At this stage, I feel its more like a legacy recommendation with RDNA3 just around the corner.
But nevertheless here it is, my experience.
A couple of months have now passed by and the testing phase is over.
The Card is a RoG STRIX RX6800 OC, so you guessed it! I payed the so called RoG TAX, as these cards tend to be much more expensive than other AIB's.
I felt that the card is not as big as I expected to be, but still big. And thicc, 2.9 Slot design.
The Strix RX480 is surprisingly similar sized.
Quality is something that RoG is known for, you can feel the weight and feel of it. No its not a 4090 sized, that's just overkill.
The Aesthetics is very pleasing and the ARGB strip is just amazing, much more good looking than the new Strix 4090 design.
The unboxing experience is something really nice too, but its a niche inside of a niche. Hardcore RoG fans will love the goodies like the action figures, cards, stickers, bookmarkers and this ruler.
Temperatures are amazing, with so much metal, this card never went above 60/65.
I'm still getting used to the card, but Ill soon try the GPU Tweak and go all in on a real OC and take advantage of the amazing cooling capacity of the card.
Desktop use and its down to 30-40.
Power consumption averages on 180-220 while pushing the card but I've seen some 300Watt spikes. Ouch.
The performance is clear, even being somewhat held back by the 2700X CPU. Games were smooth with the RX480 but now I really crank up settings to maximum and keep the smoothness. I never planned to go 4K like the card is advertised for, I prefer high fps.
And now video editing. I only use davinci resolve, they have a free version. Simple.
At first I got worried as timeline playback was somewhat slow and laggy, although render times were better.
Eventually found out the clip cache was being saved to the wrong SSD keeping access times lower than the NVME. Resulting in a sluggish timeline playback.
Now, the million dollar question
Why now? Why didn't you waited for RDNA3?
I got a deal on the card I wanted in the first place. I was going to settle with the 6700XT, then the 6750XT. Prices were not good enough here in Europe even after the price drop, we are still seeing today 450€ for 6650XT and 700€ for the 6750XT.
So grabbing the Strix Card with a special discount on Amazon was sweeeeet. No looking back!
RDNA3 will or I hope it will be a TRULY AMAZING card, but prices won't be as good as this one for the near future.
Conclusion
RoG sure has its flaws and its expensive, but I feel that the RX6800 will have enough thermal room with this cooler to spread its wings as the RX480 had. At the final moments of its life, the RX480 was running OC'ed at 1450mhz.
Time to make amends with my wallet and save for a 5800X3D perhaps. But the Ryzen 7000 sure sounds sweet too. 😀
