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.
High-res versions are also available (front, back).