Man, it seems like so long ago now that Elon Musk wasn’t tweeting about Dogecoin, human
malware wasn’t a thing, and the GPU market wasn’t a horror show of scalping and out-of-stock
banners. Damn, I miss it.
But while we can’t guarantee that Elongated Muskrat will stop living out his meme coin
dreams, or that certain viruses will go away and never come back because science and facts
are just fads, there’s a pretty good chance that one day we’ll actually be able to find
and afford graphics cards again.
And when that happens, you’ll need videos like this one. And that’s because in this
video we’ll be taking a look at a GPU I’ve been trying to get my hands on for a very
long time, that’s right, AMD’s RX 6800, or more specifically, the ASUS ROG Strix 6800
Gaming OC and I’m fully expecting to be blown away by this thing.
But first, if you want to pick up any of the parts I’ll be mentioning in this video,
go ahead and use my Amazon affiliate links in the description down below. Or if you’re
in South Africa, make sure you grab all of your tech stuff at Wootware or else.
Now, we’re all aware that AMD, or more specifically Radeon has been struggling to keep up with
Nvidia for the last couple of years, at least when it comes to the balls to the walls, ultra-high-performance
GPUs. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t think they’d ever be able to again.
And then in true underdog fashion, they totally did with the launch of the 6000-series cards,
cards that just about matched, and in many cases even surpassed the performance of their
direct competition from team green especially at the high end.
AMD's 6000-series GPUs breathed new life into the GPU market, and finally gave Nvidia some
legitimate competition to be afraid of, even though Nvidia is still the king of Ray Tracing
right now. But we’ll get to that later.
And one of the most interesting of these GPUs has to be the RX 6800.
The 6800 sports 60 compute units with 3840 Stream Processors, 60 ray accelerators, a
250W TDP, a massive 16 gigs of GDDR6 memory running at 16Gbps, has a very impressive boost
clock of 2.1 GHz, and originally launched with an MSRP of $580.
The Strix flavor we’re working with here bumps that boost clock to just shy of 2.2
GHz and launched at what would’ve been an eye-watering MSRP of $700.
Of course, none of those prices matter anymore, because if you can find this thing selling
for under $1,500 that’s a friggin’ STEAL. But for the sake of my mental health, let’s
save the value discussion for later in the video.
First, let’s see what you’ll be getting for the hugely depressing price you’ll undoubtedly
be paying for this thing.
And with this being a Strix card, you’ll be getting quite a lot.
I’ve already worked with this generation’s Strix design a couple of times, and to say
I was impressed would be an understatement.
This card practically exudes premium energy. It’s about three slots thick and is built
like a brick shithouse. There’s pretty much no part of this card that feels cheap, flimsy,
or fragile, even though the robust shroud does mix some plastic in with all the metal,
and to cap it all off, we even have a metal support bracket holding it all together.
And that premium touch also makes its way, as it usually does with Strix parts, to the
card’s internals, where we’ve got a borderline overbuilt VRM configuration stacked with high-end
parts, two dedicated PWM fan headers built right into the PCB, and a dual BIOS switch
for performance and quiet modes.
Speaking of switches, if there was one for the card’s overall look, it would be very
firmly stuck in the sexy mode.
I’ve talked about how much I appreciate the new Strix GPU design for this generation
before a couple of times, and I don’t know whether it’s the fact that this is an AMD
GPU, or maybe I just forgot how dope the design actually is, but I appreciate it a hell of
a lot more now.
This card is absolutely gorgeous.
The mix of black plastic and reflective metal on the shroud itself looks aggressive and
at the same time kind of refined, with sharp edges, interesting angles, and in-your-face
design choices that set the card apart from every other graphics card from the current
and past generations.
The card’s backplate shares the same general look of the shroud, with shiny and matte surfaces,
pronounced features, and an overall air of badassery, all toned down just a little bit
because this is just a backplate after all.
Another small touch I really like about this particular flavor of the Strix design is that
instead of having a big, obnoxious Radeon logo on the side of the card as we’ve seen
on the RTX cards, ROG decided to have the Radeon branding on the face of the card, where
I think it compliments the card’s general clean aesthetic a heck of a lot more.
And speaking of compliments, I have to give my compliments to the RGB chefs who worked
on the card’s lighting. I think other than like one other card from this generation,
the Strix cards probably have the most creative implementations of RGB lighting I’ve seen
in a long while.
When I first laid eyes on it, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the kind of zebra stripe pattern
ROG decided to go with, and it still not exactly my favorite part of the card. But it’s sure
as hell unique, and massive, and bright, and I think those far outweigh my distaste for
the pattern.
The lighting on the three fans, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as striking. It’s there,
and it does look pretty cool, but it just feels like a bit of an afterthought. It’s
like ROG was trying to think of how to light up the face of the card, then saw that the
light bar shed some light onto the fans and figured that’s probably good enough.
But It’s not, at least not for me. I would’ve loved it if ROG went more creative with the
lighting on the face of the card, just like they did with the RGB zebra on the side. Maybe
next time, eh ROG?
