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An AMD graphics card that launched in 2021 managed to beat both Nvidia’s RTX 4080 and AMD’s own flagship, the RX 7900 XTX. Surely that would make it one of the best GPUs you could buy right now — unfortunately, it’s much too pricey to be considered worthwhile, and you can’t even use it in a regular PC.
The crazy GPU in question is the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo. Thanks to tests performed by a hardware expert, we were able to see it run far outside of its usual environment. Here’s how it fared.
AMD’s Radeon Pro W6800X Duo is normally intended to run inside the 2019 Mac Pro. Apple sells it as a separate module, and it costs a hefty amount — a whopping $5,000. Despite these obstacles, we were able to see it run inside a regular PC, all thanks to der8auer. The YouTuber is an extreme overclocking expert, and it’s apparent that he also doesn’t shy away from other challenges, even though they may be quite costly.
First, some quick facts about the Radeon Pro W6800X Duo. The Navi 21-based card is made up of two graphics dies, not just one, and they are connected using AMD’s proprietary Infinity Fabric tech. It’s not exactly two full Navi 21 dies, though, because AMD disabled some compute units (CUs) on each, trimming them down a bit. In addition, each GPU has 32GB of GDDR6 memory and a total of 512GB/s memory bandwidth.
The number of displays that the GPU can support is certainly impressive. Apple’s product page tells us that the card can run up to eight 4K monitors, four 5K monitors, or six Pro Display XDRs. And if you want to have not just one, but two Radeon Pro W6800X Duo cards, you can — with an external Infinity Fabric Link connection, two Duo modules can be joined to create a monstrosity that houses a total of four GPUs.
This powerful GPU was made for workstations and would never end up in a gamer’s hands by accident. It can only run on the 2019 Mac Pro, but der8auer convinced it to run on a standard motherboard and put it through some benchmarks to check out the performance. To make this happen, the overclocker had to perform quite a lot of tweaks.
The standard AMD Adrenalin drivers also presented a problem since the card was not meant to be run outside of an Apple computer. Fortunately, the YouTuber was able to overcome that obstacle by using the Apple Boot Camp driver. Once the GPU was all set to go, der8auer installed it in a system with the Intel Core i9-13900K and 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory.
The benchmark results show that the card is worth the price for those who can make use of it. It proved to be 4% faster than the RTX 4080 and even 8% faster than the RX 7900 XTX, which means that it was able to beat AMD’s current flagship consumer card. However, Nvidia’s RTX 4090 stands undefeated — it still won by 27%.
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