Do you hate installing water blocks on your gaming graphics card? Do you find the process of creating custom liquid cooling loops tedious at best, and potentially disastrous for your components at worst? Then has Asus got a GPU for you: The new all-in-one ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition ($1,299 MSRP) makes it easy to integrate a fully liquid-cooled GPU into your build as long as you’ve got space to mount another radiator, and its stock performance, while only marginally better than the non-liquid reference Radeon RX 6800 XT, sets a baseline for more serious overclocking potential.
That high overclocking ceiling doesn’t come cheap, however, and with today’s runaway GPU inflation every $100 added to the base cost—i.e., double the $649 of the reference card—adds untold amounts of scalper markup on top. If you already have a custom loop installed in your desktop PC, liquid cooling a reference version of the RX 6800 XT should cost no more than about $250 for the backplate attachment, giving you a similar setup to the Strix LC for about $900 plus some labor. But if you’re looking for a simpler installation process and don’t mind paying a premium for the luxury, the Asus ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition is one of the fastest and most overclockable cards in the Radeon universe today, thanks to its over-the-top cooling solution.
Specs Compared: ROG Strix LC OC Edition vs. the World
The Asus ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition (we’ll be trimming that mouthful to “Strix LC RX 6800 XT” from now on) is one of the fastest RX 6800 XT cards to be released with an overclock profile already applied straight out of the box. Just how fast, though? Let’s dig into our spec comparison to get a sense of scale…
The new Strix LC RX 6800 XT is based on the same RDNA 2 architecture as reference models, and features TSMC’s 7-nanometer lithography on a 520mm-square “Navi 21 XT” GPU die. You won’t find any fundamental changes to the reference design under the hood, aside from a slightly higher boost clock that’s been bumped from 2,250MHz to 2,360MHz in this version. That’s hardly a huge gain for all the attached cooling hardware, but we’ll show you what that liquid loop can do once we get into our overclocking tests down below.
The Strix LC RX 6800 XT features 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, which seems like a substantial advantage when stacked against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and its “mere” 12GB of GDDR6X. However, when you consider that GDDR6X can double the bandwidth of the plain silicon of the RX 6800 XT, it looks slightly less impressive.
Measuring 10.9 inches long and occupying two slots width-wise, the Strix LC RX 6800 XT is surprisingly compact as a lone graphics card, though that’s not the only component that comes in the package…
That brings us to the star of this show, the attached closed-loop liquid cooling water block attached to an external 240mm dual-fan radiator. The first reference version of the Radeon RX 6800 XT featured some serious power, and was often competitive with the GeForce RTX 3080 FE in all-out might, but its temperatures were worryingly high at times, topping out at 81 degrees C during our 10-minute stress test run of the 3DMark Port Royal benchmark.
Installation of the radiator block in our Thermaltake View 51 Snow ARGB Edition case was simple enough when following the included instructions, though the Thermaltake is a spacious case with multiple mount points available for radiators (and I do this kind of thing for a living). Less experienced entrants into the imposing world of water cooling could have some trouble getting the radiator mounted, so to beginners we’d recommend watching a YouTube video or two before diving in.
Once installed, we turned on the testbed to see the Strix LC RX 6800 XT and attached radiator light up with an array of LED lights, illuminating the fans on top as well as a logo etched into the shroud of the card itself.
Surprisingly, Asus only recommends a 750-watt power supply to run both the card and the liquid loop, with the card itself rated for 300 watts of required board power. Another shock was the lack of a triple 8-pin power requirement like that of the recent MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G, with the Asus liquid-cooling machine only needing two 8-pin connectors to run the whole system.
The backplane of the Strix LC RX 6800 XT contains what’s quickly become the standard port lineup on AMD GPUs as of 2021: two DisplayPort 1.4b connectors, one HDMI 2.1 port, and one VirtualLink port (a bonus addition over current Nvidia cards).
Let’s Get Testing: Another AMD Card, Another DirectX 11 Achilles’ Heel
PC Labs ran the Asus ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks. Our PC Labs test rig is an Intel desktop with a PCI Express 3.0, not 4.0, motherboard. It’s equipped with an Intel Core i9-10900K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) motherboard. All cards below were tested on this rig, which given our tests with the Core i9-10900K and recent Ryzen 9 CPUs is the best reasonable configuration at the moment to cut the CPU out of the equation when comparing frame rates. (Read more about how we test graphics cards.)
