MSI RX 5600 XT Gaming X Review

1. Introduction2. MSI RX 5600 XT Gaming X3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. The Division 2 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. F1 2019 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Far Cry New Dawn (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Gears 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Ghost Recon: Breakpoint (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)13. Red Dead Redemption 2 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)14. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)15. Total War: Three Kingdoms (1080p, 1440p, 4K)16. Clock Speed17. Temperatures18. Acoustics19. Power Consumption20. Overclocking: Frequency and Games21. Overclocking: Temperatures, Acoustics, Power22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

Today we are back with another RX 5600 XT review as we assess the MSI Gaming X model. Despite this card receiving a new BIOS update to improve GPU clock speeds, unlike the other two 5600 XT cards we have tested, the Gaming X's memory still runs at 12Gbps instead of 14Gbps. How much of a difference does this make when gaming, and is the card still worth buying?

Regular readers may recall news emerging about the MSI RX 5600 XT Gaming X, when MSI revealed in a livestream that not all 5600 XTs can run the memory at 14Gbps. I've since had further discussions with MSI about this, and they explained to me that based on their own internal testing, they cannot guarantee that all 5600 XT Gaming X cards would be stable with 14Gbps memory. Therefore, with the card's BIOS update, only GPU clock speed has increased.

That said, there is a chance that users who buy a Gaming X will be able to run 14Gbps no problem. As we will see later on in this review, I encountered no issues manually overclocking from 12Gbps to beyond 14Gbps. It seems to be somewhat of a ‘silicon lottery' as to which Gaming X's can or can't hit the higher memory clock, but considering MSI can't validate 14Gbps for all its cards, it makes sense that memory speed has been left alone.

To ensure that MSI does have a card that can run at 14Gbps, the company will be shortly releasing a RX 5600 XT Gaming Z model, which guarantees that faster memory speed out of the box. According to my conversations with MSI, this will be exactly the same cooler and PCB as the Gaming X, only it will be validated for 14Gbps memory. Again, this brings us back to the point that some Gaming X cards out there will handle the higher speeds, and some of those will now be designated as a Gaming Z.

The downside for the Gaming X is that its specifications don't match that of other RX 5600 XT cards, like the Sapphire Pulse or Gigabyte Gaming OC. Accordingly, we expect the card will run slower than those models in our tests, but by how much? Let's find out.

	RX 5600 XT	RX 5700	RX 5700 XT	RX Vega 56	RX Vega 64
Architecture	Navi	Navi	Navi	Vega 10	Vega 10
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	7nm	14nm	14nm
Transistor Count	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	12.5 billion	12.5 billion
Die Size	251mm²	251mm²	251mm²	486mm²	495mm²
Compute Units	36	36	40	56	64
Stream Processors	2304	2304	2560	3584	4096
Base GPU Clock	n/a	Up to 1465MHz	Up to 1605MHz	1156 MHz	1274 MHz
Game GPU Clock	1375MHz	Up to 1625MHz	Up to 1755MHz	n/a	n/a
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 1560MHz	Up to 1725MHz	Up to 1905MHz	1471 MHz	1546 MHz
Peak Engine Clock	n/a	n/a	n/a	1590 MHz	1630 MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 7.19 TFLOPS	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 10.5 TFLOPS	Up to 12.7 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 14.4 TFLOPS	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 21.0 TFLOPS	Up to 25.3 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 224.6 GT/s	Up to 248.4 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 330.0 GT/s	Up to 395.8 GT/s
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 99.8 GP/s	Up to 110.4 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 94.0 GP/s	Up to 98.9 GP/s
Memory	6GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB HBM	8GB HBM
Memory Bandwidth	288 GB/s	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	410 GB/s	483.8 GB/s
Memory Interface	192-bit	256-bit	256-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit
Board Power	150W	185W	225W	210W	295W

Original BIOS spec, left, compared with updated BIOS spec, right.

Just to confirm the changes made by the Gaming X's BIOS update (available within MSI's Dragon Center utility), memory speed remains unchanged at 1500MHz (12Gbps.) GPU speed, however, has increased from 1620MHz boost to 1750MHz boost, with the game clock now sitting at 1615Mhz which is up from 1460MHz.

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