In general, one might associate the practice of tai chi with tranquility and harmony, but these characteristics do not apply to the ASRock Radeon RX 6800 XT Taichi X OC. On the contrary, it is as calm as a bull in a porcelain store; there is no subtlety in the Taichi X. The Taichi X is big, bold, strong, and bright. On paper, it is one of the fastest of all AMD RX 6800 XT cards. And, at least for the moment, they only produce AMD cards; the RX 6800 XT Taichi X is truly a premium card. A massive cooler, robust PCB, factory overclocking, useful features, and plenty of RGB lighting all make up serious graphics hardware.

When the RX 6800 series launched in November, we welcomed its generational leap in performance and competitiveness with the Nvidia RTX 3080 and Nvidia RTX 3070 cards. the RDNA2 architecture offers full DX12 Ultimate support, ray tracing capabilities, Smart Access Memory (resizable BAR), and other interesting features. In addition, a driver update will soon introduce a super-resolution mode similar to Nvidia's DLSS.

Rasterization is still king, but the winds are starting to change: games like "Cyberpunk 2077" have maximized the beauty of ray tracing, crossing the threshold where RT should become as common as AA and AF. Thanks to the growing number of console users, AMD has an architecture that developers should be familiar with in the coming years. The next few years of AAA games will be interesting.

The RX 6800 XT uses a slightly scaled-down version of the Navi 21 GPU: 4,608 cores compared to the AMD RX 6900 XT's 5,120. The RX 6800 XT has a boost clock of 2,250 MHz, while the Taichi X boosts the RX 6800 XT's boost clock to 2,250MHz, while the Taichi XT boosts it by 110MHz to 2,360MHz. The reference RX 6800 XT and Taichi X have the same memory specifications, with 16GB of memory at 16Gbps on a 256-bit bus.

The Taichi X is a triple-slot card. It is also tall, so you need to make sure it will fit in your case, and the overall look is very aggressive; the cogs and wheels design theme common to Taichi motherboards continues. The stylish back plate has a Taichi logo with RGB lights and a light bar on the case side of the card. The look is subjective, but the fan in the middle deserves to be shown in portrait orientation.

If RGB illumination is not to your liking, you can turn it all off with the onboard switch. It's a nifty feature. There is also an ARGB header so the card can be connected to other RGB devices. The card has two BIOS settings, with an optional quiet setting that lowers the boost clock to the reference 2,250 MHz and slightly reduces power consumption and fan speed.

Display output consists of one DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1, and one USB Type-C. The USB port supports DisplayPort pass-through, but in a perfect world triple-monitor users would not be bothered by three DisplayPorts would be desired.

The Taichi X is a completely custom design with a strong and robust PCB; 13-phase VRMs and another three for memory provide plenty of headroom for overclocking. You'll notice that the card has three 8-pin power connectors; add all this power to the 75W supplied by the PCIe slot and you have a massive 525W of power available. Perhaps with the release of third-party software tools or a special OC BIOS that removes the higher power limit, this design could really shine.

The Taichi cooler is generally effective; ASRock appears to have tuned it to keep temperatures down. This makes the card audible under load, but it was never obtrusive during our testing. At idle, the fan stops completely. If noise levels are a concern, use a quiet BIOS or try the undervoltage setting in the Radeon software suite. Gamers living in Alaska may have a slightly different view of cooling than gamers living in Arizona.

The RX 6800 XT Taichi X is one of the fastest factory overclocked RX 6800 XTs available, and this is evident in our performance testing. However, as seen in Nvidia's boost algorithm, the advertised boost clock means little; the quality of the GPU silicon itself, power consumption and temperature play a more important role. the Taichi X was able to maintain a boost clock of 2,375MHz after a 10-minute loop test The Taichi X was able to maintain a boost clock of 2,375MHz after 10 minutes of loop testing.

It is always interesting to see how the overclocking silicon lottery is played out. Power limiting is the main bottleneck, with both the Radeon software suite and ASRock's Tweak application limiting the power limit to 15% more. With this in mind, we were able to overclock the Taichi X to an average GPU clock of 2,550 MHz and memory of 2,150 MHz. This allowed us to marginally outperform the RX 6900 XT in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark (8843 vs. 8570) and Metro Exodus at 4K (70.9 FPS vs. 69.3 FPS).

The card is noticeably audible when pushed, but if you are gaming with headphones, this should not be a problem. However, if you are gaming with headphones, you won't care.

Now, on to the elephant in the room: availability. If you can't actually get it, it doesn't matter. By now you should have a wide selection of 6800s to choose from, but now, two months after the launch, there are none on the shelves. It is no exaggeration to say that this launch was a disaster.

Whatever the reason, be it the Covid fiasco, mining demand, component shortages, or Apple's monopoly on 7nm foundry capacity, the launch was a failure. Sony, Microsoft, and Nvidia are facing similar supply issues. Let's hope these problems are not repeated. Many gamers who were looking forward to upgrading during the holidays will be very disappointed.

However, the ASRock RX 6800 XT Taichi X itself is big, bright, and in your face. It is an excellent 4K gaming option, with performance rivaling that of the RTX 3080. However, as expected, Nvidia has the performance advantage in games that employ ray tracing, especially those with DLSS enabled.

The RX 6800 XT Taichi X is certainly expensive at US$830, but it sets itself apart from the likes of the Powercolor Red Devil and MSI Gaming X.

[17] [18] [19] [20] The RX 6800 XT Taichi X is a good value for the money. Good luck finding one at that price.

If you are looking for a card that is fast right out of the box, looks good, and can be overclocked, the ASRock 6800 XT Taichi X is worth considering alongside any RX 6800 XT from any vendor. As long as you can find something like it.

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