In the past weeks, AMD silently released a new version of their Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card. The Navi 21 XTXH graphics chip is designed to one-up existing Navi 21 XTX designs by enabling higher clocks at higher power limits with higher voltage. We're familiar with ASRock's "OC Formula" branding from their motherboards, where it signifies the best of the best, designed for overclockers. This designation is now being introduced to their AMD Radeon graphics cards with the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula.

ASRock has clocked their card at 2475 MHz rated boost, which is the highest frequency of all air-cooled RX 6900 XT cards. Only the watercooled Sapphire Toxic Extreme and PowerColor Liquid Devil go a bit higher. Just to put things into perspective, the AMD reference RX 6900 XT is rated for a boost of 2250 MHz—that's a 225 MHz difference, or 10%. It would have been nice to see an overclock on the memory, too—as our manual OC testing results show, the GDDR6 chips can definitely take it.

Averaged over our 22-game-strong test suite at 4K resolution, the RX 6900 XT OC Formula achieves the unthinkable: It is faster than NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3090. Long overdue, the day has finally come—an AMD graphics card is able to overtake NVIDIA's current-generation flagship graphics card! Who would have thought that just a year ago. This makes the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula 7% faster than the AMD reference RX 6900 XT, 12% faster than the GeForce RTX 3080, and 13% faster than the RX 6800 XT. Very impressive numbers. There are still some RTX 3090 custom designs, like the ASUS STRIX and MSI Suprim, that are yet a little bit faster than the OC Formula.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT is a great choice for 4K gaming, or lower resolutions at high refresh rates. Just be aware that AMD's DirectX 11 overhead is bigger than on NVIDIA, so you'll tend to get CPU limited a bit sooner than on the green team. With this generation, AMD is introducing support for DirectX raytracing—as it stands now, the rendering technology of the future. Currently, performance costs are high and game support fairly limited, so it might not be the most important feature to have today. On the other hand, considering that the 6900 XT is an expensive card in the ultra-high-end segment, you probably want to be prepared for the next years. We only tested two RT games so far, but it seems the loss in performance is bigger than on NVIDIA, who improved in that area with Ampere. Remember, this is AMD's first-generation raytracing implementation. Performance is still very respectable, not that far behind the RTX 3080. Now that RT hardware is available for both AMD and NVIDIA and game developers are making console games on AMD's new RDNA2 architecture, it'll be interesting to see how raytracing performance evolves in the coming months. This week, we posted our Performance Analysis for Resident Evil Village, and it shows very decent AMD raytracing performance.

The new Navi 21 XTXH graphics chip is designed to operate at higher power levels than the XTX version, which means the heat load is higher, too. The ASRock cooler achieves good temperatures with 76°C, but noise levels are fairly high, and you'll definitely hear the card working in your case when running at full load. Other RX 6900 XT cards do better here, including AMD's own reference design, but they emit much less heat at the same time. Our new apples-to-apples cooler testing reveals that ASRock's heatsink is slightly weaker than the AMD reference design cooler. That's a bit surprising since both are triple-slot with three fans. Given this limitation, I think ASRock picked a reasonable balance between thermals and noise levels. I really love the ASRock cooler shroud; it's made from thick metal and built like a tank, feeling even more solid than NVIDIA Ampere Founders Editions. Owing to a dual-BIOS feature, you can switch to a "quiet" BIOS easily. That's the promise at least. Unfortunately, I found the quiet BIOS to only be marginally quieter than the "performance" BIOS. Contrary to expectations, temperatures were 4°C lower with the quiet BIOS despite reduced fan speed. That's because that BIOS runs the GPU at lower clocks and voltages, which is great for bringing down heat output. For some reason, ASRock didn't fully optimize the fan-speed setting to benefit from that; I think there's plenty of headroom to quieten down the fans.

Non-gaming power consumption of the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula is improved because of the new Radeon 21.4.1 drivers. Gaming power draw is much higher, though, reaching 391 W on average. That's a 30% increase in power for 10% performance gained, a definite loss in efficiency. Still, the card remains 5% more energy efficient than NVIDIA's RTX 3090, so that shouldn't be a dealbreaker; rather, it looks like the price you'll have to pay if you want the highest performance. ASRock has significantly added to the VRM design of their card, increasing the number of phases from 16 to 21, and also uses stronger 90 A power stages for the GPU VRM.

Overclocking the OC Formula worked REALLY well. Even at stock, it reaches performance that's close to the maximum OC performance of the other RX 6900 XT cards we've tested. Once you OC the Formula, you can reach very impressive frequencies. On my sample, I sustained 2.85 GHz actual GPU frequency in benchmarking 100% stable. With a bit of extra juice or some better cooling, 3 GHz seems in reach. Just gotta make sure you increase the power limit setting in Wattman. While AMD has always been very miserly with the slider limits in their control panel, XTXH goes up to 4 GHz for the GPU and 2.6 GHz for memory—plenty for everyone.

Originally, the Radeon RX 6900 XT launched at a $999 price point, which didn't even last for a day. What little supply made it to the markets was quickly swooped up by scalpers, miners, and gamers. With no stock in sight, prices have risen since, to at least $1500 for a Radeon RX 6900 XT (without XTXH). ASRock hasn't given us any indication of pricing for the RX 6900 XT OC Formula, but I'm convinced it will be priced at $2000, at least. Converted to US dollars excluding tax, some stores in Europe have it listed at $2098, $2540, and $2890. That's A LOT of money, and there's no way to justify the cost both in an absolute sense or relative to other high-end cards, like the RX 6900 XT, RTX 3090, RTX 3080, or RX 6800 XT. On the other hand, in our poll "How much are you willing to spend on your graphics card?" four percent picked the answer "Will pay anything for what I want." That's who this card is for—people who can afford it and want the fastest, or overclockers looking for the best base card to mod, tweak, and strap LN2 to for breaking world records.