Asus ROG goes big on AMD Big Navi with a water-cooled Radeon RX 6800 XT

AMD revealed its Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards last night, and now it's the third-party board partners' turn to show off their RDNA 2 creations. Asus is right out of the gate with a handful of chunky coolers, including an incredibly extra AiO liquid-cooled ROG Strix LC Radeon RX 6800 XT. 

The Strix LC is quite something. To keep a slender profile and cool temperatures in most cases, Asus says, this graphics card comes attached (via extra-long tubes) to a twin-fan 240mm radiator. There's also a blower-style radial fan on the card too, so it's sort of a best of both worlds solution. 'Sort of' due to the fact blower-style fans are really only best suited to compact builds.

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The secondary fan is a low-noise design, Asus explains, and is included to ensure that the card's power delivery stays cool. Oh, and did I mention it's plastered in RGB lighting? Both the two included 120mm fans and front of the card come with RGB lighting zones, so this card is both significantly flashier than the reference fare and promising to run nice and cool, too.

Asus is also announcing a Strix model of the cheapest RDNA 2 specification announced so far, the RX 6800. A sizeable graphics card, the ROG Strix RX 6800 comes with three fans (central one on a counter-rotation), a ventilation cut-out down the back plate, and, uh, RGB lighting down the side.

Aside from the pricier Strix models, Asus is introducing two TUF models: one RX 6800 XT and one RX 6800. The TUF cards usually arrive close to the reference cost of the card—so that's $649 for the RX 6800 XT and $579 for the RX 6800. These are still pretty chunky cards, too, sitting at a 2.9-slot size and with three Axial-tech fans. Also: RGBs.

Asus will also have reference card designs for the Big Navi GPUs at launch, which will essentially be what we've already seen but with some Asus stickering.

AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT and RX 6800 graphics cards will launch on November 18. There's also an ultra-enthusiast RX 6900 XT on the way for December 8, but it's not yet clear if third party cards will be available at first.