An air-cooled Radeon RX 6800 XT just set a single-GPU 3DMark record

For the time being, the top score for a single GPU setup in 3DMark Fire Strike belongs to an overclocker who goes by LUCKY_NOOB, who achieved the record result on a Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. What stands out about the achievement is not just the GPU, but that he obtained to top result using the card's stock air cooler.

That is almost unheard of when it comes to world benchmarking records. As recognized and sorted by HWBOT, the record score for a single GPU system now stands at 47,932. That was just enough to squeak by the 47,725 scored achieved by a GeForce RTX 3090 cooled with liquid nitrogen.

It is impressive for sure, but also not without a couple of caveats. The first is that while LN2 cooling was not involved for the GPU, it was used to keep LUCKY_NOOB's Ryzen 9 5950X nice and chilly. This allowed him to maintain a 5.4GHz clock speed, which is around 59 percent higher than the stock base clock.

He also disabled 3DMark's tessellation. That disqualified him from 3DMark's own Hall of Fame recognition, but is still acceptable for HWBOT.

There is also some ambiguity with regards to the card's actual clockspeed. LUCKY_NOOB notes that he set the set the boost clock to 2,650MHz in the Performance Tuning panel with the Radeon Software utility, but because of power limitations, that was "not the real clock during load."

It hardly matters, though. The end result is a record score on what is positioned as AMD's second fastest RDNA 2 card, using the stock three-fan air cooler. The Radeon RX 6900 XT does not release to retail until December 8.

"It's been a LONG time since we saw an AMD CPU and GPU on any of the 3DMark [records], this is refreshing," LUCKY_NOOB commented.

Indeed it is, and it could happen again next month when the 6900 XT arrives.