AMD and partners might be just a few weeks away from launching and releasing a new mid-range contender, aimed at 1440p PC gaming and packing 12GB of video memory. We got the first hint that the Radeon RX 6700 XT was in its advanced stages of development back in December when a BIOS file came to light. We think it was surreptitiously teased at the recent AMD CES 2021 keynote, and more recently the HardwareLuxx editor shared the standard SKU packaging logo.
Yesterday, Gigabyte was spotted registering eight new graphics cards with the EEC. Going by Gigabyte's naming conventions it looks like it is preparing at least eight models for release in that economic region, and it will probably be the same range as we get access to in Western Europe. Needless to say we are hoping AMD and partners have bountiful supplies of this GPU.
Twitter's @Komachi spotted this EEC listing. You can see the entry date was yesterday and that Gigabyte has registered eight SKUs as follows:
- GV-R67XT-12GD-B
- GV-R67XTAORUS E-12GD
- GV-R67XTGAMING OC-12GD
- GV-R67XTGAMING-12GD
- GV-R67XTEAGLE OC-12GD
- GV-R67XTEAGLE OC-12GD R
- GV-R67XTEAGLE-12GD
- GV-R69XT-16GС-B
Picking through the model codenames, you can see that it is readying Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards in the following flavours: Aorus, Gaming, Eagle and reference design. You will also note that there are standard and overclocked versions and every model comes packing 12GB of VRAM as standard.
It is expected that the Radeon RX 6700 XT comes with that 12GB of VRAM attached via a 192-bit memory bus, with memory bandwidth aided and abetted by AMD's Infinity Cache. Other recent leaks/rumours point to the RX 6700 XT having a GPU with 40 CUs, for 2560 streaming processors. This makes it like 'half a Radeon RX 6900 XT' (a card which has 80 CUs), and compared to the RX 6800 it has 50 per cent fewer CUs (the RX 6800 has 60 CUs). The RX 6700 XT should have a TDP of approx 200W.
With no sign of the RX 6700 model in the EEC filings it looks like we will have to wait even longer for this more affordable variant. Moreover, we don't have any leaked indications about what spec-snips will be made to realise the RX 6700 non-XT model. Last time around AMD reduced the base/boost clocks and cut 4 CUs to create the little brother of the RX 5700 XT, so this might give some indication of the specs the RX 6700 will have.
