Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 6800 OC – Design and features
The ROG brand has a certain aesthetic, and the RX 6800 Strix OC bears in all respects the weight of that industrial SF look. The front of the graphics card is adorned with gray gunmetal aluminum strips torn by rigid black plastic polygons and exposed hexagonal screws. Even the design of the fans adds to the look with the aluminum-coated center shaft and the logo work. The metal back plate completes the look with its two-tone design and vent.
The only thing that really interrupts this look is the glossy RGB tape on the side, but it adds a bit of customization and visual flair if you’re already using an RGB gaming platform.More impressive than even the aesthetics is how big it is. With a length of 13 inches and only shy of the thickness of the triple slot, it is much larger than the reference edition board of AMD. This added dimension, however, brings benefits in sound and thermal.
In fact, cooling and acoustics seem to be the name of the game with this card. In addition to having such a large radiator, Asus has improved multi-blade fans and reduced air turbulence with a central fan rotating in the opposite direction. The central fan also has two additional blades to increase the static pressure in the radiator, forcing more air between the fins for improved cooling. The radiator also overlaps the PCB, allowing for nice open ventilation on the back plate and improved exhaust. Checking the time after a few hours of play, I woke up around 58C with a maximum temperature of 62C.
The card also has a dual BIOS option, controlled by a small switch on the back of the card. You can choose from performance or silent modes. Silent mode limits the overall fan speed at the expense of extra heat, but since the GPU isn’t too loud, I left this off and opted for more cooling.
Beneath that radiator is the GPU itself, which is built on AMD’s RDNA2 architecture. As with all our AIB reviews, we’ll walk you back to the original RX 6800 review for full detail. The RX 6800 Strix OC brings all the benefits you would expect from an RX 6000 series graphics card: accelerated hardware tracing, high clock speeds, improved watt performance, PCI Express 4.0 and, of course, 16 GB of memory GDDR6 video. It also has an identical core number with 3840 shading units, as well as other enhancements such as AV1 decoding and software features such as Radeon Boost and Radeon Anti-Lag.
However, this version increases the original RX 6800 speed. Out of the box, it offers overclocking to both Boost and Game Clock speeds. The biggest boost is for the Game Clock, which is rated at 1980 MHz, 165 MHz faster than the OG RX 6800. The Boost Clock is a little closer, but is 85 MHz faster at 2190 MHz. Of course, like all modern GPUs, Strix will automatically accelerate or slow down depending on power and thermal space, and during games, it was regularly agitated up to more than 2100 MHz.
Finally, if you’re running multiple displays, you’ll be pleased to know that Asus has added a third DisplayPort 1.4 output. However, there is a trade-off, as the USB Type C connection for easy connection of VR headsets has been abandoned. We are sorry fans of virtual reality.