Apple-Specific AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo Tested, $5000 GPU Loses To NVIDIA’s $1600 US RTX 4090

Hardware enthusiast, Der8auer, recently modified an AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card only found with the Mac Pro system and tested it against several leading graphics cards on the market. While the modified GPU is outclassed by the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founder's Edition, the graphics card beats others in head-to-head 3D Time Spy Extreme tests but comes at more than double the price of its competition.

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card utilizes the Mac Pro eXpansion design and form factor for the Mac Pro system. One major component missing from its design is an external power connection. The unique way that Apple has produced enough power for this graphics card is by taking a custom connector and a PCIe x16 connector and meshing them together to supply 400W of power.

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card also offers two Navi 21 GPU dies that transmit information between the two using the AMD Infinity Fabric interconnect. However, in the process, Apple did remove 20 Compute Units on each Navi 21 GPU die, dropping the CUs down to 60 units (3,840 Stream Processors). Navi 212 GPU dies come with 32 GB GDDR6 memory, transmitting at 16 Gbps through the 256-bit interface. The AMD Infinity Cache available on the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo is 128 MB.

Hartung modified the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X to work with a consumer Z790 motherboard by connecting the GPU to the PCIe expansion slot utilizing a PCIe x16 riser cable and soldered two ground wires along with two 12V wires from a 12VHPWR cable. The motherboard CPU was the Intel Core i9-13900K processor and also incorporated 32 GB of DDR5 C30 memory with 6000 Mbps memory frequency.

Hartung used 3D Time Spy Extreme G1 benchmarking software to test the GPUs for the test and initially ran into difficulty with the AMD Adrenalin Software driver. This was believed to be due to Apple intentionally blocking the ability for the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X to work outside of the Mac Pro system. Instead, Hartung used the Apple Boot Camp driver.

The graphics cards tested against the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo graphics card were:

The testing results showed that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition (FE) performed the best, scoring 123.49. However, the Apple-based AMD Radeon Pro W6800X graphics card beat the other three. The Asus Strix GeForce RTX 4080 GPU scored 93.28 against the score of 97.21 from the Apple AMD GPU, while the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (MBA) scored 89.78, and the Gigabyte Eagle GeForce RTX 4070 Ti GPU came in last place with a score of 69.78.

The AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo MPX Module sells from Apple for upwards of $5,000, but Hartung paid less for his testing version. Interestingly, three of the four cards that were tested against the Apple AMD GPU are from NVIDIA, which says quite a bit about the performance of the high-dollar Mac Pro graphics card against consumer-grade graphics cards.

News Sources: der8auer (YouTube), Tom's Hardware