I got tired of waiting for the prices to drop. My 1070ti died last week and I got lucky on a XFX Merc 6900xt for $950 cad on Amazon. The card is huge! It didn't even fit in my Corsair 680x with the 360 aio in the front, so I picked up a 7000x and refreshed my build. This card is super cool and quiet, and fast! It's like 2.5-3x faster than the pascal card!
Followed in your footsteps and snagged a used reference 6800 (non-XT) for $360 + $10 shipping. After sales tax, $407. Not bad me thinks.- Alright folks, the eagle has landed.
The 6800xt is an OEM Dell/Alienware pull. Its actually smaller in all dimensions from my old 980ti and is a true 2 slot card which comes as a bit of a surprise. Has a nice light up red "Radeon" logo on the side of the card which I can see through the tempered glass side of my case. Put it through a bunch of paces last night with 3DMark/Uniengine benchmarks and it appears to be stable as a rock and pulling down "stock" 6800XT scores which is a good sign. Temps are remarkably solid, capping out at 80c with stable clock and ram speeds after a 20 minute 3dmark stability test run which I didn't expect from an OEM cooler.
Now that I am less concerned about the actual stability of the system, I look forward to trying out some of the fun "new" card features like Freesync (which my monitor has supported for three years but my 980ti did not) and some of the upscaling stuff (ran the 3dMark XeSS test last night) and posting some of my real world feedback here after finally getting to experience the features for myself after hearing about them for so long.
Will worry about tweaking and ocing/undervolting etc at a later time. Look forward to actually trying out some of my more demanding games as well and seeing how they function.
Feels good man.
Of course I'll keep stress testing and looking for stability quirks for the duration of the return window. Any additional suggestions folks might have outside of 3dMark and Uniengine (that don't cost a ton of money) to test my system/GPU would be appreciated as well.
Thanks for coming on this PC building journey with me folks. I missed the 2xxx/5xxx generation thanks to prices/mining and then I had to wait till the ass end of the 3xxx/6xxx generation to pick up an upgrade and it feels damn good.
Followed in your footsteps and snagged a used reference 6800 (non-XT) for $360 + $10 shipping. After sales tax, $407. Not bad me thinks.
Will definitely need to run some tests after recieving it to verify everything is kosher, but I can't wait. Fortunately, eBay policy is very buyer friendly so if there's anything faulty, I have some piece of mind.
Yeah, you got it spot on. It's for my brother's PC where I'll be giving him my old 1080p 144 Hz Freesync monitor. The extra powah under the hood future proofs him in case he wants to upgrade to a 1440p monitor down the road. If not, just turn on Radeon Chill at 144 fps and call it a day. The 6800 is very power efficient to start since it's pretty much a wide and slow design that also benefits from the larger 3-fan reference cooler.I always wanted the 6800XT but have found my 6800 to be very solid and on a nice spot for the performance for the wattage spectrum. For 1440p gaming I basically set it to max everything and forget it.
I also enable Radeon Chill on a ton of games. Play Deep Rock Galactic the aforementioned settings I think it was pulling like 50W at a floor of 90 FPS. The CPU was at ~25 so something like 80W while playing a game, plus whatever overhead? It keeps my office from turning into a sauna but with all the performance I could want.
Followed in your footsteps and snagged a used reference 6800 (non-XT) for $360 + $10 shipping. After sales tax, $407. Not bad me thinks.
Will definitely need to run some tests after recieving it to verify everything is kosher, but I can't wait. Fortunately, eBay policy is very buyer friendly so if there's anything faulty, I have some piece of mind.
Glad to hear you're satisfied with your 6800XT.-Amen on the ebay buyer policy. I've stated a few times now that it's basically the only place I'll go to pick up used parts.
Look forward to hearing how the 6800 works out. I've fired up a few of the more taxing games I own @ 1440p (DX: Mankind Divided, Arkham Knight, Titanfall 2, Fallout 4... I know I know not the newest test suite) and holy crap the framerate is basically locked to 144fps and the card is rock solid.
Freesync is also an absolute game changer in terms of making everything feel even smoother. Love the OC options built into the driver as well.
AMD done good on RDNA2 by my current estimation, and for the price vs the NV competition it feels like a no brainer at the moment.
Glad to hear you're satisfied with your 6800XT.
Yeah, I plan on running Timespy and Unigine Superposition to see if there's issues and to make sure clocks, power, and temperatures are all within expectations. Might throw in Furmark as well for kicks. Unfortunately, I don't play PC games all that much anymore so I don't have an up-to-date Steam library with something graphically challenging. I might try scripting 3DMark and Unigine to run for a few hours at a time to simulate a gaming session instead.
