MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio 16 GB GDDR6 Graphics Card Review – RDNA 2 With Tri-Frozr 2S Cooling

January 11, 2021 OSTN Staff

MSI’s Radeon RX 6800 series custom graphics cards are finally here and I got the chance to test out the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio which turned out to be a really interesting experience. MSI is doing a fantastic job with its Gaming X Trio lineup which is not only better looking than the last-gen Gaming X Trio lineup but also has far better thermal performance. This is also my first time to test AMD’s brand new RDNA 2 architecture-based Radeon RX 6800 XT and the performance has me pleasantly surprised.

The sample I received featured a factory overclock of 2285 MHz but the average clock rates peaked between 2400-2500 MHz. You can further push the card through manual overclocking and gain an additional 5-6% performance boost along with SAM that adds an average 7.5% performance gain in several titles that I tested.

As for the cooling solution, the new Gaming X Trio design is built for the power-hungry RDNA 2 chips and does a pretty good job keeping the card under 65C even in stress tests. For gaming, the average temperatures were around 60C while pushing the fan speeds to 100% led to around 51-50C temps which are quite impressive at the cost of more noise output. The power consumption of the card is a metric that might be a cause of concern for many as the card can definitely increase your power input by a large factor.

I saw power figures hit around 350 Watts during gaming while peak consumption in stress tests was around 400 Watts. To run this card, you’d require a high-quality Power Supply which is a must for any flagship graphics card these days. Also, make sure that your supply is outfitted with three PCIe connectors, each on an individual rail to supply this beast with its tremendous power requirements. With that said, the Radeon RX 6800 XT was delivering around the same performance as the GeForce RTX 3080 while consuming lower power and running cooler which shows the tremendous efficiency gain that AMD has achieved with its 2nd generation RDNA architecture.

The card isn’t that bulky and should fit inside most cases with relative ease and the triple-fan solution comes with 0db fan technology which unless or until you’re touching 60C won’t spin at all. This allows lower noise levels when you’re not doing any graphics-intensive tasks. MSI went all the way by including a full metal backplate on the card which comes with dual copper heat pipes to effectively transfer heat from the back. The back of the card is also important considering there are 12 memory modules featured on the other side of the PCB which need to be cooled.

The RGB is not overdone and the Mystic Light cuts on the front and sides provide really good aesthetics of the card itself. MSI is charging a $200 US premium for its Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card. That is surely a hefty premium but considering that all AIBs have raised the MSRPs of their cards, $849 US is where you will expect the RX 6800 XT custom cards these days if you can find one which is the harder part. Compared to the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio, the RX 6800 XT is over $100 US expensive, and while the RX 6800 XT generally tends to perform better and run cooler, it lacks the RTX and DLSS features that give NVIDIA a huge edge. SAM is a feature worth looking into but the green team is already planning to unveil its own competitor which would enable resizable-bar for their GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards.

To conclude, the MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio is a great graphics card with an insane amount of performance packed under its hood. It runs cooler than its GeForce counterparts & consumes lower power. The card also manages to beat the GeForce RTX 3090 in select titles and that is a $1499 US+ graphics card. At the same time, the hefty $849 US+ price point and the lackluster raytracing performance make this card a hard buy if you’re interested in raytraced games and as of right now, AMD also doesn’t have any competing solution against NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0 which is a game-changer.