Introduction

The Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC LC is the ASUS flagship Radeon RX 6800 XT “Big Navi” design. LC stands for Liquid Cooled, which already tells you everything this card is about. While other vendors are using air-cooling for their top dog designs, ASUS opted for an AIO watercooling solution this time around. The card comes with a 240 mm radiator attached to the card; it’s pre-filled, maintenance free, and ready to go.

The ASUS Radeon RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled is based on the 7 nm “Navi 21” RDNA2 silicon, which has an 80% increase in compute units over the previous-generation RX 5700 XT. Each of those compute units has one Ray Accelerator unit, which, as the name suggests, handles certain raytracing workloads. The memory amount is doubled to 16 GB, and AMD is using 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory. At 256 bit, the memory bus width has stayed the same. To make up for that, AMD devised an ingenious solution it calls Infinity Cache, which is a 128 MB on-die level 3 cache that runs at an astounding 2 TB/s, accelerating most workloads that aren’t too data-intensive. Our RX 6800 XT reference-design review goes into more details on the RDNA2 architecture.

ASUS is using a triple-slot casing for the card, which houses the waterblock, a pump, and a slow-running fan that provides cooling for the minor components on the card. The VRM design has been upgraded to a 17-phase configuration, and you get a dual BIOS, too. As expected, idle fan stop is present as well. Out of the box, the ASUS RX 6800 XT STRIX OC LC ticks at a rated boost clock of 2360 MHz, which is quite an increase over the 2250 MHz reference.

ASUS hasn’t given us pricing yet for the RX 6800 XT STRIX OC Liquid Cooled, but it is currently listed at Caseking in Germany for €987, which includes the 16% German VAT. A few hours ago, the price was €1086, guess these are changing quite a lot. €987 including VAT is €850 without VAT, which converts to roughly US$1000 and is what I used for the charts in this review.

Update Nov 26: ASUS has provided us with pricing, it’s $899, which matches the Newegg price listing that went up after our review, too. I’ve updated the pricing throughout this review and remade the relevant charts.