- Yeah, 3dMark and Uniengine Benches are, IMO, more useful for stability and load testing than any sort of performance benchmarking. The 3080 I got first got called out by instability in 3Dmark, and the 6800XT passed with flying colors.
Precisely. I still think we're in the infancy stage for true RT games. Currently RT is just a visual enhancer and games are being built for current gen consoles, which have weaksauce RT performance, so I'm not concerned.$360 for a 6800 is real good. The only real downside (besides buying an obvious mining card) is that RT performance is not that great... but I imagine by the time a hardcore RT game comes out you'll probably want a new card.
I have been on my soap box about Freesync since 2016; it changed budget gaming.-Amen on the ebay buyer policy. I've stated a few times now that it's basically the only place I'll go to pick up used parts.
Look forward to hearing how the 6800 works out. I've fired up a few of the more taxing games I own @ 1440p (DX: Mankind Divided, Arkham Knight, Titanfall 2, Fallout 4... I know I know not the newest test suite) and holy crap the framerate is basically locked to 144fps and the card is rock solid.
Freesync is also an absolute game changer in terms of making everything feel even smoother. Love the OC options built into the driver as well.
AMD done good on RDNA2 by my current estimation, and for the price vs the NV competition it feels like a no brainer at the moment.
Right on. I have more hours logged in 3DMark than many games in my steam library. I go through a lot of hardware. It is the most efficient way to evaluate baseline performance and stability. It goes on sale for $5 on Steam frequently, no reason for DIYers to not own the full version.The 3DMark stress tests will catch a lot of issues, not just on the GPU side but system wide.
You can change the number of loops in the advanced version. My personal observation is that if it doesn't fail within the first few loops, it will not fail.
Chill is a great feature. In most of the games I play, even a 6600XT doesn't break a sweat. I set Chill to max 120fps, as I only do SP gaming at this point. As I have written here before, the 6600XT with Chill uses less power than my RX6400 in the same title and settings.I always wanted the 6800XT but have found my 6800 to be very solid and on a nice spot for the performance for the wattage spectrum. For 1440p gaming I basically set it to max everything and forget it.
I also enable Radeon Chill on a ton of games. Play Deep Rock Galactic the aforementioned settings I think it was pulling like 50W at a floor of 90 FPS. The CPU was at ~25 so something like 80W while playing a game, plus whatever overhead? It keeps my office from turning into a sauna but with all the performance I could want.
I have been on my soap box about Freesync since 2016; it changed budget gaming.
...
On topic: There are some good used deals out there. For NIB, AMD pricing is attractive on some AIB models. Nvidia can suck it on the lower tiers. They don't have a single card worth considering in the $300 and under range, where most gamers live. Of course many of those same gamers have been gaslit so hard, that they will overpay for Nvidia cards anyways. Tragic really.
Yeah FreeSync is great, can play a lot of games at 1440p now with my dinky 1660 Super since I don't have to worry about 60 fps minimums any more and can just focus on 60 fps averages. Not enough that I don't want to upgrade though.
Also don't really think there is any Nvidia gpu worth touching below the RTX 3080 12GB. Anything less than halo products and AMD curbstomps Nvidia right now on price and/or VRAM in every performance tier.
- I'd throw the 3080 10gb in as well, but yes, below that the 6700xt is a better buy than the 3070 or 3060ti, 6600xt is a better buy than 3060, 6600 is a no brainer vs the 3050.
Even the 6800 vanilla sort of exists in a no man's land performance wise but tends to be priced vs the 3070 which it absolutely beats.
At the end of the day, for most people stuck way back on the 9xx/10xx generation and AMD equivalents, just about anything is a huge upgrade nowadays.
Does the 3080 10GB still sell for nearly the same price as the 3080 12GB though like it used to?
Look in reddit hardwareswap. My current card on there is going for $700-750. I'm sure you can find a good price on a 3080. I've seen some sold for $6-650.Does the 3080 10GB still sell for nearly the same price as the 3080 12GB though like it used to? 3070 is just a straight no go for me at 8GB of VRAM so the only Nvidia gpus I even bother looking up these days are to see if 3060 Ti prices fall since I'd take one of those for around $300 since they're 30% faster than 6650 XT at 1440p in Techpowerup's testsuite. For similar prices though I'd take 6700 XT and it's 12GB any day over the 3060 Ti.
Look in reddit hardwareswap. My current card on there is going for $700-750. I'm sure you can find a good price on a 3080. I've seen some sold for $6-650.
There's several 3060ti cards for $350 and under. I saw one recently sold for $270.Nah I have no interest in a card like that, not really looking to buy anything for over $300.
There's several 3060ti cards for $350 and under. I saw one recently sold for $270.