ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT Formula

Big Navi revs its engine

- JARRED WALTON

THE RADEON RX 6900 XT currently reigns as AMD’s most powerful GPU. ASRock takes that chip, slaps on a massive tripleslot, 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 miniITX 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 850W 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 390– 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 390W 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 430W of power draw in testing.

Thankfully, 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 75C, and it has a noise profile of 48 dB(A) at 10cm. 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 250MHz higher.

LIGHTS OUT