The overclocking and graphics card enthusiast known as der8auer finally got around to testing the most powerful video card currently available for Mac, the Radeon Pro W6800X Duo. It is a product that AMD has developed expressly for Apple and, as the name suggests, mounts two GPUs in a single card – to be precise, the same Navi 21 that is found on the top of the 6000 series range, i.e. the Radeon RX 6900 XT and the 6950 XT, although 20 CUs per die are disabled.
The project of using the card outside of its original intended purpose is a difficult one for a number of reasons. To begin with, the most obvious: it costs the beauty of € 5,750, an absolutely senseless figure and out of the market even by making a very quick superficial analysis of the price/performance ratio. In addition, the card includes a number of proprietary technologies specific to the latest Mac Pros, including a significantly different power system than seen in other systems.
In short, der8auer, born Roman Hartung, he had to work a lot, above all to adapt a standard 12VHPWR power cable to the card’s MPX (Mac Pro eXpansion) connector to supply it with the approximately 400W needed to operate. Not to mention the difficulties with the drivers and to stabilize everything.
But the benchmarks finally arrived, albeit amidst many crashes and power problems. The results are admirable on an absolute level: let’s talk 97.21 FPS average in 3DMark’s TimeSpy benchmark. That’s 4% more than the latest generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 can do, and 8% more than AMD’s current flagship, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
But, as we said at the beginning, the exorbitant price (in addition to the objective difficulties in making it work in Windows) makes the experiment purely academic. After all, even with the difficult conditions of the current market, with € 5,750 you can buy almost 3 RTX 4090, and only one of these is faster than the W6800X by about 21% (not to mention the whole ray tracing thing ). It’s true that Hartung managed to find it “on offer” and spent “only” €3,500. Big deal!
