MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming Trio 16G, 16GB GDDR6, HDMI, 3x DP

As stated, we're very pleased and even impressed to see what MSI brings to the table here. The card is offered as a factory tweaked product, and for once, it really has a pretty impressive factory tweak. Coming from a reference 6900 XT you can expect an up to 10% performance increase for any reference 6950 XT. However, MSI allows additional higher power usage and clocks the max boost clock an extra 150 MHz as well. All that results in yet another performance increase. So in the long haul, if a 6900 XT pushes 200 FPS, a card like this can reach 230~240 FPS, and that is a serious incremental number. What also helps AMD is that SAM works out better and better for AMD, as opposed to NVIDIA which hardly benefits from it with their Ampere-based cards. The GAMING X TRIO is premium and unique in a number of ways. This dragon pours fire back at you in the form of majestic cooling, dignified acoustics, and, some factory tweaking bringing you some noble gaming performance. We adore manufacturers that go beyond the box and share our admiration for superior products, but with a price tag that is hard to stomach. MSI executed everything perfectly in terms of hardware and manufacture. They are extracting as much information as possible from this GPU using a well-constructed board that meets all of our wants and specifications, which you should appreciate. I will say this; factory-tuned performance is disputed and debatable these days; after all, you can tweak these cards yourself, so does it justify the price premium? Many of you will disagree, while others will have no problem with it I guess. If you find this product to be prohibitively expensive, you may purchase a reference card or even downgrade to the 6750 or 6800 XT if your preferred color is red. Apart from the pricing point, we're quite satisfied with this card. The experience of tweaking this board pleased me as well. Who's gonna buy this then? Well, AMD aficionados still in that Series 5000 we expect. other then that we think most people will wait until Series 7000 surfaces later this year. But without regard for cost, this has to be a top selection.

Averaged over our 25-game strong test suite, at 4K resolution, we find the MSI RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio 11% faster than the original RX 6900 XT reference design—very nice. With these gains, the card is able to overtake the more expensive NVIDIA RTX 3090 by 5%, and the recently-released RTX 3090 Ti is only 4% faster. This makes the MSI Gaming X Trio the fastest RX 6950 XT tested today, but it does use a lot of additional power to achieve it, more on that later. Compared to the RTX 3080 Ti, which sells for $1,200, the RX 6950 XT is 6% faster. The RTX 3080 and RX 6800 XT are roughly 13% behind. While performance is always near the top, it does vary greatly between games, so make sure to check out the titles you're playing. AMD's new Radeon RX 6950 XT is the perfect choice for gaming at 4K. With the newest drivers, AMD seems to have improved performance in situations where the games ended up CPU-limited; older DirectX 11 titles also show good gains.