INTRODUCTION

   With the new Ada Lovelace based GeForce RTX 4090 cards making their appearance even as i type these lines and the new RDNA 3 based Radeon graphics cards just around the corner gamers and professionals all over the world are getting ready for the upcoming and probably significant price cuts of previous models. For that exact reason i really wanted to test one of the top-tier cards that fell through the cracks and since i didn't climb high enough in terms of the current Radeon line i really wanted to test and see just how much better the Radeon RX 6950 XT model is compared to everything else. Still, just like every other card model there's a large number of cards based on the Navi 21 chip and so since this will probably be my last review of the Radeon RX 6XXX series i wanted something special and there's clearly not a better implementation than the TOXIC AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Limited Edition card by SAPPHIRE.

   SAPPHIRE Technology continues to be a world leading manufacturer and global supplier of innovative graphics and mainboard products, delivering its AMD Radeon based products to the PC markets addressing gaming, eSports and performance graphics enthusiasts as well as delivering an array of professional graphics products and embedded system solutions. Recently SAPPHIRE has penetrated new markets with a series of GPU Compute server systems targeting the blockchain and commercial cryptocurrency mining businesses.

   The TOXIC AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Limited Edition card by SAPPHIRE is a PCIe 4.0 x16 graphics card based on the 7nm "Navi 21 KXTX" chip featuring a total of 80 RDNA 2 compute units, 5120 stream processors, 128 raster units (or render output units), 80 ray accelerators (or ray tracing cores) and 320 texture mapping units. In case you're all wondering these numbers are exactly twice as much as the NITRO+ AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT 12GB model i reviewed a while ago (review here) so this card is a beast. The TOXIC Radeon RX 6950 XT LE sports a total of 16GB GDDR6 memory (18Gbps effective) on a 256-bit memory bus and as with past models AMD has used a small amount (128MB) of Infinity Cache memory on the GPU side to further boost the bandwidth of the card. Of course, once again technologies such as DirectX 12.0 Ultimate, ray tracing, FreeSync, smart access memory, variable rate shading, mesh shaders, sampler feedback, anti-lag, FidelityFX, image sharpening and super resolution are also supported. As for the card itself the SAPPHIRE TOXIC AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Limited Edition is a dual-slot card that measures just 270mm in length but what really steals the show is the fact that it's cooled both via an 360mm liquid AIO (GPU) and a hybrid quick connect fan (VRM/memory). Other features include a dual BIOS switch (normal/OC), aluminum backplate, 14 layer 2oz copper PCB (increased durability) and ARGB lighting (8 different modes via TRIXX software) and as for available connections the TOXIC AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT LE card has 3 full size DP v1.4a (with DSC) ports, single HDMI v2.1 port and a three pin ARGB connector.