AMD doesn’t make mention of the Radeon RX 6700 on the official site. That hasn’t stopped Sapphire from announcing said card. It’s a curious GPU, truth be told, as it shoehorns 2,304 shaders and 10GB of memory via a 160-bit bus. Confused? Let’s roll out the Table of Doom to explain the card’s provenance.
| RX 6750 XT | RX 6700 XT | RX 6700 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch date | May 2022 | Mar 2021 | June 2021 |
| Architecture | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 |
| Codename | 22 KXT | 22 XT | 22 |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x16 | PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| Process (nm) | 7 | 7 | 7 |
| Transistors (bn) | 17.2 | 17.2 | 17.2 |
| Die size (mm²) | 335 | 335 | 335 |
| Boost clock (MHz) | 2,600 | 2,581 | 2,495 |
| Shaders | 2,560 | 2,560 | 2,304 |
| GFLOPS | 13,312 | 13,215 | 11,497 |
| Compute Units | 40 | 40 | 36 |
| Infinity Cache (MB) | 96 | 96 | 80 |
| Memory size (GB) | 12 | 12 | 10 |
| Memory bus (bits) | 192 | 192 | 160 |
| Memory clock (Mbps) | 18,000 | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| Bandwidth (GB/s) | 432 | 384 | 320 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | N/A |
| Power connectors | 2x 8-pin | 2x 8-pin | 1x 8-pin |
| Power (watts) | 250 | 230 | 220 |
| MSRP ($) | 549 | 479 | Unknown |
Analysis
RX 6700 appears to be a cut down version of the Navi 22 die also powering RX 6750 XT and RX 6700 XT. Compute Unit count drops from 40 to 36, correlating to 2,304 shaders (36×64) alongside lower peak frequency. Crunching numbers reveals, for example, RX 6700 XT, released in March 2021, has approximately 15 per cent more shading power.
Snips at the top end are matched by reductions in the memory department. Framebuffer drops to 10GB and memory bus to 160 bits. This leads to RX 6700 XT offering 20 per cent more bandwidth and RX 6750 XT 35 per cent more.
Looking at Sapphire’s card in particular, as it is the only one we can draw any meaningful conclusions from, shows a solitary 8-pin power connector, which is a minor boon for cable management. The card’s 220W TDP also makes sense as there’s less power under the hood.
Sapphire uses a simple-looking dual-fan cooler which fits into a two-slot form factor. Measuring 242mm long, 119.85mm wide, and 41mm tall, it has appeal in a wide range of chassis. Outputs include a single HDMI and three DisplayPort.
On paper at least, it’s a good card for high-framerate FHD and solid QHD gaming. The addition of FSR 2.0 also ought to enable triple-A games to be played at reasonable framerates at 4K.
RX 6700 XT cards start at around £500. We believe the Sapphire card needs to be priced at no more than £450 for effective segmentation between it and RX 6650 XT / RX 6700 XT.
Should it hit that price in the coming days, RX 6700 becomes a solid contender for those currently contemplating rival GeForce RTX 3060 / Ti cards.
