Today we are taking an in depth review of the AsRock Phantom Gaming 6800XT. I have had the opportunity to buy a bunch of different graphics cards over the years. I never really based the purchase off of the brand, sometimes I went with EVGA or if I was feeling risky at the time PowerColor was always my go to AMD card. Once we started running the channel I started buying cards based on what I thought our viewers or a customer would be considering. Fast forward to now, where if you actually get to make a choice on what video card you get, a higher power was looking out for you.
That led me to wonder, let’s say you won the newegg shuffle, The lottery that Newegg has for selling “low stock” items and pairing them with items no one wants. Or you lineup early in the morning at Micro Center and there’s one last 3080 but it’s a zotac, or one last 6800XT and its AsRock should you take it or just try again? I want to make this very clear, this is not me taking a shot at either company. I have had a couple of Zotac cards in the past, and I love AsRock motherboards, but If given the choice between a EVGA FTW3 3080 or one of the Zotac 3080s which would you assume was the better buy?
Now, another interesting thought here is, not once have I seen a Zotac GPU at a micro center, I’ve only ever seen one AsRock card, and very few on newegg. Why is this? This is a question that doesn’t have a straightforward answer. Now let’s start talking about the card itself.
This is a massive card, its 330 by 140 by 56mm and is almost a 3 slot card coming in at 2.8. It’s also very heavy, weighing 1784 grams, or 3.9 pounds. On the bright side the card does come with a AsRock GPU stand to help take some of the strain off of the PCIE slot. This card happens to be one of the only RX 6800XT video cards that come with three VGA connectors. This is something we are going to talk heavily about later in the review, but for most users it is almost completely unnecessary. AsRock recommends at a minimum 800Watt power supply, and with the card being able to pull up to or around 500watts of power we would recommend considering a 1000watt if you plan on pairing it with a power hungry cpu.
The card comes with 3 display ports and 1 HDMI, this is a little bit of a dissapointment. I would have loved to have seen a type C connector on a card that costs north of 1000 USD, but not the end of the world. The hardware for the most part is the exact same. It comes with 4608 stream processors, 72 compute units, 16GB of GDDR6 memory running a bus speed of 256. It comes out of the box at a base clock speed of 1875mhz, a game clock of 2065 and a boost of 2310mhz. This makes it an absolute power house at 1080P, and 1440P, and with extremely competitive performance at 4K.
Now before we get into the specific performance of this card, I wanted to take a minute and talk about the aesthetics of the card. This is always going to be a subject that can go either way. One person may love it and the next one might hate it. I think with the current video card shortage most people would just be happy they had a card, and ignore it if they didn’t like it. Personally I love the look of it. The middle fan and the top panel are the only parts with fully addressable RGB, this makes the card stand out compared to any other one on the market. The card comes with a 3 pin 5v rgb connector on the card, and has an LED on and off switch on the board.
The cooling system on a video card is one of the biggest reasons you should or shouldn’t buy a card. Most video cards follow the same guidelines on how to transfer or get rid of the heat, but small subtle changes can have massive consequences on the cooling. The thermal benchmarks will have its own section below, but we will briefly go over the system AsRock decided to implement.
The card uses three 90mm fans, evenly spaced out across the card. AsRock calls them the Striped Axial fans due to the cut out patterns on the fan to help improve the flow of air into the direction of the highest concentrated heat areas. These three fans sit on top of a very thick stack of heat fins. There are several large V shaped cut outs on the top and the bottom that allow for a much larger amount of air intake and exhaust on the bottom side. This is all a nickel plated copper material that helps the transfer of heat. Keep in mind there is almost no performance difference between nickel plated and just straight copper.
One more thing to talk about before we start the benchmarking process. This card is power hungry, and with it being able to consume upwards of 500watts of power in the right situation we think the consumer needs to know everything they can about the PCB and the power delivery system. AsRock uses a 13 phase VRM, the reference model card uses a 12 phase VRM, and the reference model RX 6900XT uses a 13 phase VRM just for comparison. The card uses international rectifier TDA21472 DrMOS chips that are 70amps and for the power chokes they went with 90amps. The memory uses a 3 phase vrm design, an international rectifier IR35217 controller. The best part of the PCB is that it feels like it matches up with the AsRock price of 999.99 USD.
Benchmarks. This is where testing a video card gets really fun. We try to make things as user friendly and realistic as it can be. In this review we are running tests on a praxis open air test bench and doing thermal testing inside of fractals meshify compact for a more user like set of benchmarks. The testing starts with 1080P, and goes through 4K. Then we will move on to thermals, power consumption and briefly go over noise. We are pairing the card with our Gigabyte Master X570 and the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, and 16GB of ram. Let’s get started.
1080P, this resolution feels low for such an expensive card. Maybe you’re an Esports player, or want the highest refresh rate you can get, we understand. For 1080P testing we spent the majority of our time on competitive titles. We will have graphs uploaded as well but type out the performance as well, keep in mind these are max settings.