Along with the aesthetics, I’m also expecting to be impressed by the Strix RX 6800 OC when
it comes to cooling performance, just as I was with the cooling performance on the other
current-gen Strix GPUs I’ve worked with.
While the enormous heatsink and high-performance parts ROG slapped on to this thing are already
quite impressive, an extra-smooth heat spreader, and three redesigned Axial-tech fans should
help push the card’s cooling capabilities over the top.
The almost all-metal backplate, complete with a cutout on the far end of the card to allow
air to flow straight through the heatsink, are also nice little cooling touches.
Touches we’ll be putting to test right now because it’s benchmark time!
For testing we’ll be using a Ryzen 7 3800XT clocked at 4.5 GHz, socketed into an X570
motherboard, 32 gigs of Crucial’s Ballistix RGB memory running at 3600 MHz, Antec’s
EAG Pro 750W PSU, and Crucial’s P5 NVME drive for our storage.
Now, let’s kick things off at 1080p.
And if there was any doubt that AMD and ROG came to play, then those doubts have just
been squashed. The Strix 6800 clobbered all of the cards in the lineup in all but two
of the games tested, and usually by quite an impressive margin.
In fact, the card didn’t average any lower than 100 FPS across the board at 1080p, and
we’re talking about high to ultra settings here. Of course, the 6800’s lead in some
of the titles is way higher than in others, and the 3070 does trade blows with it a couple
of times, but this is still a fantastic result for the 6800.
And with the jump to 1440p, we see a continuation of that trend, with the 6800 coming out on
top almost across the board. Again we see the 3070 putting up a decent fight to hold
off the team red behemoth, but not really managing it, with the 6800 more often than
not coming out with a sizable lead.
It’s here where I wish I had one of Nvidia’s brand spanking new RTX 3070 Ti cards to throw
into the mix since at an MSRP of $600, it’s the closest competitor to the 6800. And from
the reviews I’ve watched, the 3070 Ti should put up a much tougher fight, just about matching
the 6800 on average.
At 4K, where each additional frame matters a heck of a lot more than at lower resolutions,
the 6800 again flexes its muscles over the 3070, coming out on top in all but one of
the games tested.
Although we did see the card dip below 60 FPS here in some of the more graphically-intensive
titles, with the graphics settings we’re using, you’d really need something like
a 3080 or 6800 XT to hit and surpass 60 FPS at this resolution.
Now, it’s time to address the shiny elephant in the room. What about ray tracing performance?
Well, for the first time since Nvidia kicked off the ray tracing race, AMD can actually
provide some competition here, so this could be very interesting.
And, well… the results are certainly interesting. With AMD’s current-gen cards being the first
from team red to feature hardware specifically built for ray tracing, the results are actually
pretty commendable.
In games that don’t make heavy use of ray tracing, the card performs decently well,
however in titles that support more extensive use of the tech, the card falls disappointingly
flat. This is largely due to Nvidia having gotten a bit of a headstart on the tech, but
also largely comes down to AMD not really having an answer to Nvidia’s DLSS just yet.
That is set to change with AMD’s recently announced FidelityFX Super Resolution tech,
but the list of games that will support the feature at least initially isn’t all that
exciting, to put it mildly. That will of course change too as the technology improves and
developers start implementing it more, but I don’t like recommending hardware on the
basis of possible future upgrades. If you want a more than passable ray tracing experience,
then Nvidia is still your best option for the time being.
As for raw rasterization horsepower, the 6800 has a ton of it, and our ROG Strix version
here works those horses hard. The card hit a max core clock of 2262 MHz during testing,
with an average clock speed landing around the 2063 MHz mark, and I just have to appreciate
that 2GHz is pretty much approaching the norm for GPUs nowadays. Sheesh.
The card under heavy load drew about 228W, which is lower than I expected, and temps
were also lower than expected, with the Strix maxing out at 68 degrees under load, with
a max hot spot temp of 82 degrees.
Impressive temps, especially considering I only saw the card hitting a max fan usage
of 48% or 1613 RPM. That low max fan speed meant that the card was all but silent under
heavy load in a closed case and barely louder than the rest of the system with the side
panel off.
As a whole, the ROG RX 6800 OC Strix is an awesome beast of a card, one that, in a normal
world with normal prices, I’d only be hesitant to recommend because of its $700 MSRP, which
I would’ve recommended spending on an RTX 3080 instead.
But since "value" isn’t a thing anymore, if you’re looking for one of the best graphics
cards you can buy right now, and aren’t planning on diving headfirst into the ray-tracing
settings just yet, then this is absolutely one to keep an eye on as prices start to come
down in 2025.
But I won’t wait until 2025 to end this video, because that’s what I’ll be doing
right now.
Huge thanks to ASUS South Africa for lending me the card to drool over, and thanks to everyone
watching.
If you want to pick up any of the parts I mentioned in the video, go ahead and do it
via my Amazon affiliate links down below, or do it at Wootware if you’re in South
Africa.
And yeah, I’m gonna go watch South Africa surf the third wave of human malware, and
I’ll see you all in the next one. Cheers.