience and know-how to push that RX 6900 XT to record-breaking speeds. But knowing AMD, this is just the beginning of what could be the Golden Age of Radeon graphics cards.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
