THE RADEON RX 6900 XT currently reigns
as AMD’s most powerful GPU. ASRock
takes that chip, slaps on a massive triple-
slot, triple-fan cooler, and cranks the
clocks to levels normally only seen on
the smaller Navi 22 and Navi 23 chips. It’s
less about an elegant design and more of
a brute force approach, but we appreciate
the end result nonetheless.
If it’s not immediately obvious, this card
caters to extreme desktops with plenty
of room. Perhaps there are some mini-
ITX cases that could accommodate the
card’s girth, but we’d be concerned about
limiting airflow. Also, finding a mini-ITX
power supply with the required triple
8-pin connectors and probably 8 50W of
output will prove almost impossible.
You could probably run the card off a
750W PSU, especially if it’s a good quality
model, but once you factor in CPU and
motherboard power use, plus the 3 90–
430W of power use (not counting for PSU
inefficiency), and you can almost see the
electrical grid flicker.
In the default mode, the Formula
draws up to 3 90W of power, but who
buys a card like this only to skip the
extra factory overclock unlocked with
ASRock’s OC Tuner software? Kick the
card into overdrive and it averaged just
over 43 0W of power draw in testing.Big Navi revs its engineASRock Radeon RX6900 XT Formula7VERDICT ASRock Radeon
RX 6900 XT Formula
MUSCLE CARS Beefy cooling;
extreme performance; 16 GB VRAM.
ELECTRIC VEHICLES Expensive; inefficient;
16Gbps VRAM.
$1,8 99 , http://www.asrock.comSPECIFICATIONS
Architecture Navi^21
Lithography TSMC N7
Boost Clock 2,475MHz
GPU Cores 5,120
Memory 16GB GDDR6
TFLOPS FP3 2 25.3
Bandwidth 512GBps
TDP 357W
Connectors 1x HDMI 2.1, 3x
DisplayPort 1 .4Thankfully, the card runs relatively
cool and quiet—and alternatively, you
can drop power use and noise levels by
enabling Silent mode in the software, but
where’s the fun in that? ASRock tuned the
fans to keep the GPU at around 75 C, and
it has a noise profile of 48 dB(A) at 1 0cm.
That’s about the same as the reference
6900 XT. Enable OC mode and noise
jumps to 52 dB(A), which is louder than
AMD’s reference design, but it also clocks
in at nearly 2.6GHz—over 250 MHz higher.LIGHTS OUT
One strange thing about the card is that
it actually looks quite boring, at least it
does if you’re into RGB bling. The only
lighting on the card consists of a small
strip around the back of the shroud,
near the power connectors. ASRock’s
Phantom cards include RGB fans and
more copious bling, and ‘conservative’
doesn’t normally come to mind when
we think about Formula One racing or
muscle cars. But hey, it’s what’s under
the hood that counts.
The performance ends up being about
five percent faster than the reference RX
6900 XT, and it comes relatively close to
matching the RTX 3 090. It’s actually faster
than the 3090 in most of our test suite, but
we also include Control and Cyberpunk2077 running with ray-tracing enabled.
That’s the Achilles’ Heel of AMD’s RDNA 2
architecture, especially since both games
include numerous ray-tracing effects.
At 14 40p, the ASRock card only manages
to reach 4 3fps in Control and drops below
30fps in Cyberpunk 2077. The RTX 3090 is
60–80 percent faster in those two games,
though Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla favors
the ASRock card (and AMD’s GPUs in
general) by 15 –35 percent.
Our biggest complaint with the ASRock
Formula is that it didn’t go far enough.
AMD released a liquid-cooled RX 6900 XT
card to system integrators, and it includes
18Gbps GDDR6. We would have loved to
see ASRock provide a similar VRAM for
the Formula, as that could have boosted
performance by another 10 percent in
some cases. A decent overclock of the
GPU can only go so far without a similar
overclock to the memory subsystem,
even if the Infinity Cache does help to
mitigate that somewhat.
Our other major complaint is more a
sign of the times than anything unusual.
ASRock lists the MSRP for the RX 6900 XT
Formula at $1,8 99. It’s high enough that
you can find the card in stock for less than
the MSRP, but that’s because AMD’s base
MSRP is only $ 999. Given the ASRock
card achieves the same 6 5MH/s hash rate
in Ethereum as other RX 68 00, 6800 XT,
and 6900 XT cards, miners aren’t willing
to pay the price premium. That means
you could actually buy the Formula for
around $1,600. That’s still more than we’d
recommend, but these are desperate
times for gamers. – JARRED WALTONBENCHMARKS
RX 6900 XT ASRock RTX 3090 RX 6800 XT8 Game Average 105 / 65 112 / 74 94 / 58
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla 120 / 70 90 / 60 108 / 63
Borderlands 3 147 / 81 128 / 76 133 / 73
Control (DXR) 68 / 43 109 / 71 62 / 39
Cyberpunk 2077 (DXR) 40 / 27 71 / 48 35 / 24
Dirt 5 148 / 97 149 / 100 139 / 90
Horizon Zero Dawn 145 / 82 137 / 94 136 / 76
Metro Exodus 113 / 72 115 / 77 99 / 63
Red Dead Redemption 2 123 / 83 117 / 83 108 / 72Best scores are in bold. All testing conducted with a Core i9-9900K, MSI MEG Z390 ACE, 2x16GB DDR4-3600
CL16, 2TB XPG 8200 Pro M.2 SSD, Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W. Scores are average framerates at
2560x1440/3840x2160, except in Control and Cyberpunk, which are at 1 920x1080/2560x1440.in the lab