MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT

The base design of the Radeon RX 6700 XT is done right, MSI added to that a more advanced PCB design, component selection as well as a more beefy cooler. That recipe is working well bringing you a product that is 3 to 4% faster than reference depending on monitor resolution and game. You'll retrieve a nice performing product in that WQHD range at very acceptable temperatures and acoustic levels. Aesthetically the card looks fine as well, a bit bulky perhaps. We do feel that MSI needs to step away from the silver-colored elements on the cooling shroud though. As stated it's a lovely Full HD, and Quad HD card with abilities at Ultra HD as well. Raytracing performance on this generation RDNA2 card is okay and will allow you to fool around with ti a bit. Of course, AMD lacks something DLSS, bigtime. All that could be forgiven if the product was priced right, and it isn't. We think the card as tested will cost somewhere in the 550 USD marker, and while we can recommend the card itself up-to 2560x1440 gaming, we cannot justify the irrational price level.

On average, over our brand-new, 22-game strong test suite, we measured the MSI RX 6700 XT Gaming X to almost exactly match the AMD reference design. In some tests it's a tiny bit faster, in others it's a tiny bit slower—expected due to random variation between test runs. The result is still surprising, because MSI has the card coming with a factory overclock, according to specs, but it doesn't turn into any tangible performance benefit. Other custom designs tested today have exactly the same problem, so it doesn't look like it's MSI's fault. While it's not a huge deal—factory OCs only give you 1, 2 or 3% these days, it's still unexpected. Other reviewers are seeing similar results, I wonder what's going on.

Going into this I knew that AMD was focusing on this card being a solid performer at 1440p and it did just that. I only had one result lower than 60 FPS at that resolution and there were a lot in over 120 FPS as well. The same went for 1080p. The RX 6700 XT came in and stepped its game up compared to the 5700 XT. They added ray accelerators to help with ray tracing. But it is the huge jump in clock speeds that have improved the overall performance up significantly. Of course, this was an overclocked card from MSI as well which adds a little more kick to things, but MSI paired that up with one of their dual fan coolers and even without going with a monster Trio cooler the cooling performance was great. Noise performance was middle of the road but not bad at all and it will be interesting to see how it all compares to other RX 5700 XT’s when I dive into testing them.

MSI’s Gaming X variant of the 6700 XT offers similar performance to that of every other 6700 XT we have tested. Where it really shines is the quality! You know what you are getting with MSI and let me tell you, this card ha a good weight to it when you pick it up. Thanks to its Gaming X cooling solution, it should also some decent overclocks so you can get that bit more extra performance out of it.

Ever since the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Update and Review we have seen a larger divergence in AMD’s consumer/ gaming GPUs for compute performance. AMD’s focus on ROCm and CDNA GPUs has certainly changed how we view the market. There are many sites that do gaming benchmarks, but on the compute side, things are a bit different. There is a lot more work getting consumer AMD GPUs to work in GPU compute scenarios that we test. NVIDIA, in contrast, focuses on offering CUDA support, and across its range. There are still cases where AMD performs well, but the strategic decision to focus on the higher-end GPUs as AMD readies exascale supercomputers can certainly be seen here.