MSI Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming Z

Paving the road for proper mainstream gaming perf

The new Radeon RX 5600 XT has been announced, in this review, we peek at the MSI Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming X. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is basically an RX 5700 however with 6GB of GDDR6, lower clocks and a price tag of 279 USD. That could make it an excellent offering in the Quad HD domain at up-to a resolution of 2560x1440.

However days before this launch something happened, NVIDIA lowered RTX 2060 pricing to 299 USD. And there's where AMD made an 180 degree turn and pretty much created two separated SKUs for the 5600 XT. That would be the reference product, and then the factory tweaked (OC models) with greatly enhanced specs like a 180 Watt power envelope (opposed to 150 W), an increase of the maximum turbo clock as well as a bump in GDDR6 memory data-rate going from 12 towards 14 Gbps. Interesting for sure. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is not replacing the Radeon RX 5700 graphics card. The two products address different market needs. The Radeon RX 5600 XT was specifically designed and optimized to deliver the best 1080p gaming experiences, while the Radeon RX 5700 – with its additional memory and memory bandwidth – was specifically designed for 1440p gaming. Yeah, AMD hasn't been wasting any time, Ryzen 3000 at 7nm, Radeon VII at 7nm, then the Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT, as well as the 5500 series. All at 7nm fabrication. We now add the 5600 XT series. The basis of the product that we test today is the NAVI GPU, with a die fabbed at a 7nm fabricated package and 6GB of GDDR6 graphics memory (12 Gbps) these cards are released in an aim to compete with the GeForce RTX 2060, will it be capable to do that? We can already tell you that the numbers will be interesting to see. The most important aspect, however, is pricing. Where the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cost 349 and 399 USD respectively the 5600 XT series starts at 279 USD. The NAVI GPU is based on what AMD refers to as RDNA architecture (Radeon DNA). The Radeon 5000 series is the first commercial consumer graphics card that is PCIe Express 4.0 compatible. Both the Radeon 5600 and 5700 are offered with 2304 shader processors. The GPU game clock is dynamic at 1130~1375 MHz with a peak boost clock to 1.560 GHz for the no- OC (reference) model card. NAVI cards are fitted with GDDR6 memory, that means HBM2 is no longer used opposed to what you have been seeing with Vega 56/64, a clever choice as HBM2 memory is difficult to assemble onto the die substrate (lot's of yield issues there) and that makes it very expensive, next to being an expensive memory type to purchase.

Graphics card 5700 5600 XT 5500 XT RTX 2060 GTX 1660 Ti GTX 1660 Super Architecture RDNA 1.0 RDNA 1.0 RDNA 1.0 Turing Turing Turing Manufacturing processes 7 nm DUV 7 nm DUV 7 nm DUV 12 nm FFN 12 nm FFN 12 nm FFN Chip size (die) 251 mm² 251 mm² 158 mm² 445 mm² 284 mm² 284 mm² Code Name Navi 10 Navi 10 Navi 14 TU106-200 TU116-400 TU116-300 Transistors graphics chip (million) 10,300 10,300 6400 10,800 6600 6600 PCI Express standard 4.0 ×16 4.0 ×16 4.0 ×8 3.0 ×16 3.0 ×16 3.0 ×16 FP32 Shaders / TMU 2.304 / 144 2.304 / 144 1.408 / 88 1.920 / 120 1.536 / 96 1.408 / 88 ROP 64 64 32 48 48 48 GPU base clock (MHz) 1465 1130 1607 1365 1500 1530 GPU Boost Clock Games (MHz) 1625 1375 1717 1680 1770 1785 Compute power FP32 (GFLOPS) 7488 6336 4835 6451 5437 5027 Memory bus (bit) 256 192 128 192 192 192 RAM speed (GT / s) 14.0 12.0/14.0 14.0 14.0 12.0 14.0 memory type GDDR6 GDDR6 GDDR6 GDDR6 GDDR6 GDDR6 Memory bandwidth (GB / s) 448.0 288.0 / 336.0 224.0 336.0 288.0 336.0 Storage capacity (MiB) 8192 6144 8,192 / 4,096 6144 6144 6144 Typical power consumption 180 Watt 150 Watt 130 Watt 160 Watt 120 Watt 125 Watt

MSI Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming Z

MSI's Gaming X in that 5600 XT flavah was fitted with that newly updated style cooler combining a mix of black and gunmetal grey with a brushed metal backplate, and sure at the top side (albeit really subtle) some RGB light effects on the outside. The Gaming X is fitted with two 90mm Torx (v3.0) fans based on a Zero Frozr design, which means below 50 Degrees C the fans do not spin. The card is a notch longer for more cooling radiator surface, at a length of 29cm. The card will receive two 8-pin PCIe power connectors and connectivity wise it looks to become three DisplayPort outputs and one HDMI ports. It has been widely addressed by us already. But AMD created a bit of confusion by changing the specs for the OC/factory tweaked Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards. During our review process, MSI was still finalizing the firmware update. So they decided that the Gaming X model will retain the firmware with a TGP tweak (higher power envelope) and create another SKU called the Gaming Z, which holds the new performance firmware + a GDDR6 data-rate increase towards 14 Gbps.

RX 5600 XT GAMING Z Boost Game Memory speed Core Clock 1750 MHz 1615 MHz 14 Gbps

RX 5600 XT GAMING X Boost Game Memory speed Original BIOS 1620 MHz 1460 MHz 12 Gbps New BIOS for GAMING X 1750 MHz 1615 MHz 12 Gbps

The Gaming Z card features 6 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 14 Gbps and that means a memory bus width at 192-bits, delivering bandwidth of 336GB/s combined with a Boost allowance on the GPU of 1750 MHz. Tweaking wise AMD is restricting frequencies again. We'll discuss that in the overclocking section of the article. The card offers one HDMI 2.0b port and three DisplayPorts v1.4.