ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X Review

Name: ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X
Brand: ASRock
Price: 830 USD

W1zzard

on Dec 22nd, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASRock

(26 Comments) »

Introduction

Today, we have with us the ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X, the company's most premium custom-design version of the RX 6800 XT "Big Navi." Although a giant with motherboards, ASRock is one of the youngest in the graphics card business, making its debut exclusively with the AMD Radeon brand. Given "Big Navi" is the first enthusiast segment GPU by AMD since ASRock's foray, the RX 6800 XT Taichi ends up being the most top-shelf graphics card by the company. The Taichi X combines a custom-design PCB with ASRock's 3X cooling solution. The "gearwheel" design language of ASRock has been well received by enthusiasts and is used across the company's motherboard and graphics card families.

AMD launched the Radeon RX 6800 XT this November, introducing the RDNA 2 graphics architecture that meets all the feature requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate, including real-time raytracing. This is particularly important as RDNA 2 is deployed across the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S next-gen consoles, which is where the money is for game developers, and optimizing for these consoles makes it easier to optimize for AMD Radeon.

Real-time raytracing is the final frontier with 3D graphics, and while fully raytraced interactive 3D remains only theoretical, the latest graphics architectures, starting with NVIDIA "Turing," are able to combine conventional raster 3D graphics with certain raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, and illumination, to vastly improve realism. Even these tiny bits of raytracing call for enormous amounts of compute power and dictate the use of fixed-function hardware. AMD RDNA 2 architecture relies on an enormous uplift in the GPU's compute capabilities, by a doubling SIMD resources over the previous generation "Navi" RDNA architecture. The most compute-intensive task of intersections is handled by fixed-function hardware called Ray Accelerators. Each of the 72 RDNA 2 compute units on the RX 6800 XT has one.

An off-shoot of the enormous SIMD uplift is that conventional raster 3D performance is significantly increased over the past generation, with AMD claiming that the RX 6800 XT performs in the same league as NVIDIA's flagship GeForce RTX 3080. Based on the 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon, the Radeon RX 6800 XT features 72 out of 80 RDNA 2 compute units physically present on the silicon, amounting to 4,608 stream processors, 72 Ray Accelerators, 288 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. The company has also doubled the memory amount to 16 GB and is using the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. The memory bus width, however, has remained 256-bit wide, which works out to 512 GB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD claims to have overcome the bandwidth shortfall through an innovative feature it calls Infinity Cache, a 128 MB on-die cache that operates at an enormous data-rate, assisting the memory.

Running at up to 2360 MHz compared to the 2250 MHz reference, the ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X in this review features the company's highest factory overclock for this GPU. Powering the card is a powerful 16-phase VRM solution that pulls power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and power limits are increased as well. Keeping it all cool is the Taichi 3X cooling solution, which uses a thick aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by three fans. The card is well into the triple-slot category and features plenty of RGB LED embellishments, and certain handy features, like an ARGB control that lets you synchronize your rig's lighting to that of the graphics card, and dual-BIOS. In this review, we tested the card with its default "P" (performance) BIOS and the quieter "Q" BIOS. ASRock is pricing the RX 6800 XT Taichi X at $830—the card goes against established rivals from the AMD ecosystem, such as the Red Devil, Sapphire NITRO+, and ASUS ROG STRIX.

Radeon RX 6800 XT Review 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
ASRock RX 6800 XT Taichi	$830	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
RX 6900 XT	$1000	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$1500	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

ASRock created a new design for their RX 6800 Series Taichi cooler. They kept the blocky, industrial design of previous Taichi products, including appearances of various stylized cogwheels. The ring around the center fan is now held in a brighter silver, and the backplate design has been quietened a bit compared to the RX 5700 XT Taichi.

Dimensions of the card are 33 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1755 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes two standard DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB type-C with DisplayPort passthrough.

The card uses three 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 525 W power draw.

I love this feature—you can easily turn off all RGB lighting effects with a physical button—no software installation required.

This pin header lets you connect external ARGB hardware, like LED strips, which then run the same RGB effects as the graphics card.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series doesn't support multi-GPU. In this area, you'll find the dual-BIOS switch, which lets you toggle from the default "Performance" BIOS to a "Quiet" BIOS that runs slightly lower clocks, lower voltage, and lower fan speed.

Teardown

The ASRock heatsink is a very elaborate design of multiple components. Eight heatpipes quickly move any heat away from the GPU core and to a large array of fins, where it is dissipated in the airflow of the three fans.

Once the main heatsink is removed, this metal bracket becomes visible; it stabilizes the card against sagging.

The metal backplate protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

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.