AMD released the Radeon RX 6900 XT LC (Liquid Cooled) in June of this year, though it was limited to OEMs. There is no official suggested retail price for the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled or availability information for board manufacturers in the retail market as AMD was not planning to supply it directly to the retail market at the time.
While the reference Radeon RX 6900 XT LC was theoretically only meant for pre-assembled systems, we’ve seen various offers selling the RX 6900 XT LC individually in Asia for months now, and now those offers have surfaced in Europe as well, allowing users in this region to purchase an RX 6900 XT LC without having to buy a complete system.
The cheapest offer in Europe comes from German retailer MindFactory, which offers the card for 1749 euros, the equivalent of 1980 US dollars. For comparison, the most basic RX 6900 XTs start at 1500 euros, so the difference for this liquid-cooled model isn’t that big.
A few days after these offerings started showing up in stores, Andreas Schilling of HardwareLuxx shared images of a mining rig equipped with 10 of these cards, showing that the graphics cards are ending up not in the hands of gamers, but back in the hands of miners. This is a bit strange in the case of this RX 6900 XT since you get exactly the same hash rate with an RX 6800 XT that costs much less, with a shorter payback period, although we have seen that some miners like to use exotic solutions, even if they don’t have the best price/performance ratio.
Compared to the air-cooled version of the Radeon RX 6900 XT, the Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled features an integrated water-cooling cooler in 120mm format in addition to an increased TGP from 300W to 330W, although it is still equipped with only two 8Pin external power connectors. Its gaming frequency has been increased to 2250 MHz and its Boost frequency to 2435 MHz, while it has a faster video memory at 18 Gbps, which increases the maximum bandwidth to 576 GB/s.
It will be interesting to see if AMD ends up releasing the RX 6900 XT LC worldwide, or if it will only be found in limited quantities in certain stores, as it has been so far. We will keep you up to date.