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ASUS Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled Review - Incredible OC Potential

Name: ASUS Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled
Brand: ASUS
Price: 1000 USD

W1zzard

on Nov 25th, 2020,

in Graphics Cards .

Manufacturer: ASUS

(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. ASUS hasn't given us pricing yet for the RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled, but it is currently listed at Caseking in Germany for €987, which includes the 16% German VAT. A few hours ago, the price was €1086, guess these are changing quite a lot. €987 including VAT is €850 without VAT, which converts to roughly US$1000 and is what I used for the charts in this review.

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.

Radeon RX 6800 XT Market Segment Analysis
	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.