XFX has a mighty fine offering here with the Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster MERC 319 BLACK, which stands up against some of the very best brands selling custom Big Navi graphics cards.

The MSRP of this card is $599, a full $200 more than an RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition. That price also puts the iGame GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Vulcan OC-V in GeForce RTX 3070 territory, and as we’ve seen, the RTX 3070 offers significantly better performance.

In terms of gaming performance however, all three RX 6700 XTs we have tested perform near enough identically. Averaged across our 12-game test suite, the Gaming OC is just 1% faster than the reference card at 1080p and 1440p, while it is an exact match for the Nitro+ at the latter resolution.

Instead, the reason to opt for the Nitro+ over a different model will come down to the cooler, and here Sapphire really delivers the goods. Not only does the Nitro+ run 5-9C cooler than AMD’s reference card, but it is significantly quieter too. The fans barely spin up to 1000rpm, at which point they are effectively inaudible. Inside a case, there is no way you would hear the Nitro+ over the noise of your system fans.