Apex Legends 1080P
- AVG 289
- MAX 311
Fortnite 1080P
- AVG 147
- MAX 166
Formula one 2020
- AVG 313
- MAX 333
Counter strike
- AVG 683
- MAX 739
Total War 3 Kingdoms
- AVG 147
- MAX 164
For 1080P this card absolutely crushes it. If you only play 1080P games and you’re not doing it competitively or at 144hz or higher this definitely isnt the card for you. We would definitely recommend trying to find a card like the RX 6700XT or the Nvidia RTX 3060 or 3060Ti.
Now let’s move on to 1440P gaming. This is really the sweet spot for this card. The raw rasterization power of this card allows it to outperform the Nvidia RTX 3080 and AsRocks performance is stellar. This time we tested a different set of games, ones that really took advantage of a higher resolution.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
- AVG 92
- MAX 99
Cyberpunk 2077
- AVG 71
- MAX 77
Apex Legends
- AVG 215
- MAX 237
Doom Eternal
- AVG 261
- MAX 284
The rx 6800XT performance in general for 1440P is an insane card, and typically makes more sense than the RTX 3080 or 3070 and much more cost effective compared to the performance gain of the 6900XT. For this final part of testing gaming performance we are going to include 4K and ray tracing performance in this section. With regards to ray tracing, we are going to cover a few select games and you may find a bigger pool of results elsewhere but we did want to touch on it.
Total war 3 Kingdoms
- AVG 45
- MAX 51
Cyberpunk 2077
- AVG 35
- MAX 41
Cyberpunk ray tracing
- AVG 23
- MAX 27
Battlefield V
- AVG 108
- MAX 119
Battlefield V RTX
- AVG 34
- MAX 41
Apex Legends
- AVG 111
- MAX 117
Assassins Creed Valhalla
- AVG 57
- MAX 63
F1 2020
- AVG 143
- MAX 156
Quake RTX
- AVG 19
- MAX 22
4K is where the RX 6800XT, and this model included, start to falter. Especially if you care about ray tracing in any shape or form. In most 4K titles it trades blows with any RTX 3080 especially with the overclock and constant boost we were able to get out of the card. When it comes to ray tracing it doesn’t really matter. AMD has nothing even close to Nvidia’s Iteration of DLSS and it shows. The card performs better than the reference model but not by much. When it comes to raw performance, we see about a 8–13% increase in the card’s overclock compared to the reference model card, and it sees a small 2–4% increase over the Red Devil card we tested earlier this year. A very impressive gain, but this mostly comes down to the insane overclocks and gnarly amount of power the three 8 pin connectors can pull. This leads us into the power consumption part of the review.
Under a normal load our Phantom Gaming 6800XT ran at a respectable 363 watts of power under he game boost. This bounced up to 387 watts on average when running close to the full boost of over 2300MHZ. Just by unlocking the power slider to max, and not allowing the card to have a thermal limit saw this sky rocket with overclocking well over 480watts of power used. We talked earlier about the card having three 8 pin power connectors, and in some sense this is overkill or unnecessary. The card can consume almost 200 watts per 8 pin connector depending on the power supply, and with most consumers doing low or moderate overclocking AsRock could have definitely gotten away with having two 8 Pin connectors here. I am happy they opted with three, it ups the overclocking capability of this card even if some end users won’t put it to use, it’s a nice to have.
With all of that power it leads to a ton of heat. To try and standardize a thermal test we decided to leave the fan curve stock. You could obviously improve the thermals by adjusting this, but you would have results ranging from all over. With the Fan curve stock we saw the following.
Gaming: 77C
3D Benchmark: 81C
Blender: 83C
4k Rendering: 74C
This was a little on the high side, especially in gaming. Now keep in mind this is inside of a case, if we were on the open air test bench I would think we would see slightly lower thermals, and much lower with a custom fan curve. This is stellar performance for a card that is pulling 480 watts of power at peak load in a Apex Legends max and a stock fan curve.
With all of that being said the final thing to talk about is noise. I think when it comes to getting a graphics card this is the last part to consider. Especially in the current climate. With the card at 100% fan speed under peak load we had the card isolated at 36dba, relatively high, but not unexpected for the size of the card.
I actually traded a founders edition RTX 3080 for this video card. One of the biggest reasons was because the card was different. The video and review would have a much bigger impact than a video on a card all the major channels cover. The more important reason, well eventually you will actually be able to go into Microcenter, Best Buy, Newegg and pick whatever video card you want, or the only option you might have is it worth just biting the bullet? Yes. If you get the chance to get this card you definitely can jump on it. Overclocking is insane, it beats out most of the other partner model 6800XT cards, and the thermals are great for the kind of video card this is. Let us know if you have any questions, concerns by emailing us at pcpit33@gmail.com