Your testing methodology is flawed.
The memory should not be overclocked in these cards.
These cards show much better results once you push the GPU to the max & leave the memory at stock.
It seems that you & all the other testers I have come to respect in almost 2 decades of reading tests & benchmarks , have become fixated on maxing the mem to the point of "no crush" without even comparing the results.
I hope you still have at least one of the cards at hand to make 1 more test, you will see that stock mem@2000mhz + GPU@2600mhz gets much better results than mem@2140mhz + GPU@2600mhz .
I am active on a different language forum & a local system builder/fine tuner corroborated these results with several different 6800XT cards.
( he is the one that Identified this issue , I don't own such a card at the moment)
He is now testing a 6900XT .
As a bonus , once you leave the memory at stock you get a few extra watts for higher gpu oc.
I don't care that much about the actual value of the specific cards ( definitely not at current pricing ) it is however very important for me to make sure you testing methodology isn't flawed.
I seriously hope you still have one of the cards for one more test .
Define "much better results" for me, please. The overclocking is not supposed to be the major focus, because silicon lottery and other elements come into play. Frankly, I wouldn't bother overclocking most GPUs -- it's just not enough of a gain to warrant the added power and potential stress on the hardware. Anyway, a 7.5% memory OC isn't much, and neither is the 3-7% increase in performance I measured with the 'max' OC I achieved.
Dropping the memory OC and trying for a slightly higher core OC is totally within the parameters of what can be done, and may improve performance more than what I've shown. More effort on tuning voltages, fan speeds, etc. could also improve performance. Without physically modding the cards, though, I strongly doubt you'll see more than a 5% improvement over what I achieved, which is a 10% potential total improvement. In practice, I'm sure it would be far less than that -- probably only a 1-2% difference from my max core + max RAM OC results. And there's a very good chance that, despite what you're positing, overclocking the memory actually
does improve performance.
Let me give you just one example, because based on this I see no reason to bother retesting anything more.
| Setting | Asus Strix LC RX 6800 XT OC | Asus Strix LC RX 6800 XT OC StockRAM | Asus Strix LC RX 6800 XT |
| Metro Exodus | 1080p Ultra | 125.09 | 123.2 | 119.46 |
| 1440p Ultra | 105.43 | 103.69 | 99.77 |
| 4k Ultra | 69.44 | 68.52 | 64.81 |
So, in at least one game, using the same card in all three cases (the Asus Strix LC), dropping the RAM OC but leaving the GPU at the same 2600 MHz setting reduced performance by 1-2%. So much for my "flawed" methodology.
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