Which 6900 XT should I get?

[kubikolos]

So I'm curious which 6900XT should I get. They are priced the same so it depends on which model is better. 

It's gonna be paired with 5800X + 32 GB 3600 MHz RAM.

 

Should I go for Red Devil or XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319?

[Ryuikko]

The red devil is definitely the better card, I'm surprised that those 2 are at the same price point

[DoctorNick]

4 minutes ago, Ryuikko said:

The red devil is definitely the better card, I'm surprised that those 2 are at the same price point

Yeah.. Red devil is usually much more expensive, I would go red devil

[RONOTHAN##]

First, are they the "Ultimate" or "Limited" edition cards respectively? If they aren't both are fine and you should just get whatever you think looks the best. If they are, then I'd lean more towards the MERC since it's got a slightly better input filter (barely, but might get you an extra 5MHz overclock and might have slightly less coil whine), but both cards are very similar. 

 

How does the OC Formula rank against those two cards? Usually it's about the same price when I've looked, but it's a significantly better card than both of those. If the price difference is less than about ~$50-100 I'd go for that card instead.

[MingLee420]

11 minutes ago, kubikolos said:

So I'm curious which 6900XT should I get. They are priced the same so it depends on which model is better. 

It's gonna be paired with 5800X + 32 GB 3600 MHz RAM.

 

Should I go for Red Devil or XFX SPEEDSTER MERC 319?

if you want the cheapest but still good temps n noise id get the Xfx merc or qic

edit: didnt fully read the post, the speedster is good and cheapest i think

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, MingLee420 said:

if you want the cheapest but still good temps n noise id get the Xfx merc or qick

It's a 6900XT, the loudest thing on those cards isn't the fans, it's the coil whine. On my Red Devil I can have fan speed maxed out and the coil whine is still noticeably the loudest part of the card. It's mostly because they have remarkably small input filters, so I'd expect crazy amounts of coil whine on basically every 6900 XT excluding the ones that redesigned the reference input filter (ASRock OC Formula and MSI Gaming Z, I'd still expect some whine with those since it is still a 300+W GPU, but not to the same degree as the Red Devil or other mostly reference cards). The Merc and Red Devil have basically the same input filter so either way, the card will whine like absolute crazy and noise between the two won't be noticeable either way. 

[kubikolos]

I'm gonna do the Undervolt anywy I guess  Strange thing cause Red Devil Ultimate and basic Red Devil was at the same price point. I wanted to buy Ultimate but I hesitated and they sold this bad boy out I had RX 480 from XFX and this card died a week after purchase... 

[Ryuikko]

14 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

How does the OC Formula rank against those two cards?

Afaik the oc has a higher base clock speed but the ultimate has a higher boost clock speed. The ultimate dosent have a lot of room for oc though since iirc it's basically max factory oc. Though can't tell you if they both have xtxh chips since you might as well slap a waterblock on it to get the most potential of the gpu

[RONOTHAN##]

Just now, kubikolos said:

I'm gonna do the Undervolt anywy I guess

I mean, that's somewhat defeating the point of getting a 6900 XT, those cards like voltage, performance scales with more voltage and more power a fair bit (I saw 10% gains in performance just by disabling the power limits, not touching anything else), even on standard air cooling (unlike Nvidia cards). If you're gonna undervolt anyway you might as well just get a 6800 XT instead. 

 

Undervolting has 3 advantages: decrease heat output on high heat cards, decrease power consumption to get more out of the power limit, and get higher clocks out of thermally limited clocks. For the first point, you might as well just buy a lower heat card like a 6800 XT instead. For the second point, 6900 XTs are super easy to disable power limits of anyway, so it's not like you'll have to fight with it anyway. For the final point, 6900 XTs excluding the reference card all have really nice coolers on them, so you won't really be thermally limited anyway. 

 

6 minutes ago, Ryuikko said:

Afaik the oc has a higher base clock speed but the ultimate has a higher boost clock speed. The ultimate dosent have a lot of room for oc though since iirc it's basically max factory oc. Though can't tell you if they both have xtxh chips since you might as well slap a waterblock on it to get the most potential of the gpu

I was mainly talking about price wise. The OC Formula is easily top 3 6900 XT models, debatably #1, and the price for it is usually relatively low for other 6900 XTs. Factory OCs on 6900 XTs are pretty useless since they're all power limited anyway, and once you bypass the power limits you'll want to setup a new OC anyway, and since the OCF has the better capacitor configuration it should clock a bit better. OCF and RDU are XTXH cards so they'll both be unlocked. If getting an OC Formula doesn't cost that much more than a Red Devil (Ultimate) you really should be going OCF. 

[kubikolos]

9 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

I mean, that's somewhat defeating the point of getting a 6900 XT, those cards like voltage, performance scales with more voltage and more power a fair bit (I saw 10% gains in performance just by disabling the power limits, not touching anything else), even on standard air cooling (unlike Nvidia cards). If you're gonna undervolt anyway you might as well just get a 6800 XT instead. 

Yeah that's right. I have a good airflow in my case and I guess I don't have to do the Undervolting. I wanted to do this just to test it. 

[-rascal-]

My vote goes to the Sapphire NITRO+ (you dont need the AIO Toxic version).

IMO, one of the quieter and cooler (temp wise) designs.

Plus, the PCB is well over engineered.

[kubikolos]

Yeah I wanted to get Nitro+ SE (XTXH) but it's price is astronomous or it's not available.