ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT

All said and done, I have to say I’m quite surprised with the overall performance of the ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT Phantom Gaming D 12GB OC. It produced some impressive scores in our benchmarks, and this is all thanks to its overclocked GPU. What’s more, the impressive Phantom Gaming 3X Cooling System, along with its Polychrome ARGB lightning, makes this card really stand out above the rest.

ASRock is doing things right with the Phantom gaming D OC series. That OC suffix with Radeon products barely means anything anymore. The Radeon cards are not configured at clock frequency anymore; they need to match an assigned power value (TGP); this is also why results can vary little per card as another factor then come into play. On average, you'll gain perhaps 1 or 2% additional performance coming from reference card performance. So you need to weigh in if spending money on OC models really is worth your while. The same can be said about taking; all cards run into roughly the same limitations in power. That also means that all cards combined with a memory tweak (which is also limited) will stretch another 5 to 7% performance out of the card. My advice, go with a product that you like based on price, aesthetics, acoustics, and cooling, as the rest is downright trivial. Aside from the current price levels, overall, the 6700 XT series are very much recommended. You'll retrieve a commendable performing product in that WQHD range at very satisfactory temperatures and acoustic levels. It's an enchanting Full HD and Quad HD graphics card with abilities at Ultra HD as well. Raytracing performance on this generation RDNA2 architecture is average, and of course, AMD could really use something like DLSS. The 12 GB memory is nice. The 192-bit wide memory bus, however narrow. The added L3 cache is bypassing the bulk of that challenge, and that works up to 2560x1440 indeed; however, the L3 cache will always be a bypass, a limitation even as with future more GPU bound games, you're prone to run out of that cache and get a full penalty of that 192-bit wide memory bus. If you have the willingness to shell out such an amount of money for this product range, recommended as ASRock does offer a nice sensible product here. But the lowest price we could find was hovering above the 850 USD/EUR mark, and that's a no-go in my book. Much like any other brand, that has little to do with ASRock, as the product overall is delightful.

With the Radeon RX 6700 XT, AMD is releasing a highly competitive SKU for the upper midrange—a segment for which NVIDIA launched two cards recently, the RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti. This market is very important because it defines the serious gamer willing to spend a little bit extra for higher FPS or better image quality without going overboard. The Radeon RX 6700 XT uses the Navi 22 GPU, while the Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6900 XT are powered by Navi 21. Both are built on the same RDNA2 architecture with support for raytracing and a 7 nanometer production process—Navi 22 is basically a cut-in-half Navi 21 with 192-bit memory. The only deviation is that the L3 Cache (Infinity Cache) is 96 MB on Navi 22, while it is 128 MB on Navi 21.