AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT reference card could sport an all-black cooler

AMD is getting ready to drop its refreshed Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card, with some 'Super-style' upgrades including faster 18Gbps GDDR6 memory.

But in some fresh rumors, industry insider "Greymon55" has teased that AMD's in-house reference Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card will feature an all-black cooler. This would be a shift away from the silver + black + red theme of the first wave of Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs -- including the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT reference graphics card -- so an all-black cooler must mean business.

An all-black cooler reminds me of the earlier TITAN series GPUs from NVIDIA, where the TITAN X dropped almost to this day in 2015. NVIDIA used the GeForce GTX TITAN X as a much more premium-focused GeForce GPU with much more VRAM (12GB at the time) and a serious all-black cooling design.

• Read more: AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT teased for April: RDNA 2 refresh + 18Gbps GDDR6
• Read more: AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT: over 2.5GHz GPU clocks, higher 350W TDP
• Read more: AMD Radeon RX 6000 series refresh: 18Gbps GDDR6 cards in Q2 2022
• Read more: AMD could have its own 'SUPER' cards with 'Radeon RX 6000S' teased

AMD is reportedly launching its new RDNA 2 refresh GPUs on April 20 or April 21, with the refreshed Navi 21 and Navi 22 GPUs. The refreshed Navi 21 + 18Gbps GDDR6 will power the new Radeon RX 6950 XT, and the refreshed Navi 22 + 18Gbps GDDR6 will power the new Radeon RX 6750 XT and RX 6650 XT graphics cards.

In previous rumors, we heard AMD's new flagship Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card will see its GPU clocks at over 2.5GHz, which will be impressive to see -- and give NVIDIA's suped-up Ampere-based GeForce RTX 3090 Ti a run for its money.

AMD could also make use of TSMC's new 6nm process node, with the Navi 23 GPU inside of the limp-ish Radeon RX 6500 XT already making use of 6nm, with its new RDNA 2 refreshed GPUs. That would make for some interesting times in the coming months in the GPU war.