Our fifth Radeon RX 6950 XT review comes from ASRock, AMD's youngest graphics card board partner. ASRock became famous offering great motherboards at reasonable pricing, and the Radeon RX 6950 XT OC Formula is the company's flagship card based on the refreshed Radeon RX 6950 XT design, which is an evolutionary upgrade over the RX 6900 XT with higher clocks, better power limits, and faster memory. ASRock's card is a factory overclocked premium custom design with stronger VRM, higher power limits, and increased clock speeds.

Averaged over our whole game test suite at 4K resolution, we find the RX 6950 XT OC Formula to be faster than most other RX 6950 XT cards we've tested so far. The OC Formula is 3% faster than the Gigabyte RX 6950 XT Gaming OC, 2% faster than the Sapphire Pure, and matches the MSI Gaming X Trio—pretty nice considering ASRock isn't charging any extra money for the factory overclock. Compared to the AMD RX 6950 XT reference design, the uplift is 5%, which makes ASRock's card 11% faster than the original RX 6900 XT. When looking at NVIDIA's offerings, the RX 6950 XT OC Formula beats the RTX 3080 by 16%, RTX 3080 Ti by 6%, and much more expensive RTX 3090 by 4%. Only the RTX 3090 Ti is 4% faster, at almost twice the price. While performance is always near the top, it does vary greatly between games, so make sure to check out the titles you're playing. AMD's new Radeon RX 6950 XT is the perfect choice for gaming at 4K. With the newest drivers, AMD seems to have improved performance in situations where the games end up CPU-limited, and older DirectX 11 titles also show good gains.

Where AMD does have the weaker offering than NVIDIA is ray tracing. This is due to AMD's architecture, which executes some RT operations in shaders, while NVIDIA has dedicated hardware units for it. The Radeon RX 6950 XT still achieves very respectable performance comparable to the RTX 3080. In many newer titles, which have less demanding, but less impressive ray tracing effects, differences are smaller, though. I don't think RT performance is a dealbreaker for the RX 6950 XT, but it's something you should be aware of. If ray tracing is the only thing that matters to you, which it shouldn't be, the RTX 3080 Ti might be an alternative to consider. AMD is also actively engaged with all major developers to get them to optimize their games for AMD's architecture, and the driver performance improvements in this review confirm that AMD's driver team is always looking for opportunities to improve performance.

Visually, the RX 6950 XT OC Formula adopts the great design of the RX 6900 XT OC Formula. Under the hood, the thermal solution is identical, too. No changes to the PCB design or VRM, either. The GPU chip and memory chips have been changed to align with RX 6950 XT specifications. No complaints about that as it actually makes a lot of sense to reuse designs and keep supply chain requirements simple, which definitely helps achieve competitive pricing—remember, ASRock's card comes at MSRP. Temperatures of the RX 6950 XT OC Formula are great. Under full load, the card only reaches 69°C, which is among the lowest temperatures we've seen in our RX 6950 XT reviews. The drawback is that noise is pretty high. With 39 dBA, the card will be well audible in your system; other RX 6950 XT cards do much better here. ASRock includes a dual BIOS capability with their card. The second BIOS is a "quiet" BIOS that runs the card at a less aggressive fan curve. On top of that, clocks and voltage are slightly lower, too, which dramatically reduces the heat output of the card. In that mode, we measured 34.5 dBA—much better. Temperatures are only 66°C now, which is even lower than the default BIOS, albeit due to lower clocks and voltage. Given those temperatures, I feel like ASRock could have dialed down fan speeds a LOT more to achieve a whisper-quiet card that still runs decent temperatures. This would also make the "quiet" BIOS a real alternative to the primary one. Right now, the "quiet" BIOS is just quieter, but could be much quieter. Just like all other Radeon RX 6950 XT cards, the ASRock RX 6950 XT OC Formula includes idle fan stop, which will shut down the fans completely in idle, desktop work, internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

While NVIDIA has dialed up power consumption to unseen levels with their RTX 3090 Ti, the RX 6950 XT is more gentle in its power usage. We measured 410 W during gaming for the ASRock OC Formula, which is over 100 W more than the original RX 6900 XT, or +35%. Even when considering the performance gained, this results in a 10% loss in energy efficiency. Still, the RX 6950 XT is more energy-efficient than the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti. It seems higher power draw and, consequently, increased heat output are things we'll have to live with on the highest-end SKUs of this generation, and possibly going forward. During my other RX 6950 XT reviews, I sometimes experienced system shutdowns, which wasn't the case with the ASRock RX 6950 XT even though it has relatively high power consumption. It's also strange that the RTX 3090 Ti cards ran fine on the same hardware. Maybe it's due to ASRock's 21-phase VRM design, which is more powerful than any other RX 6950 XT we've tested so far. I'll do more testing. Either way, make sure to pair the RX 6950 XT with a high quality PSU, and only use one connector per power cable.

Graphics card prices have come down a lot this year and are now almost reaching MSRP levels. AMD announced a $1,100 MSRP for the RX 6950 XT. ASRock's RX 6950 XT OC Formula is currently listed at those same $1,100 and in stock with what looks like good volume. This makes the card an extremely attractive choice for those who want to go beyond the AMD RX 6950 XT reference design, but aren't willing to spend even more money on their card. Right now, Newegg has the Sapphire Pure for $1,560 and ASUS TUF and MSI Gaming X for $1,650; only the PowerColor Red Devil and Gigabyte Gaming OC are $1,100, too. There's no way I'd spend over $1,300 for any RX 6950 XT custom design. Even $1,200 will be hard to justify. For $1,100, the RX 6950 XT is a great option if in the market for a flagship card, though. The RX 6900 XT is selling for around $1,000 now, so the ASRock RX 6950 XT gives you another 10% performance for 10% more money—very reasonable. Both the RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti are just way too expensive unless you need the 24 GB VRAM. What's a solid alternative is the RTX 3080 Ti—for $1,200, it offers better ray tracing performance, but slightly lower gaming performance. Still, the RX 6950 XT is a solid new competitor for the absolute high-end, and probably the final Navi 21 graphics card release.