For many gamers, the news that ASRock is releasing video cards came as a surprise. Although this is not news at all — it's just that motherboards have always been in the first place for the company. In addition, ASRock works exclusively with Radeon, bypassing popular hits from NVIDIA, so these cards flash very rarely in the top sales. Given the modest choice of Radeon video accelerators, it would be strange to expand the product line to the level of MSI, Gigabyte or Asus. Therefore, the model range of the company is limited to only 4 series of video cards, the most popular among which are the models of the Challenger series.


In the internal hierarchy, they occupy a position one step below the Phantom Gaming models, but at the same time they practice a completely different approach to design. The former seek to impress the gamer with a beautiful design, address lighting and additional functions, the latter do not even try to surprise anyone. On the contrary, these are orthodox video accelerators, in which performance is much more important than anything else. For example, the Radeon RX 6700 XT Challenger Pro is equipped with a similar cooling system with three fans, which we saw in the Phantom Gaming cards. However, it occupies exactly two expansion slots, looks very simple, and its length is reduced to 303 mm.

It is immediately clear that the company's engineers sought to simplify everything as much as possible and reduce the cost, but not at the expense of quality. Where it was possible to save money on the design of the casing, they did it. The number of light elements was reduced to a minimum, leaving only the Challenger logo to glow. But they did not save on cooling memory chips and video cores, leaving a metal backplate and massive aluminium radiators with 5-6 heat pipes. Such a solution, first of all, will interest thrifty gamers who prefer Radeon products to NVIDIA graphics cards.