Introduction

We have with us the ASUS ROG STRIX Radeon RX 6800 OC graphics card, our first custom-design Radeon RX 6800 graphics card after the pile of RX 6800 XT cards we've munched through. While its bigger siblings, the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, hog much of the limelight with the DIY enthusiast crowd for smooth 4K UHD gaming, the RX 6800 is a bit of an underdog. At a starting price of $580, AMD is confident of the RX 6800 outperforming the GeForce RTX 3070, which starts at $500. ASUS takes things up a notch by giving this GPU its most premium ROG STRIX treatment. The card is based on a similar-looking board design to the RX 6800 XT ROG STRIX (air-cooled), which means there's plenty of cooling muscle to tame the already cooler RX 6800.



The Radeon RX 6800 has an interesting mandate for its price: to offer maxed out gaming performance at 1440p while being perfectly capable of 4K UHD gaming with reasonably high settings. The RTX 3070 is advertised by NVIDIA to beat the RTX 2080 Ti, and AMD claims that the RX 6800 beats the RTX 3070. This means you're dealing with plenty of graphics horsepower right off the bat. The RX 6800 is based on AMD's new RDNA 2 graphics architecture, which also powers the latest game consoles, such as the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S. The architecture meets all the requirements for DirectX 12 Ultimate, which includes real-time raytracing standardized under DirectX Raytracing. An extremely compute-intensive technology, raytracing requires enormous compute muscle and fixed-function hardware. A side effect of this is vast increases in compute power for the latest generation of GPUs, which significantly increases performance for conventional raster 3D graphics.

The Radeon RX 6800 is carved out of the 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT are based on and features 60 out of 80 RDNA 2 compute units, translating to 3,840 stream processors, 60 Ray Accelerators, 240 TMUs, and 96 ROPs. The memory sub-system is the same as the RX 6900 XT, with 16 GB of the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface. This is already a lot faster than the 14 Gbps memory the RTX 3070 is equipped with, not to mention double the memory size, but AMD has taken things in the memory bandwidth department a step further by deploying 128 MB of super-fast on-die L3 cache it calls Infinity Cache. Together, this memory solution offers a peak theoretical bandwidth of 2 TB/s.

ASUS adds value to the RX 6800 by giving it the latest generation of its ROG STRIX DirectCU III cooling solution, which it debuted with the GeForce RTX 30-series. It features a large aluminium fin-stack heatsink that's ventilated by a trio of Axial-Tech fans. Since the cooler is longer than the PCB, airflow from the third fan flows right through. The ASUS RX 6800 STRIX OC also comes with a handy factory overclock, with the GPU boosting up to 2190 MHz as opposed to the 2105 MHz reference. ASUS is pricing the card at $700, and you can currently find it on eBay for around $1000.