For our testing, we focused some of the effort on the esports aspect of the card with games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) and Rainbow Six: Siege. We also ran the card through the rest of our standard benchmark regimen, which tests a GPU’s abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings, as well as how it rides during synthetic benchmarks that stress cards in a variety of ways.
Also remember that almost every test we run (aside from the esports titles) is done at the highest available quality preset. If you have a higher-hertz gaming monitor and are worried your card might not make the frame-rate grade, it could still be possible with the right card and a combination of lower settings. Not only that, but some of these titles (including Death Stranding, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and F1 2020) support both DLSS and FidelityFX CAS with Upscaling. This can mean performance boosts of up to 40% depending on the setting and the card you’re playing with.
And so, onward to our test results. Note: If you want to narrow down our results below to a specific resolution (say, the resolution of the monitor you plan to game on), click the other two resolution dots in the chart legends below to suppress them and see a single set of results. Our list of AAA titles includes a mix of recent games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and F1 2020, as well as some older but still reliable pillars of the benchmarker’s toolkit like Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Far Cry 5.
Testing Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance. UL’s circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to as an approximation of the load levied by mainstream 4K gaming. We’re looking here only at the test’s Graphics Subscore, not the Overall Score. Another test, 3DMark’s Time Spy Extreme, is a good approximation of how well a card will do with DirectX 12 games at 4K resolution. We also run 3DMark’s Port Royal, limited to GeForce RTX cards at the moment (hence the absent bars for AMD Radeon cards), measuring how well they handle ray-tracing tasks. Finally, we throw in a pair of GPU acceleration tests (Furmark and LuxMark); more details on those at the “how we test” link.
In synthetic runs, the Strix LC RX 6800 XT managed to beat out the original RX 6800 XT by a not insignificant margin, though that win was quickly overshadowed by what we saw from the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G, a card that’s roughly 40% more expensive but also far more capable of handling content-creation tasks than any challengers in AMD’s stack at the time of this writing.
Testing Results: Recent AAA Games
Now on to the real-world game stuff. The following benchmarks are games that you can play. In each case, we typically used (for the AAA games) the highest in-game preset and DirectX 12 if available. The multiplayer-focused and esports titles (such as CS:GO and Rainbow Six) were set slightly below top detail settings to maximize frame rates.
At this price/performance level, the only games that can even put a dent in cards like the Strix LC RX 6800 XT are Read Dead Redemption 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. So, did the Strix stay cool under pressure?
At certain resolutions, the $1,299 Asus card was faster than the $1,799 MSI RTX 3090, and at others it was close enough to render the difference imperceptible. This card is overkill for 1080p gaming by a long shot, and set a 1440p record in F1 2020. We saw some of the same stalling problems between 1080p and 1440p in AC:O that we first noticed in our original RX 6800 XT review, but more on those driver issues once we jump into our legacy gaming tests below.
Speaking of driver issues, a quick note here before we move onto the rest of the results: regular readers of our reviews will notice that the Strix LC RX 6800 XT isn’t listed in our Shadow of the Tomb Raider results. This is because, like the RX 5700 XT and RX 6800 XT before it, the Strix LC crashed before we could get a result. Bad driver implementation is nothing new for AMD at this point, and neither is this particular bug. Hopefully we make it all the way through multiplayer!
Testing Results: Multiplayer Games
Though most of PC Labs’ game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate. With that in mind, we’ve kept CS:GO, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Final Fantasy 14 tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep 1080p frame rates above 144fps.
Why 144fps? That’s a coveted target for highly competitive esports gamers with high-refresh-rate 120Hz or 144Hz (or faster) gaming monitors. For more casual players with ordinary 60Hz displays, a solid 80fps or 90fps at your target resolution, with some overhead to account for dips under 60fps, is fine.
