Packaging

The Card

ASRock's card comes with a nice-looking white color theme. The main colors are various shades of white and gray—I like. The card uses a short PCB, which allows some airflow through the card for better cooling performance. On the back you get a metal backplate, which integrates nicely with the rest of the design.


Dimensions of the card are 30.0 x 13.5 cm, and it weighs 951 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 50 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1a. On the Intel reference card one port is marked with a black outline, but not on this card. That port supports higher bitrates (UHBR13.5), i.e. 4K up to 360 Hz, while the other two ports support up to 240 Hz, so I guess you have to test them to find the right one (if you have a monitor that requires such high transfer rates).

In terms of codecs, you get full support for H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1, both encode and decode. Worth highlighting is HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit encoding and decoding, which is a unique capability, and AV1 Screen Content encoding, which improves the quality of text in movies—fantastic for screen recordings or screen sharing.


The card uses two 8-pin connectors, plus PCIe slot power, allowing a maximum power draw of 375 W. Since the card's power limit is much power (200 W), there's only minimal benefit from this dual connector design.


ASRock's Steel Legend supports adjustable RGB lighting on the three fans and the logo.


Using this header, you may feed RGB from an external source, so that the graphics card displays the same RGB effects as your motherboard, for example.


If you prefer, the lighting can be turned off easily with this switch—no software required.

Teardown

The main cooler uses four heatpipes and provides cooling for the GPU, memory and VRM circuitry.


On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a big cutout to improve airflow.