AMD’s mid-gen Radeon 6000 refresh, announced today, comprises of three new graphics cards: the $399 RX 6650 XT, the $549 RX 6750 XT and the $1099 RX 6950 XT. Each offers small boosts to memory speeds (18GBps versus 16GBps for the 6750 XT against the OG 6700 XT) and slightly higher power draw (250W versus 230W). That should translate into modest frame-rate gains, but this is very much a card that slots in to replace the older RX 6700 XT rather than sitting in its own distinct power band – despite a rise in asking price. You can think of it like the Ryzen 3000 XT CPUs that debuted a few months before Ryzen 5000 – a last hurrah before the true next generation arrives.
We’re looking at the middle child today, courtesy of PowerColor who provided us with the RX 6750 XT Red Devil. It’s an attractive card with a thick thermal solution, three fans and the usual port arrangement: three DisplayPort 1.4 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port. As the name suggests, it lights up in a hellish red colour, and requires two eight-pin auxiliary power inputs.
On our unit, one of the card’s three fans seemed to have been damaged in shipping, as it knocked into the side of the shroud at low fan speeds. Thankfully, the card has a zero RPM mode at idle and doesn’t knock once it hits around 50 percent fan speed, so this didn’t affect performance and the card’s temperatures remained low (and clock speeds high) throughout.