I’ve said it in previous reviews of cards in this power tier, but until the stock situation of GPUs improves globally, it bears repeating: please don’t buy a card this powerful just to play multiplayer games. There are GPUs much better suited to titles like R6: Siege that max out most monitors at their respective refresh/resolution combinations while costing considerably less than the Strix LC RX 6800 XT. Could I interest you in a perfectly capable Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition, perhaps?
Testing Results: How About Some Legacy AAA Titles?
We also ran some quick tests on some oldies-but-goodies that still offer the AAA gaming experience. These legacy tests include runs of Hitman: Absolution, Tomb Raider (2013), Sleeping Dogs, and Bioshock Infinite, the last being a 2013 title that has no business still being as well optimized as it is today.
Last up in our testing regimen, AMD’s biggest rival in gaming today…and no, it’s not Nvidia. We are of course talking about certain games based on DirectX 11 (curse you, Sleeping Dogs!), a seemingly unsolvable problem for AMD’s driver department since the launch of the RX 5000 Series on RDNA 1 back in 2019.
Whenever those optimization problems kicked in—the same glitches we’ve seen from four separate AMD cards in the past two years now—Asus’s monster $1,299 card and liquid cooler combo would barely match the results of the air-cooled $599 Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. If you play a healthy mix of new and old games, be wary of any that use DirectX 11 as their primary graphics API, as your AMD card might not match up to the expectations it sets for itself in more modern games like Read Dead Redemption 2.
Overclocking and Thermals: Breaking the Gauge
Finally, onward to temperature testing and overclocking (what everyone really came to see, I presume?). We ran a 10-minute stress test in 3DMark Port Royal on the Asus ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition, and the card peaked at a temperature of just 73 degrees C, a full eight degrees cooler than the reference RX 6800 XT. But that was running at stock clocks, so let’s see how the radiator held up to some overclocking punishment…
When it came time to overclock the card using AMD’s Radeon Software utility, I achieved a maxed-out stable overclock of 2,800MHz on the boost clock, with 200MHz added to the VRAM. Much like our experience with the RX 6800 XT (which also maxed out at 2,800MHz), this equated to an 18% boost in clocks compared with what we saw out of the box, which translated to roughly 15% higher performance in the games and synthetic benchmarks we tried before and after applying the new profile.
Even during these overclocked runs, the card still never peaked above 73 degrees C. This could suggest that we weren’t even pushing the 240mm radiator to its peak cooling limits, and the only thing holding back more overclocking (at least in theory) are the artificial limits imposed by AMD’s engineers. Well, where’s the fun in that?
The Verdict: A Whole Lotta Power (Most of the Time)
All-in-one liquid-cooled graphics cards are nothing new by this point, but it’s still always a wonder to see how much extra power you can squeeze from a GPU when it’s freed from an air-only cooling design. The Asus ROG Strix LC AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition is a perfect example of performance placed above all else, and in its pursuit of raw power at any cost, the card almost succeeds handily.
For anyone who might have been considering an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti ($1,199 MSRP), the Strix LC RX 6800 XT often comes close enough in 4K gaming results that you’d be forgiven for forgetting the two are supposed to represent separate power tiers. But as for the price? No matter what, we’re never going to be able to justify doublingdoubling the MSRP of a reference Radeon RX 6800 XT for what ultimately amounted to an average benchmark boost of about 10% (even with a max overclock applied).
However, this is the kind of card that isn’t made for sensible builds or builders; it’s the new king of AMD’s RX 6800 XT line in performance, and it’s not afraid to show it. In gaming, the card is often one of the fastest we’ve ever tested, cresting the same heights as VRAM monsters like the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Suprim X 24G in specific 4K scenarios.
Unfortunately, the driver set powering this card, like the reference version and others before it, still struggles with certain DirectX 11 legacy titles and wouldn’t even get past the menus of our Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark. If you want a driver-stable experience at this performance level without the extraneous cooling system, or you’re buying a card for content creation tasks, the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition and RTX 3080 Ti FE both offer more reliable alternatives at a reduced cost.
But if you’re an AMD loyalist who demands the highest frame rates at 4K and 1440p resolutions (at least in certain games), there’s nothing faster (or cooler) on shelves today than the Strix LC RX 6800 XT. Knock yourself out.
