Overall and Final Verdict
The Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT launch has been exciting and a great follow up to Nvidia’s launches as well. That is of course not including the supply issues affecting nearly all of the launches packed into the last quarter of 2020. It’s clear that XFX hasn’t been sitting on their hands between the 5000 series and the 6000 series. The old cooler design is gone as well as the entire naming scheme they used to have. Thicc is no longer and we now have the speedster series with their top-end mercury card. Specifically, the RX 6800 XT Merc 319 which I took a look at today. It’s all new look which has what I like to think of as speed dimples aren’t as clean and simple as some of XFX’s past designs. But it isn’t far off, sticking with black and not going overboard with RGB lighting at all. It also dropped the chrome from the Thicc lineup for silver accents which are a little more muted.
XFX learned from mistakes from their early 5700’s and have improved the cooling design here with extra ventilation, a larger cooler, larger cool plate, and thermal pads on everything. The result is solid cooling performance, though I will say cranking the fans up doesn’t result in much more. They upgraded the VRMs over the stock AMD offering as well. My biggest complaints about the card are that it is huge and that when you do crank the fans up it is a lot noisier than it should be. The noise shouldn’t be an issue as long as you stay close to the stock fan profile which isn’t bad at all. As for the size, well you just need to make sure this beast is going to fit into your case. I know a lot of SFF cases aren’t going to be able to fit this and a lot of the other aftermarket cards from this generation on both sides. I also noticed that the MERC 319 doesn’t have a way to turn off the top lighting for anyone who might want that. Unless I missed it.
Now for pricing XFX has this their flagship card with an MSRP of $799 which is a lot more than the MSRP of the stock RX 6800 XT which was $649. The $799 is in line with some of the other RX 6800 XT aftermarket cards and cheaper than a few as well. More importantly though, until RX 6800 XT card availability improves the pricing isn’t going to matter. Especially when stock is selling on eBay for twice its MSRP. SO for now, the XFX MERC 319 RX 6800 XT looks to be a solid card and a good option if you come across availability. As far as its pricing, we will have to reevaluate that later when there is enough availability for it to matter. It is $100 less than the RTX 3080 Suprim X that I recently reviewed which puts it about right with its performance but more than a lot of the other RTX 3080’s on the market. Which would make the decision hard given that the 3080 does come out ahead in more of the games tested.
Live Pricing: HERE
