MSI Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming Z review - Introduction

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.

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.