With its new Navi 21 GPU, the ASRock Radeon RX 6900 XT OC Formula is a top contender among all AMD graphics cards. Yes, it's here again. A coveted flagship graphics card with limited availability and skyrocketing prices. [But is there light at the end of the tunnel? The crypto market crash has shaken the resolve of some miners. With many coins dropping in value, it suddenly became difficult to recoup the high expense on top cards. Does this mean that RX 6000 and RTX 3000 cards will end up in the hands of gamers instead of miners? A single tweet from Elon Musk could change all that. [The ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula is designed to extract the maximum performance from AMD's flagship Navi 21 GPU and go head-to-head with Nvidia's best offerings. It is also a real treat to see another product dedicated to overclocking. These days, OC is often associated with LN2 clouds and irrelevant benchmark results, but overclocking still means high performance, which means more frames per second. This is something gamers and overclockers alike can appreciate.

The ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula features the fully unlocked Navi 21 silicon common to all AMD RX 6900 XT cards. The card features 5,120 stream processors spread across 80 RDNA2 compute units with 80 Ray Accelerators. It also features 16GB of GDDR6 memory connected by a 256-bit bus, with 128MB of on-die cache (Infinity Cache in AMD parlance) helping to offset the effects of the bus, which is considered quite narrow on the flagship 2021 card.

The rated boost clock speed is 2475MHz, which means that the OC Formula is 10% OC and MHz down when compared to the already impressive 2250MHz of the regular RX 6900 XT.

While the regular RX 6900 XT and most partner cards use the so-called Navi 21 XTX GPU, ASRock OC Formula uses a higher bin variant called Navi 21 XTXH. This is the highest bin for Navi 21 and thus the highest bin for all RDNA2 GPUs. It can obviously run at a higher clock speed than the vanilla RX 6900 XT.

If you need the fastest AMD card ever, ASRock OC Formula is definitely a contender.

OC Formula is a big triple-slot card. The triple-fan cooler is very attractive and comes in subtle gray and black tones with a hint of green. It may not be to everyone's taste, but to this reviewer, it is one of the best looking flagship cards on the market. On the back is a metal back plate with cutouts to allow air to pass through. There is also a thermal pad, which dissipates heat onto the back plate.

This cooler is, in a word, monstrous: the VRM and memory are all cooled via pads, and with eight heat pipes, it physically rivals the performance of any cooler on any card.

It also has a dual BIOS with performance and quiet modes, but under normal operating conditions our ears could not detect any difference in noise levels. There is also a small switch to disable all RGB without installing any software. This is a nice touch.

Display connections consist of three v1.4 DisplayPort connections and one HDMI 2.1 port. A triple PCIe power connector provides power; when combined with the 75W of PCIe slots, a minimum of 525W is available; ASRock recommends that a 1KW power supply be provided to power the OC Formula.

One would expect the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula to have a PCB built to set world records, and indeed it does. With a total of 21 phases powering the GPU and memory, high current capability is expected, allowing all high-end Infineon and IR components to get the most out of the GPU, with or without LN2 cooling.

This may be overkill compared to a regular RX 6900 XT, but if you are going to spend this much on a graphics card, you might as well go all the way. I guess it's cheaper than my car hobby.

Yes, the pricing suffers; at $2,270, the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula is about as obnoxious as any graphics card you can find on Ebay. There is no justification for such a price, and it leaves a big mark on the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula's name.

However, this is a card built for performance. However, the OC Formula can be as much as 10% faster in some cases, which is truly impressive for an overclocked SKU.

1440p performance

4K performance

Sadly, we did not have a GeForce RTX 3090 on hand for accurate side-by-side testing, but outside of ray-tracing enabled games, OC Formula 3080, except for games with ray tracing enabled. Of course, the newer GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is superior.

If only all these cards were available at reasonable prices. It would be a great battle and a great time for PC gamers.

During our testing, the cards settled into an average long run of 2,550 MHz. This is amazing. Not long ago, this would have been a decent CPU clock speed. This is easily the highest value of any card in AMD's RX 6000 series.

Ray tracing performance

Thermal performance

Temperatures were also very good, with a peak value of 73°C. Under default conditions, the card makes an audible noise, but that noise is not the annoying screech of an old AMD leaf blower card, but one of low pitch whirring.

ASRock appears to have tuned the cooler for lower temperatures at the expense of ultra-quiet operation. However, this is not a problem as this is a performance oriented card. To be honest, we did not notice any difference in sound even with the quiet BIOS selected.

Power consumption is high and may be the secret behind the Navi 21 XTXH silicon. The same RX 6900 XT system drew 454W from the wall at full gaming load, while the OC Formula drew 534W. This indicates that the card itself consumes over 70W more power than the reference RX 6900 XT. It is up to you to decide if this drop in efficiency is worth the added performance.

Despite the stock cooler, we can't say goodbye to the OC Formula without testing its OC prowess, and ASRock may not be good about dusting off the old LN2 pot for some 3DMark fun. We clocked it up to 2,790 MHz on the core and 2,140 Mhz on the memory. It was actually stable at higher than this, but the benchmark results were lower due to power limitations. However, there is a way around this if you scour the Internet: using TimeSpy Extreme, we improved from 8,573 to 8,913 when overclocked. This is higher than the top score of the Zotac RTX 3080 TI AMP Holo, which is very impressive.

The ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula is a fast card. It is really fast. The problem is that it sells for $2,270 directly from Newegg. I mean, come on. This is a decent retail price, not a price some shady Ebay reseller has put on it. This would make for a really nice holiday. But going to the top end of the market will always yield less. Let's hope this situation doesn't last forever.

In many cases, it outperforms the RTX 3080 Ti, making it a contender for the fastest card on the market, and while Nvidia holds the lead in ray-tracing applications, especially in games using DLSS, eye candy is not the real purpose of this card. The card's purpose is to maximize FPS and high results in benchmarks.

It overclocks well, runs cool, and looks great. But is it worth the cost ......?" It's definitely not worth the current skyrocketing price, but that's true of other high-end GPUs as well. But then again, that's true of other high-end GPUs as well. It all comes down to whether your bankroll can take the hit, and whether you can stomach paying more than twice the price of the RX 6900 XT for 10% higher gaming performance.

But if you want AMD and are willing to pay extreme prices for the best graphics card Red Team Silicon will allow, the ASRock RX 6900 XT OC Formula will not let you down.