Futuremark Tests
The strange nature of testing the Asus card, where we went down to the company's offices rather than test in our own lab, meant that it gave us an opportunity of evaluating differently. We chose to compare to the Asus Radeon RX Vega 64 Strix Gaming to the reference card across a range of games that you don't usually see in the current HEXUS suite.
Should you want to cross-compare the probable performance of the Asus card, head on over to our in-depth review. As it is, we used an Intel Core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz on all cores as the performance base. Drivers were the same 17.8.1 beta as used on the reference card.
Though both cards are clocked in at the same speeds - programmed with a maximum clock of 1,630MHz - the Asus variant does better in the batch of synthetic tests.
The reason why is, because as we mentioned on the previous page, the Strix card keeps its core running at a higher frequency, for longer, thanks to the better cooling.
Comparing average core frequency over the tests when under load, the reference card managed 1,366MHz while the Asus Strix upped that to 1,471MHz. It is this 100MHz-plus gain that gives the Asus card its lead.
Though we don't explicitly show it here, the reference card's frequency fluctuates far more, resulting in a fail in the 3DMark Time Spy Stress Test, coming in at 95.6 per cent - anything below 97 per cent is considered a fail - yet the Asus card managed 99.2 per cent.
