Last night, Gigabyte"s gaming division Aorus held its "AMD Radeon MAX-Covered Cooling Launch Event" to announce its latest aftermarket Radeon RX 6800 series cards. It was streamed live on YouTube and Facebook.
At the event, the company unveiled RX 6800 AORUS Master and Gaming OC versions, one each for the 6800 XT and non-XT flavors. Some performance comparison numbers in a few recent demanding titles like Watch Dogs: Legion, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Assassin"s Creed Valhalla over the last-gen RX 5700 XT Gigabyte versions were also shown. As most of us already know, there is a huge generational leap in performance with the new RDNA 2 architecture.
The AORUS Radeon RX 6800 XT Master Type C - the name indicates the presence of the UCB-C display option - is the most expensive of the bunch priced at $899, which is a 38.5% premium over the $649 MSRP of the reference AMD card. Both the AORUS Master 6800 cards come equipped with the company"s new "MAX-Covered Cooling" solution.
The Gigabyte Gaming OC 6800 XT is slightly cheaper than the AORUS Master version at $849. For $50 less, you lose the USB-C display interface, some core clock, and get the trusty-old "Screen Cooling" WINDFORCE solution. This is still nearly 31% premium over the reference MSRP.
Finally, we have the RX 6800 non-XT AORUS Master version coming in at $719. As you"d expect from the name, this one doesn"t have the USB-C display option but the rest of the feature-set is at parity with the 6800 XT AORUS Master. This is perhaps the most affordable - relatively speaking - out of all these cards as it is commanding a premium of 24% over the reference MSRP of $579.
The availability of these cards is still up in the air as AMD and its partners are struggling to meet demand and it"s likely to stay this way at least till the end of this year.