AMD is allegedly considering allowing its board partners to launch custom Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics cards.

Custom AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT might happen

Prior to launch, we reported that AMD had not confirmed to AIBs the existence of Radeon RX 6900 XT SKU, although the AIBs we spoke with already knew about it. The announcement of reference AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT earlier this week and the few custom Radeon RX 6800 XT models yesterday, does appear to confirm that board partners were not allowed to prepare the custom 6900XT cards for launch.

We were told by AIBs this week that the delay of RX 6900XT to December 8th, could mean that AMD will, in fact, allow board partners to customize the design (eventually). AMD has no technical reasons to block AIBs from customizing the design, only financial reasons. It does not prevent AMD from disallowing AIBs to sell reference RX 6900XT cards, although that also has not yet been confirmed.

AMD Radeon RX 6900XT and RX 6800XT have a lot in common. The cards share the same clock speeds: 2015 MHz game clock and 2250 MHz boost clock. The SKUs also share the same memory layout: 16GB GDDR6 256-bit. More importantly, though, these cards use the same Navi 21 GPU with the same power requirements (300W). Thus, a custom Radeon RX 6900XT design would require very limited resources from AMD partners, as the board designs are ready, and cooling solutions are already preconfigured for the same power envelope.

Today, Andreas Schilling from HardwareLuxx reported that AMD is in talks with AIBs about custom RX 6900XT models. Hopefully, the customization won’t be limited to sticker replacement:

First custom designs of Radeon RX 6800XT were already unveiled by ASUS and MSI:

AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series Specifications
VideoCardz	Radeon RX 6900XT	Radeon RX 6800XT	Radeon RX 6800
Picture
GPU	Navi 21 XTX	Navi 21 XT	Navi 21 XL
Compute Units	80	72	60
Stream Processors	5120	4608	3840
Ray Accelerators	80	72	60
Texture Units	320	288	240
ROPs	128	128	96
Game Clock	2015 MHz	2015 MHz	1815 MHz
Boost Clock	2250 MHz	2250 MHz	2105 MHz
Memory	16GB G6	16GB G6	16GB G6
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB
Memory Clock	16 Gbps	16 Gbps	16 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	512 GB/s	512 GB/s	512 GB/s
Memory Bus	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Total Board Power	300W	300W	250W
MSRP	999 USD	649 USD	579 USD
Release Date	December 8	November 18	November 18

Source: HardwareLuxx