XFX Mercury 319 RX 6800 XT Graphics Card Review

How Much Does It Cost?

This card is going to be a little more than a stock Radeon RX 6800 XT (review), however, what that truly means in early 2021 is up for interpretation. We know the cards are out of stock, you might see one, and lucky you if you do. However, until stock returns, which it absolutely will, I’m not nailing down a number here, which I’m sure you can appreciate.

Overview

There’s no doubt about it though, this is a seriously fast graphics card! However, it did throw up a few quirks in our testing, but nothing that felt of any major concern. It’s 3DMark performance scores were either below what was expected or way above. It seemed it just wasn’t triggering the boost at the right time in some of the synthetic tests. However, when it came to gaming tests, there was no real issue to be found, so I can’t really complain.

It managed an impressive 64 FPS in Control at 4K, which is a very demanding game. That’s 15 FPS more than the AMD reference card and 3 FPS more than the RTX 3080. Even with ray tracing enabled, it hit 40 FPS, which is respectable, and will improve when AMD fully implement their DLSS rivalling tech. Overall, the performance was either on par with rival Radeon RX 6800 XT cards or a good bit ahead of them, especially at the more demanding 1440p and 4K resolutions.

Build Quality

Top marks for XFX on this one, as they’ve really put a solid card together. It’s a large and fairly heavy GPU, but that’s hardly uncommon these days. It comes with a large cooling configuration that did a pretty amazing job of keeping things cool. Cool enough that it likely wouldn’t be much trouble to push the overclock higher too. The card runs cool and quiet, and in low load, it makes no noise at all thanks to zero RPM fan modes.

Of course, you get that ventilated backplate, as well as a built-in brace down the side of the card, which will help prevent unwanted drooping at the back of the card.

The only thing I would change is the Merc text on the backplate, it’s subjective though. I do think it looks cool, but a more understated look would be even cooler.

Should I Buy One?

It seems every RX 6800 XT we’ve tested has something to be impressed by, and the XFX Mercury 319 RX 6800 XT is no exception. Really strong 4K performance and competitive ray tracing performance make this a really fantastic gaming card. The cooler manages to keep the card surprisingly cool and quiet, even when it has spent all day being heavily benchmarked. When the stock looking healthy again, this is one card you’ll want to look out for.