The ASUS Radeon RX 6800 STRIX OC is the company's top dog custom version of the RX 6800. It comes with the huge ROG STRIX cooler that impressed us very much in our RTX 3090 STRIX review—ASUS is using the same cooler on the RX 6800. As expected, ASUS includes a factory overclock with the STRIX OC, too, up to 2190 MHz rated Boost clock, which is the highest of all RX 6800 cards announced so far and matches cards like the PowerColor Red Devil, Sapphire Nitro+, Gigabyte AORUS Master, and ASRock Phantom Gaming.

In terms of relative performance, this makes the RX 6800 STRIX OC 1% faster than the RX 6800 reference card at 4K resolution. That increase is surprisingly small considering AMD rates their reference design at 2105 MHz, a 4% difference. It seems that with Navi 21, even more so on the RX 6800 non-XT, the limiting factor is not the clock configuration, but the card's power limit. I also have the PowerColor RX 6800 Red Dragon here for review, which is 2% faster while clocked at 2190 MHz rated Boost. I guess that means even the highest-clocked RX 6800 custom designs won't be significantly faster than the AMD reference card. This is a trend we've been seeing for a while—manufacturers are getting better and better at eking out the highest clocks and performance, even at stock. NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080 is 19% faster than the RX 6800 STRIX, and the RX 6800 XT is 13% ahead. NVIDIA's RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Ti are 9% slower. Performance uplifts compared to older cards are impressive as well, as it is almost twice as fast as the RX 5700 and nearly three times as fast as the RX 590.

With these performance numbers, the Radeon RX 6800 is the perfect choice for 1440p gaming at well above 60 FPS. It can also be your gateway to 4K gaming. While it's not fast enough to get 60 FPS in every title at the highest settings, it's pretty close. If you reduce some detail settings, you should get 60 FPS easily. Things are different once you turn on raytracing, however. Just like on NVIDIA, there's a hefty performance hit when running with the DirectX Raytracing API. We only tested two games so far, but it seems the loss in performance is bigger than on NVIDIA, who improved in that area with Ampere. Remember, this is AMD's first-generation raytracing implementation. Performance is still very respectable, reaching roughly RTX 2080 levels. Now that RT hardware is available for both AMD and NVIDIA and game developers are making console games on AMD's new RDNA 2 architecture, it'll be interesting to see how raytracing performance evolves in the coming months.

ASUS did an outstanding job with the design and engineering for their new STRIX cooler. We've seen this exact same thermal solution on the ASUS STRIX RTX 3090 before. The RTX 3090 is a 350 W+ design, so I guess you can imagine how the cooler fared on the 230 W RX 6800 STRIX. We measured temperatures of only 53°C, which are mighty impressive. With 33 dBA, noise levels are slightly better than the AMD reference design, but slightly higher than what I expected, though I can understand that ASUS sought to impress with ultra-low temperatures. Should you prefer a more balanced approach, the "Quiet BIOS" can be activated easily because of a dual BIOS switch. Now the card runs at 67°C—still extremely cool—but only 31 dBA, which is almost whisper-quiet and very impressive for a card in this performance class. I recommend you use the quiet BIOS at all times because there's effectively no difference between 53°C and 67°C, but you'll notice lower noise levels all the time when gaming. Just like on the AMD reference design, idle fan stop is included, which provides the perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, internet browsing, media playback, and light gaming.

Power consumption of the ASUS STRIX tracks the AMD RX 6800 reference very closely. The higher power limit and factory OC result in no significant power increase on average, but the peaks are a little bit higher. Overall, the RX 6800 is the most efficient graphics card design we have ever tested, almost 10% better than what NVIDIA Ampere offers. Idle power consumption is still suboptimal on RDNA 2. While 1080p desktop will run at super-low power levels, even 1440p 60 Hz sees power consumption jump to around 30 W, and a second monitor will add 10 W on top. Video playback also requires more power than before, almost 50 W.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 Series launched in November last year, and there has since then been very little supply coming in, which, paired with the high demand, led to an extreme shortage of cards. With few cards available and everybody wanting one, scalpers are listing these cards with a markup to cash in on people who are willing to pay top dollar to have a card now. The same is happening with all the other AMD RDNA 2 and NVIDIA Ampere products. Officially, AMD claims an MSRP of $580 for the Radeon RX 6800, which was a fantasy even at launch—board partners wouldn't be able to achieve those prices even if there were enough GPU supply. That's why ASUS has set an MSRP of $700 for the RX 6800 STRIX OC, $120 above AMD MSRP. I find this 20% increase impossible to justify as a buyer. No doubt, the ASUS STRIX thermal solution is incredible and achieves impressive noise levels and temperatures, but I don't think that's enough. The factory overclock yields 1%, impossible to notice subjectively even in a blind side-by-side test.

Current market conditions have the AMD RX 6800 at $950, and the ASUS RX 6800 STRIX OC at $1000. Scary prices that are extremely high compared to their announced MSRPs. On the other hand, the RX 6800 at $1000 isn't such a bad deal anymore if you consider all MSRPs fake and compare it to the RTX 2080 Ti, which people happily paid $1200 for last year. The card is 10% faster, with much better power, heat, noise, and efficiency.

Compared to other cards at inflated prices, the RX 6800 is difficult to recommend, though. $1000 gets you an RTX 3080, too, which is 20% faster and has better raytracing performance. Another alternative could be the RTX 3070, which is $850, a bit slower than the RX 6800, but ahead in raytracing—if you believe that's the future. RX 6800 does have 16 GB VRAM, which will not make a substantial difference unless you look 5 to 10 years ahead, and at that point, the card will simply be too slow anyway.

If things change price-wise, I'd have no problem giving our Recommended Award to the RX 6800 STRIX OC. The biggest obstacle is that at current market pricing, the RX 6800 is simply not competitive (which is not ASUS's fault at all). Right now, the RTX 3080 and RX 6800 non-XT are both around $1000. I suspect the reason is that volume on the RTX 3080 is a little bit better in comparison, which has the increased competition and RTX 3080 volumes drive prices down a little bit. If we were looking at only the RX 6800, so $950 for the reference vs. $1000 for the STRIX, I'd definitely pick the STRIX—$50 is a reasonable price increase for the much better cooler and additional features.