MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

After taking a look at my first AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card I have to say I am very impressed! As I mentioned AMD is marketing this card as the ideal card for 1440p gaming and it really is. In all of our tests at 1440p the card was easily able achieve well over 60 FPS and in most cases it was closer to 100 FPS. That means that you could also use this card as a high frame rate option for 144 Hz monitors. On the other hand you can definitely do 4K with this card too, with many titles easily hitting over FPS with the settings turned all the way up. In some cases you might need to turn you settings down, but not by much. In our testing the RX 6700 XT was very competitive with the RTX 2080 Super as well as the RTX 3070, although it did fall behind the RTX 3070 in most of our tests.

A new thing to the Radeon RX 6000 series is real-time ray tracing. The RX 6700 XT features 40 ray tracing accelerators. Obviously enabling ray tracing will take a performance hit, but it is good to see AMD offer ray tracing, which was a NVIDIA-only feature last generation.

Another interesting thing about the RX 6700 XT I noticed is that while it has better performance than the RX 5700 XT in gaming, the performance is actually less when it comes to crypto currency mining. Mining ETH I was able to get around 47-48 MH/s with the 6700 XT, while the RX 5700 XT was around 52-53 MH/s.

MSI’s RX 6700 XT Gaming X sits as their flagship RX 6700 XT. Off the bat you get factory overclock (GPU Boost) up to 2659 MHz vs 2581 MHz of the reference card. That is definitely going to get you a few extra FPS in games. On top of that you are getting MSI’s Twin Frozr 8 cooling solution which is one of the best out there. It keeps your GPU nice and cool and is not loud at all really. The card also has a full-cover aluminum backplate and some great, but not in your face RGB lighting.

AMD has set the MSRP of the card at $479, which definitely makes it competitive with the RTX 3070 ($499 MSRP). MSI will be selling their Gaming X version of this card for $789.99! That is a $300+ premium! This pricing is US only as MSI tells us “Due to 25% tariffs tax by the Trump administration back in Jan 2021, the MSRP has to be added to the cost.” So this card is more expensive than a RTX 3080 Founders Edition (if you can find one). I know that the GPU market is horrible right now with scalpers and second-hand sellers, but those are the people imposing the higher prices. Here we have MSI putting a 64% price increase on the card which is only going to be slightly faster than reference and has a better cooling solution. I just cannot justify an extra $300 for that.

Overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X Graphics Card an 8 out of 10 score.

rating8 10

Pros:
– Great 1440p performance
– Competitive against RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 Super
– Twin Frozr 8 cooling solution
– Ray tracing
– Sleek design with RGB lighting
– Full cover aluminum backplate

Cons:
– Availability
– $300+ premium over reference
– Lower performance in mining than a RX 5700 XT

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