Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 XT proved itself to be one of the best value graphics cards for sheer rasterization. All of that power comes at the expense of heat, which makes today’s review all the more interesting. I’ve spent the last week going hands-on with the Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT, a GPU with its own built-in liquid cooler and hefty factory overclock. But at $1,149 MSRP, it doesn’t come cheap. Is the extra cooling potential worth the cost? Let’s take a closer look and find out. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=asus-rog-strix-lc-radeon-rx-6800-xt-oc-review&captions=true"]

Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC – Design and Features

The Strix LC is an interesting card to say the least. Visually, the card itself feels small compared to most of what I’ve seen this generation from AMD and its partners. Since it uses its own closed-loop liquid cooler, it doesn’t need a massive heatsink to dissipate heat. It’s nearly the same length as the reference 6800 XT but thinner at only a 2-slot width. You’ll still need an ample amount of space in your PC case, however, as it also comes with a 240mm radiator with 600mm of tubing to mount in top, front, or bottom configurations. This gives you the freedom to mount it anywhere you see fit, but the excess tubing did take more time to manage. The card doesn’t rely explicitly on its radiator and water pump for cooling. ROG’s Strix LC uses top shelf power delivery components that aren’t covered by the copper cold plate cooling the GPU and VRAM. Instead, these components are kept in check with a blower cooler that exhausts heat out the back of the case. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=db77474f-2fcd-4e9a-b568-96945740e9d7"] It’s a clever, hybrid design that works extremely well. Looking back at the original RX 6800 XT, I recorded a peak temperature of 89C in my Lian Li Lancool II case. The Strix, on the other hand, topped out at 62C after the water had a chance to warm up. For normal gaming, it would often hover between 58-60C. That’s one power of water cooling, but it’s not all. Out of the box, the card is set to Performance mode using a switch on its back and favors cooling and clock speed first. With this setting, the card ramps up quite fast, becoming 2-3 dB louder than AMD’s air cooled RX 6800 XT. In Quiet Mode, they’re roughly equal, but I found the Strix’s fans to be more noticeable because of Asus’s Fan Stop technology. When the card is idle, the PC fans don’t spin at all. When loading up a game, they ramp up and increase in volume very fast. It is more noticeable than a normal air cooled card, but there’s a solution that doesn’t involve flicking the switch to Quiet Mode. As I often recommend, setting a custom fan curve in programs like MSI Afterburner is a smart move to really customize your device. Since the cooler does such a good job, I was able to lower the RPM of the fans enough that it was able to be several dB quieter than the reference RX 6800 XT while still running capped out clock speeds across every game I played. Thermal overhead is the reason to buy a hybrid GPU like the Strix LC and there is simply no reason not to take full advantage of it here to fine tune your experience. Aesthetically, it’s also a fine looking GPU. Asus has a unique visual identity that blends science fiction and industrial cues with healthy doses of RGB. That’s definitely the case here. The card is striped with ridges and mixes black, gunmetal, and reflective finishes for a sleek, high-end look. When powered on (through 2x 8-pin connectors) the face of the card lights up as a portion of the ridges reveal themselves to be RGB diffusers. The two fans on the radiator are also illuminated. I also have to applaud how simple Asus made the setup process here. One of the most challenging parts of any RGB PC is cable management, but the Strix requires no additional setup whatsoever to allow the lightshow. The card has two fan headers built right in, supports its own RGB, and comes velcro-wrapped so the only extra step is mounting the radiator. The only thing that needed to be plugged in was the card itself, making setup fast and easy. Under that hybrid cooler is the RX 6800 XT GPU, which is built on AMD’s new RDNA2 architecture (read more about it here). Like all RX 6800 XTs, it features 4608 stream processors, 16 GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, and runs on PCI Express 4.0. It comes with a large factory overclock with a 2360 MHz Boost Clock and a 2110 MHz Game Clock. Compared to reference, that’s a speed increase of 110 MHz to Boost and 95 MHz to the Game Clock. Like all modern GPUs, though, the Strix LC will dynamically speed itself up beyond these ratings as thermal and power headroom allows. In practice, the card hovered just under 2500 MHz, which is nearly 100 MHz more than the stock 6800 XT without Rage Mode. Finally, when it comes to video connectivity, we have two DisplayPort 1.4a connections, one HDMI 2.1, and a USB Type-C port for easily connecting a VR headset.

Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC – Performance

Test system: Z390 Asus ROG Maximus XI Extreme Motherboard, Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (stock), Corsair H115i PRO RGB 280mm AIO CPU Cooler, 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200, 1TB Samsung EVO Plus NVMe SSD, Corsair HX1200 1200-watt power supply.

Now that we have a solid grasp on what the ROG Strix LC brings to the table, let’s dig into how it performs. I test graphics cards using a mix of synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks. All tests are conducted on Ultra settings unless otherwise noted. Likewise, ray tracing and DLSS are both enabled wherever possible. At the time of this writing, AMD does not have an answer to Nvidia’s DLSS technology; however, it reports that a technology called FidelityFX Super Resolution is in development and is planned for release at some point, though we don’t know when. I am reporting the results here including DLSS on Nvidia cards to demonstrate the trade-off present in choosing a graphics card today. Once FidelityFX Super Resolution is available, my results will be updated to show the impact of this technology on overall performance and with ray tracing in particular.

Graphics Card	3D Mark Fire Strike Ultra	Uniengine Heaven 4.0 (1440p)
Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition	10,744	3385
Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition	8,547	2785
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode)	12,317	3725
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT	12,105	3671
ASUS ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC	12,283	3734
AMD Radeon RX 6800	10,265	3041

Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Synthetic Benchmarks

Beginning with 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra and Heaven, the Strix performs very well. Its score in Fire Strike surpasses the reference edition and is extremely close to that model with Rage Mode enabled. In Heaven, the results are even more impressive with a score that’s second only to the Nvidia RTX 3090 Founders Edition.

Graphics Card	3D Mark Port Royal	3DMark Ray Tracing Test
Nvidia RTX 3080 Founders Edition	11248	46.1
Nvidia RTX 3070 Founders Edition	8131	31.9
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT (Rage Mode)	9107	27.2
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT	9,054	26.7
ASUS ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT OC	9,322	27.9
AMD Radeon RX 6800	7396	21.5

  When it comes to ray tracing, the RX 6800 XT still doesn’t hold a candle to the RTX 3080 but passes the original RX 6800 XT by 3% and the RTX 3070 Founders Edition by 15%. In Boundary, which is rated in FPS, the impact of DLSS allows even the RTX 3060 Ti to surpass the Strix. Compared against the rest of the RX 6000 Series results, it leads the pack, including 3DMark’s Ray Tracing Test. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=asus-rog-strix-lc-radeon-rx-6800-xt-oc-benchmarks&captions=true"] Based on these results, we can see that the ROG Strix LC is on average 3% faster than the reference edition at 4K, and 2% faster at 1440p. At 1080p, things are even tighter with less than 1% average difference across all 12 games tested here (since this is not a 1080p card, I did not create a separate chart for that resolution). The RTX 3080 maintains its lead in ray tracing due to DLSS, but in sheer rasterization the Strix LC is only 1% slower at 4K, tied with reference using Rage Mode. These results can be extended further through overclocking. Overclocking potential will vary per card, but I was impressed at how well the Strix could be pushed while remaining stable. If you prefer to keep things simple, AMD’s Radeon Software has an automatic overclocking feature, but in my experience tends to be a bit conservative. Through testing of my own, I was able to dial in a stable manual overclock of 2650 MHz to clock speed and 2100 MHz to the memory. This did increase temperatures, but since the LC runs on a large 240mm cooler, this was never a concern or bottleneck. With these improvements applied, the Strix outperformed the RTX 3080 in rasterization at 4K by nearly 3%. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-pc-controller&captions=true"]

Purchasing Guide

The Asus ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT is sold at a recommended price of $1,149. Like most graphics cards, it is out of stock at the moment and only available sporadically. For easy returns, it’s worth keeping a close eye on Amazon, but it can also be purchased directly from the Asus web store. For users that don’t want a liquid cooler, Micro Center and Amazon sells the Asus TUF Gaming AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT OC Edition for a “reduced” price of $1,049.

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