With the Gaming OC, Gigabyte designed a cost-effective RX 6700 XT that doesn't go overboard with cooling, yet has sufficient cooling power to beat the AMD reference card at both noise and temperatures. With just 69°C under full load, the card has plenty of thermal headroom left. At the same time, noise levels reach 34 dBA, which is definitely audible, but not "loud" or "noisy." Some other Radeon RX 6700 XT cards we've tested are much quieter, whisper-quiet even, but they use much bigger coolers, too.

The card stays cool throughout any amount of gaming and benchmark stress testing, with 55-70C depending on whether you have the card at stock fan settings or manually tweaked and cranked up.

Sapphire's Nitro+ thermal solution has delivered excellent results in all our reviews in recent years, and the RX 6700 XT Nitro+ is no exception. We measured much better temperatures and noise levels than on AMD's reference card: 70°C under load, with 27 dBA fan noise. Especially the noise levels are a huge improvement over the AMD card; the Nitro+ is whisper quiet even with the most demanding games.

The ASUS STRIX thermal solution is the best of all the card we've reviewed today. Our new apples-to-apples heatsink test confirms that. The challengers are right behind, differences are small. Still, ASUS achieves the best temperatures in our testing, with only 60°C, a whopping 20°C better than the AMD reference, which is quite decent already. These impressive temperatures come at the cost of fan noise, though. With 36 dBA, the card is noticeably louder than all other RX 6700 XT custom designs tested today.