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ASUS Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled Review - Incredible OC Potential
(116 Comments) »Introduction
The Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC LC is the ASUS flagship Radeon RX 6800 XT "Big Navi" design. LC stands for Liquid Cooled, which already tells you everything this card is about. While other vendors are using air-cooling for their top dog designs, ASUS opted for an AIO watercooling solution this time around. The card comes with a 240 mm radiator attached to the card; it's pre-filled, maintenance free, and ready to go.
The ASUS Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled is based on the 7 nm "Navi 21" RDNA2 silicon, which has an 80% increase in compute units over the previous-generation RX 5700 XT. Each of those compute units has one Ray Accelerator unit, which, as the name suggests, handles certain raytracing workloads. The memory amount is doubled to 16 GB, and AMD is using 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. At 256 bit, the memory bus width has stayed the same. To make up for that, AMD devised an ingenious solution it calls Infinity Cache, which is a 128 MB on-die level 3 cache that runs at an astounding 2 TB/s, accelerating most workloads that aren't too data-intensive. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review goes into more details on the RDNA2 architecture.
ASUS is using a triple-slot casing for the card, which houses the waterblock, a pump, and a slow-running fan that provides cooling for the minor components on the card. The VRM design has been upgraded to a 17-phase configuration, and you get a dual BIOS, too. As expected, idle fan stop is present as well. Out of the box, the ASUS RX 6800 XT STRIX OC LC ticks at a rated boost clock of 2360 MHz, which is quite an increase over the 2250 MHz reference.
Update Nov 26: ASUS has provided us with pricing, it's $899, which matches the Newegg price listing that went up after our review, too. I've updated the pricing throughout this review and remade the relevant charts.
| Price | Shader Units | ROPs | Core Clock | Boost Clock | Memory Clock | GPU | Transistors | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RX Vega 64 | $400 | 4096 | 64 | 1247 MHz | 1546 MHz | 953 MHz | Vega 10 | 12500M | 8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit |
| GTX 1080 Ti | $650 | 3584 | 88 | 1481 MHz | 1582 MHz | 1376 MHz | GP102 | 12000M | 11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit |
| RX 5700 XT | $370 | 2560 | 64 | 1605 MHz | 1755 MHz | 1750 MHz | Navi 10 | 10300M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 2070 | $340 | 2304 | 64 | 1410 MHz | 1620 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU106 | 10800M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 2070 Super | $450 | 2560 | 64 | 1605 MHz | 1770 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU104 | 13600M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| Radeon VII | $680 | 3840 | 64 | 1802 MHz | N/A | 1000 MHz | Vega 20 | 13230M | 16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit |
| RTX 2080 | $600 | 2944 | 64 | 1515 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU104 | 13600M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 2080 Super | $690 | 3072 | 64 | 1650 MHz | 1815 MHz | 1940 MHz | TU104 | 13600M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 2080 Ti | $1000 | 4352 | 88 | 1350 MHz | 1545 MHz | 1750 MHz | TU102 | 18600M | 11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit |
| RTX 3070 | $500 | 5888 | 96 | 1500 MHz | 1725 MHz | 1750 MHz | GA104 | 17400M | 8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RX 6800 | $580 | 3840 | 96 | 1815 MHz | 2105 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RX 6800 XT | $650 | 4608 | 128 | 2015 MHz | 2250 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| ASUS RX 6800 XT STRIX OC LC | $900 | 4608 | 128 | 2110 MHz | 2360 MHz | 2000 MHz | Navi 21 | 26800M | 16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit |
| RTX 3080 | $700 | 8704 | 96 | 1440 MHz | 1710 MHz | 1188 MHz | GA102 | 28000M | 10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit |
| RTX 3090 | $1500 | 10496 | 112 | 1395 MHz | 1695 MHz | 1219 MHz | GA102 | 28000M | 24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit |
Packaging
The Card
Visually, the ASUS STRIX uses a mixture of black and various shades of gray, nice shininess there indeed. The front cooler shroud is made out of plastic, while the backplate is metal.
Dimensions of the card are 28 cm x 14.5 cm.
Installation requires three slots in your system.
The watercooling radiator is permanently attached to the card. It comes pre-filled and is ready to go, no maintenance is needed.
The cables for fan power and RGB look a little bit messy, some additional sleeving would have been nice.
On the GPU side, everything looks much cleaner, though.
Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB type-C with DisplayPort passthrough.
The card uses two 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 375 W power draw.
ASUS has installed a dual-BIOS feature on the STRIX that lets you toggle from the default "Quiet" BIOS to a "Performance" BIOS, which runs higher fan speed. Clock and power limit are identical and both BIOSes have fan stop.
Two fan headers near the back of the card can be used to connect case fans to the graphics card. These fans will now run in sync with the graphics card radiator fans—stopped when idle and increasing in speed depending on the GPU temperature. Since the graphics card is the primary heat source in most computers, this makes a lot of sense and helps keep noise levels down.
The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series doesn't support multi-GPU.
Teardown
The waterblock uses a large copper baseplate that provides cooling not only for the GPU, but also the memory chips. Note the thermal pads, which indicate that VRM cooling is handled by the main heatsink. That's the reason why there's a fan installed on the graphics card, too.
ASUS has combined the pump and waterblock into one compact unit that looks great.
Not sure if you noticed in the previous pictures, but one row of memory chips is missing thermal pads. Guess someone forgot to install them at the factory. Memory overclocking works fine, though, so this doesn't seem to be having any effect.
The backplate is a very nice design that's thicker than other backplates and feels very rigid, nicely done. Note the thermal pads on the back, arranged in a memory chip pattern—is this a hint that we'll see the same cooler on the GeForce RTX 3090, too?
High-Resolution PCB Pictures
These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.
High-res versions are also available (front, back).
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