AMD has debuted a new top-tier Radeon graphics card, the RX 6900 XT liquid cooled. This golden sample binned 6900 XT hits higher clock speeds, has faster memory, and it's cooled by an AIO water cooler like some of AMD's previous flagships, like the Fury X.
The 6900 XT Liquid has the same 80 compute units as the standard 6900 XT, but it improves clock speeds at the game clock level by a full 235MHz, and the boost clock now reaches 2345MHz - a 95MHz increase. Memory is faster too, at 18Gbps, delivering a near 15% increase in memory bandwidth. It does come at the expense of power, but not as much as you might think. It has a TDP of 330W, 10 percent higher than the 6900 XT and 6800 XT.
To keep temperatures reasonable and enable these higher clocks, the 6900 XT employs a 120mm AIO radiator and fan combo, with braided tubing and a pump that's built into the GPU itself. It's still a dual slot cooler, but there's no fan — so it must be a chunky block under the shroud.
Performance is estimated to be around 10% higher than the standard 6900 XT, which should make it the most powerful GPU in the world for general rasterization. The 3090 will pull ahead in some games and both it and the 3080 will continue to best AMD's new flagship in ray tracing performance, but until we see a 3090 Ti or equivalent, the 6900 XT Liquid could be the most powerful GPU in the world.
The price for this new version will be rather hefty, unfortunately. System integrators are charging an $800 premium for the card, so expect any individual units to sell for north of $1,500.
