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Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6800 OC – Design and Features
The ROG brand carries a certain aesthetic and the RX 6800 Strix OC carries the weight of that industrial sci-fi look in every way. The front of the Graphic card is lined with strips of gray aluminum broken by rigid black plastic polygons and visible hexagonal screws. Even the design of the fans adds to the look with its aluminum-topped center shaft and logo. The metal backplate completes the look with its two-tone design and air vent.
The only thing that really breaks with this look is the bright RGB stripe on the side, but it adds a bit of customization and visual flair if you’re already using an RGB gaming rig.More striking than even the aesthetics is how tall it is. With a length of 13 inches and a little less thickness at the triple slot, it is much larger than AMD’s benchmark edition card. This extra size, however, has its advantages in terms of sound and warmth.
In fact, cooling and acoustics seem to be the name of the game with this card. In addition to having such a large heat sink, Asus has improved the fans with more blades and reduced air turbulence with a center fan that spins in the opposite direction. The center fan also has two additional blades to increase the static pressure in the heat sink, forcing more air between the fins for improved cooling. The heat sink also overlaps the PCB, allowing for a nice open vent on the backplate and improved exhaust. Checking the temperatures after several hours of play I found myself hovering around 58 ° C with a maximum temperature of 62 ° C.
The card also has a dual BIOS option, controlled by a small switch on the back of the card. You can choose between Performance or Quiet modes. Quiet mode limits the overall fan speed at the expense of a little extra heat, but since the GPU isn’t too loud in the first place, I left that off and opted for higher cooling.
Underneath that heatsink is the GPU itself, which is based on AMD’s RDNA2 architecture. As with all of our AIB reviews, we will redirect you to the original RX 6800 notice for full ventilation. The RX 6800 Strix OC delivers all the perks you would expect from an RX 6000 series graphics card: hardware-accelerated ray tracing, ridiculously fast clock speeds, improved performance per watt, PCI Express 4.0 and, of course, , 16 GB of GDDR6 video memory. It also has the same number of cores with 3840 shader units, as well as other improvements like AV1 decoding and software features like Radeon Boost and Radeon Anti-Lag.
This version however outperforms the original RX 6800 in pure speed. Out of the box, it features overclockings at Boost and Game Clock speeds. The biggest boost is its Game Clock which is rated at 1980 MHz, 165 MHz faster than the OG RX 6800. Boost Clock is a bit closer but is still 85 MHz faster at 2190 MHz. Of course, like all modern GPUs, the Strix will automatically speed up or slow down depending on power and thermal headroom, and during gaming it consistently clocked over 2100 MHz.
Finally, if you prefer to use multiple displays, you’ll be happy to hear that Asus has added a third DisplayPort 1.4 output. There is a trade-off though, as the USB Type-C connection for easily connecting VR headsets has been dropped. Sorry VR fans.
