Final Thoughts
This is the second Radeon RX 5700 series card that we’ve had the chance to get our hands on and I have to say this one really caught our attention much more than Sapphire’s Pulse card. This mainly has to do with the overall design of the card with its champagne-colored metal shroud and full-cover metal backplate. The card not only looks premium, but feels premium when you pick it up. Also we didn’t mention it all that much, but this card does not have any RGBs or lights for that matter, which some people might actually like. While the look of this card is great, it does however make the card really stand out in your system and it is going to be hard to match other components with it.
Looks aside, MSI has outfitted this card with a custom cooling solution and an overclock that brings your game clock up to 1835 MHz and boost clock up to 1945 MHz. The overclock is going to get you a few more FPS in games compared to a reference-clocked card and the cooling solution definitely does its job. During full load our card peaked at 69C, which is much, much better than what you would get from AMD’s blower-style reference cooler. We ran MSI’s new “Quiet” BIOS on the card, which was released to address the louder fans. Even with that BIOS installed the card was a bit noisy during our game testing, so that is something to keep in mind. The card does feature MSI’s Zero Frozr technology, so the fans will turn off when the card is not under load, which will help with noise levels as well as power consumption.
When looking at performance of this card and the Radeon RX 5700 XT in general it beats out the NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super in most of our tests and should be pretty on par with a RTX 2070 Super. So you should have no problem playing games at 1080p at very high (100+) frame rates and 1440p titles at 70-90 FPS. You could also bump your settings down a bit and play some titles at 4K resolution no problem. The only thing that the NVIDIA RTX cards have that this card does not is real-time ray tracing and DLSS. So if you are interested in using those things that is something you are going to want to consider.
At the end of the day MSI has created a very eye-catching Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card in their Evoke OC. At $449.99 at our favorite online retailer, that puts it $50 over reference-designed cards. With the champagne-colored all metal shroud, backplate, custom cooling solution, and factory overclock MSI makes a good argument why you should spend the extra money over a reference card. Overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI RX 5700 XT Evoke OC Graphics Card a 9 out of 10 score.
Pros:
– All metal shroud and full-cover backplate
– Factory overclock
– Great cooling solution
– Zero Frozr
– One of the best looking RX 5700 XTs we’ve seen
Cons:
– Fans are a bit loud even with the Quiet BIOS installed
– $50 over reference pricing might be a bit too high
