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The ASRock RX 6900 XT Formula isn't quite the largest graphics card we've ever tested, but it does come close. It's slightly longer than the reference RTX 3090 Founders Edition, a card that still surprises me with its heft every time I pick it up. But the ASRock Formula isn't quite as heavy, weighing 'only' 1831g — the 3090 FE weighs 2189g. The ASRock card does use every bit of its triple-slot thickness as well, with dimensions of 331 x 124 x 59mm.
ASRock sticks with traditional axial fans, though it notes the ones on the Formula are "striped" — presumably to reduce air turbulence. The highest performing fans these days use an integrated rim, increasing the static pressure and helping to direct more airflow over the radiator fins. We've seen such fans on Asus and MSI cards, for example, but not from ASRock. The three 95mm fans should still provide sufficient cooling, but for a premium card we'd like to see a fan upgrade — these are the same fans as you'll find on ASRock's lesser Phantom Gaming line.
Another interesting twist is that compared to the Phantom Gaming cards, there's very little RGB lighting on the Formula. Some will appreciate the lack of bling and generally subdued looks, particularly anyone using a case that doesn't have a window, but if you like colorful lights you'll be better served by other options. There's just a single RGB strip that wraps around the back and top sides of the card, and it's not particularly visible unless you look from the right angle. Naturally, you can use ASRock's Polychrome SYNC software to control the color of the strip, or turn it off completely.
As mentioned above, we tested the Formula using OC Mode, which you can access through the ASRock Tweak software. You can also opt for the Quiet Mode, which cuts clocks and drops the power limit, though the card was relatively quiet even in OC mode. Manual overclocking is also possible, either via ASRock Tweak or just using AMD's Radeon Settings software, and the AMD software exposes more fine-grained control than ASRock Tweak so there's no real need to install the extra software unless you just want the one-click overclock button.
ASRock does have a rather wide range of overclocking speeds exposed on the Formula, but unless you're planning to replace the cooler with a liquid nitrogen pot, you're going to end up only using a fraction of the available range. You can set the maximum GPU clock as high as 4000 MHz, which is definitely not a thing you should do, and you can try to push the memory clock as high as 2624 MHz (21 Gbps effective). While there's a bit of headroom on both, in practice you'll want to stick to about a 150MHz maximum increase on either one, and then test to ensure stability. The minor gains in performance you'll get from such an overclock likely aren't worth the added power use, heat, and potential instability, which is why we opted to stick with the OC Mode for testing purposes.
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