The devil is in the details.
Asus: It's AMD's Fault The ROG Strix Radeon RX 5700 Series GPUs Run Hot : Read more
Asus: It's AMD's Fault The ROG Strix Radeon RX 5700 Series GPUs Run Hot : Read more
IMO, it is poor engineering. Those specs are certainly available from AMD.Trying to shift the blame, on their poor QC. Plenty have shown the strix is horribly built, while others , like the power color Red devil, are great cards.
Hardware Unboxed covered this and described a fix in a video they did back in early January. From the looks of it, it appears to be largely down to Asus using a very large and heavy cooler, but inadequate mounting hardware to properly support such a cooler. So while the pressure might be fine when the heatsink is turned upright or when it is sitting on a surface during the cooler's installation, the cooler actually pulls away from the card when suspended below it. Some reviewers saw better thermal results, though that may have been down to them testing the card in a vertical orientation, such as in an open test-bench, where the weight of the cooler wouldn't be pulling down on the card as much...A lot of things can affect mounting pressure. For example, if you use too thick a thermal pad on the memory chips, that will will read 50-60psi on the plate, but the GPU isn't making proper pressure contact.
10:1 they didn't have the proper thermal pads, and it was interfering with the mounting.