We're a little more than a month out from the reveal of AMD Big Navi graphics cards, but Team Red has just graced us with the first look at its upcoming Radeon RX 6000 Series.
AMD Radeon took to Twitter late Monday afternoon, revealing what looks to be an absolute monster of a graphics card, along with a brand-new cooler design. And AMD fans can even get a closer look at the card on Fortnite of all things, through AMD's Battle Arena in the same game. If you want to log in and take a look at the card, you can do so with code "8651-9841-1639".
Take a first look at the design of the new Radeon RX 6000 series. Our upcoming @AMD #RDNA2 graphics cards will feature a brand new cooler design, and you can study every angle yourself on our Fortnite Creative Island. 8651-9841-1639. pic.twitter.com/KGQAOXDivZSeptember 14, 2020
Luckily, if you don't want to go through downloading Fortnite and navigating to AMD's custom map, some friendly users have shared plenty of screenshots on Twitter.
I took a couple screenshots for anyone interested. The code in the post brought me to a matchmaking hub that had 5877-8461-8283 on the wall pic.twitter.com/pdysKfK7rcSeptember 14, 2020
AMD hasn't shared anything in terms of specs or performance, but at least we know for sure that the company is indeed going with the Radeon RX 6000 series as a name for the upcoming graphics cards. The rest we'll just have to wait until October 28 to see for sure.
Let's do some speculation anyways, though
While AMD hasn't shared any hard specs or performance information, that doesn't mean we can't learn a bit about the upcoming graphics cards by looking at the pictures.
The first thing that's immediately apparent is that AMD's reference board for whatever card it is – probably the flagship – is using a triple-fan design. This isn't exactly new ground for AMD to cover, 2018's Radeon VII also had a triple-fan reference design, but it does mean that this is likely going to be a bit of a monster graphics card.
For instance, the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series, led by the RX 5700 XT, all used single-fan blower-style reference coolers. That decision wasn't exactly popular, but the cards didn't run into much problem keeping themselves cool – at least in our testing. The move to a triple-fan design could be a sign that the graphics card will need more significant cooling, either because the power requirements are much higher or AMD is really pushing clocks high (or both).
Another thing we can glean from this image is the 2 x 8-pin PCIe power connection. This configuration can deliver up to 375W, so it honestly doesn't really tell us much about how much juice the graphics card will take – both the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 require the same power connectors, even if you have to connect those to a 12-pin adaptor for the Founders Edition.
It does tell us that AMD is not adopting the 12-pin power connector, however, which will likely be excellent news for anyone who doesn't like living the dongle life on their desktop computer.
We're currently in the process of downloading Fortnite to see what's happening in closer detail, but you can be sure we'll update this article if there's some significant detail we've missed.
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