Radeon RX 6950 XT vBIOS Shows 5 GHz Cap, 332W Power Limit

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AMD's Navi 21 KXTX is rated for up to 332W.

According to a leaked BIOS for this board, AMD's upcoming flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card will leverage a Navi 21 GPU featuring a new KXTX moniker. In addition, the new GPU will feature a whopping 5.0 GHz frequency cap and support a considerably higher total power limit than the Radeon RX 6900 XT boards. 

AMD's Radeon RX 6900/6950 XT-series graphics cards use a fully-fledged Navi 21 XTX graphics processing unit with all 5,120 stream processors enabled.

Meanwhile, the original Navi 21 XTX GPU has a clock rate cap of 2.80 GHz; the more capable Navi 21 XTXH has its frequency limiter set to 3.0 GHz (some overclockers have managed to get around that constraint and boost the GPU clock up to 3.20 GHz). In contrast, the newly uncovered Navi 31 KXTX has a cap of 5.0 GHz, which essentially means no cap. 

To enable high frequencies, AMD's Radeon RX 6950 XT boards with the Navi 21 KXTXH GPU will also feature a 325W (Sapphire) and a 332W (MSI) total power limit, up from 255W for AMD's own Radeon RX 6900 XT based on the Navi 21 XTX silicon.

The information comes from TechPowerUp, which accidentally published firmware .rom files for MSI's and Sapphire's Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics cards and their internals revealing critical details about the boards late on Friday. While the website was quick to remove the BIOSes from its collection, people from Chiphell and VideoCardz were fast enough to capture all the essential information from these files and made several interesting revelations. So, unless the said BIOS versions were preliminary or fake, we can be reasonably sure that the data is correct.

AMD's Radeon RX 6950 XT is undoubtedly the ultimate Radeon RX 6000-series graphics card with maximum performance and no limitations (in fact, it is faster than the Radeon RX 6900 XT by 17% in some benchmarks). It appears to carry an all-new Navi 21 KXTX GPU presumably binned for very high clocks, lacks a maximum frequency cap, has a massive 332W power limit, and is equipped with 16GB of GDDR6 memory with an 18 GT/s data transfer rate. 

Regarding GDDR6 memory, the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics boards will be equipped with memory chips from Samsung or SK Hynix, whereas AMD's reference RX 6900 XT only supports memory from Samsung.

A previous leak suggests that the Radeon RX 6950 XT could arrive with a $1,099 MSRP with a rumored launch date of May 10.
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