My first taste of AMD’s latest generation of Navi GPU’s to be put in my graphics card reviews portfolio, in particular, the RX 5700 XT, starts with no more no less with this monster MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X model. Be sure to subscribe to my channel because I’m also going to check out it’s smaller brother in the near future!
Right away you can notice that something is very different from this card design-wise, considering that it comes from MSI. As you all probably saw in one of my RTX reviews of MSI cards, I’ll put a random video to of one those in the right top corner if you want to check it out, they tend to carry over some design cues from their previous generations, but this time, with the Navi cards, they decided to go in another direction. Now we have this boxy-looking minimalistic shroud covered in black and dark gray color scheme with a sort of like a brushed aluminum finish in few areas.
Overall I must amid that I do like where this design is going, but I would really rather see those red accents being replaced for example with maybe an RGB LED line, as ones see on their current-gen Nvidia offering, instead of just being a fixed red accent. Actually, my first thought, when I saw them, was that they were going to light up in red, based on some of their former designs choices that I’ve seen. As for the actual RGB, we have this well familiar and pretty modest add on of a glowing MSI logo on the side of the card. Alternatively, they could have put some extra lighting on that massive aluminum back-plate which brings in this very cool looking design, fit and finish, and actually, there are some thermal pads between it and the PCB of the card, for better heat transfer.
MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X – A monster to be reckoned with
The back I/O shield is really hollowed out, probably so the hot is can easily escape, but it does look a bit wired. Back here you’ll find a standard layout of video outputs with three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. Lastly, in terms of other ports on it, for powering it up you’ll find two 8-pin PCI-express power connectors.
The RX 5700 XT Gaming X weighs in at enormous 1400 grams, measures almost 300 millimeters of length and three slots in height. That’s before all due to a massive heat-sink design, which is probably at least half of the weight of the card. It’s divided into two aluminum fin stacks, one carries a nickel-plated copper base plate for the GPU, and the other an aluminum heat-spreader for cooling off the power delivery system, that being a 9-phase one for the GPU and 2-phase for the 8 GB’s of GDDR6 video memory. All of that is connected and using a total of 6 nickel-plated copper heat-pipes, one of which is an 8 mm pipe, while we also have a black aluminum heat-spreader below the main cooler array, making direct contact with it over thermal pads, and and such it takes the heat of the video memory, while all of that is, of course, topped off with two 95 mm Torq 3.0 fans, which have this mildly interesting MSI logo stickers which have slight rainbow color shift effect.
Speaking of the fans, with this cooler design MSI put all of their bets for this model on its noise and cooling performance. I was seeing mostly below 70°C during my benchmarking runs, which was a more than a decent figure for a Navi card, while the hot spot temperature didn’t go over 90°C. During idle the GPU temperature mostly around 50°C, which is high but understandable since the fan don’t spin if the temperature is below 60°, plus it heavily depends on your chassis airflow, while the fan speed under load was roaming around 1300 RPM, which was hard to hear even with it sitting right next o me on an open testbed. Here’s a short sound clip of the card under load, while also showing the sound meter for measurement comparison.
RX 5700 XT Gaming X overclocking bound by the GPU
Getting back to the cards performance side of things, MSI of course decided to do some factory overclock with it, bumping up the GPU core clock frequency by about 80 MHz from the reference figures, but that’s just on paper as in practice this can vary as I saw it roaming anywhere from 1800 to 2000 MHz, depending on the game or benchmark. Overclocking it further it didn’t get me too far since the Navi GPU aren’t t keen on that. Although I bumped up the core clock to 2150 MHz, which basically the max it will go and if you put a higher value for it after a certain number, it just pulls back, and the same goes for video memory and GPU core voltage too, in practice I saw it anywhere from 2050 to 2100 MHz. Memory overclock was pretty modest, I managed to stretch it to 930 MHz as it wasn’t too stable on the 950 MHz limit, so I pulled it back a bit. All of this, in the end, resulted in about 2-3% of a performance jump, not great, not terrible.
Before I cross over to my benchmarking results, if you have any question or other concerns about this card, being it in general or something specific, like overclock settings and such, feel free to leave your comment down below, and here, within the description box to be precise, you will find my setup which was used for testing this GPU out. OK, let’s check out the performance of this card.
Similar to its main rival, Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super, the MSI RX 5700 XT Gaming X delivers enough horsepower for you to basically play any game at 1440p and high settings while getting above 60 FPS. On the other hand, if you have a high refresh rate 1080p gaming monitor, it will also deliver the performance needed to drive such a display.
Not your average RX 5700 XT
As for the power draw, this system in idle pulled around 60W, while putting a load only on the GPU it went up to 315 W, so that’s about 255-260W of raw pull from the graphics card, plus a bit more when you count in the idle power draw.
It seems like MSI set the bar really high for other Navi based models which are going to come through my hands in the future, actually, I already have Gigabyte’s RX 5700 XT Gaming Oc in the workings, be sure to stick for that one also, but as for what I saw from MSI’s RX 5700 XT Gaming X model, they’ll we have to give a really good fight to compete in the segment of noise and cooling performance. Something to keep in mind when making your final purchase decision,
and that’s that this model is priced a bit higher than your average example for this series, so you’ll have to weight in if that’s worth it to you considering everything that it brings on the table.
That’s it for this time, I hope this MSI RX 5700 XT Review will let you decided which Navi card to buy, if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
