Final words and conclusion

Final words

And there's the 5th Radeon RX 6800 XT we have tested; as time passes and performance increases, so does pricing, it seems. I just performed a quick lookup at pricing for this card here in the Netherlands, and it's listed at a monstrous 899 EUR, which means the price in USD is roughly the same, slightly lower at 850 USD. That's a deadly number for a product that is supposed to be sitting in that 650 USD range. And yeah, I mentioned it many times; ultimately, everything and anything it's all about gaming price, performance, and, of course, rendering quality. Of course, the Radeon RX 6800 XT is a product that ticks the mandatory boxes. We do feel a potential 6800 offers more value for money. But MSI  did well with this one regarding perf, tweaking, cooling, and acoustics. This card can run games at 4K; it will serve extremely well at WQHD and with brutally GPU bound games. At Full HD, you'll be quite often bottlenecked and CPU limited, but compared to NVIDIA's RTX 3080 and even 3090, AMD's L3 cache brings them some speedy performance. Competition wise you're looking at 3080 levels of performance for the 6800 XT overall. Performance-wise we can safely state that this is a true Quad HD graphics card that is very Ultra HD capable of the current games. However, AMD's biggest deficit is that they do not have a solution at hand that matches DLSS from NVIDIA. The added Tensor cores in hardware on the RTX series will always work out better for NVIDIA. Even with DirectML support pending, these still need to be run over the compute engine. So no matter how we look at it, it'll cost performance, whereas NVIDIA can offload its ML supersampling to the tensor cores. It's the sole reason why they implemented these specific DL/AI cores in the first place. 

Performance-wise I had expected that MSI would have clocked the product a little higher with a tad more Boost and power allowance. You can see that the Gaming X TRIO is roughly 4 to 5% faster than the reference (depending what application you measure), but 1 to 2% slower than the competition. Perhaps MSI is planning a SUPRIM X edition that I don't know off, though. Then again, relatively speaking, it's just 1 to 2%; literally, that's a 1 or 2 frame differential per 100 FPS on average.

Cooling & noise levels

The series offers good results in even stressed conditions, all thanks to the excellent cooler, of course. You'll hover at only 33~34 DBa measures at a 40cm distance in terms of stressed GPU acoustics. Temperatures are fine; you'll hit 66~67 Degrees C overall under heavy gaming stress. That number will vary a bit in relation to the airflow you have available in your chassis, though. FLIR imaging shows the card is hardly bleeding heat. Overall, we're very comfortable with what we observe.

Energy

Heat output and energy consumption are closely related to each other, as (graphics) processors and heat can be perceived as a 1:1 state; 300 Watts in energy consumption equals close to 300 Watts in heat as output. This is the basis of TDP. AMD is listing them at 250 (6800) to 300 (6800 XT) Watts for the flagship product, which is okay for a graphics card in the year 2020 at this performance level. We measure numbers to be close to the advertised values for the XT. We measured a typical 332 Watt while gaming; that's total board power, not TGP. So that's 10% extra power consumption for 5% extra performance.

Aesthetics

We already mentioned we do not understand the eerie grey looking inserts despite being a good looking design. The looks should have been all dark or very dark. Good to see is the backplate, including ventilation gaps. So overall, we're okay with the card's looks; however, it could have been a notch better looking imho. Then again. Looks are a subjective thing, of course.

Above the GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming X TRIO, now look below.

And here the Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X TRIO; we feel the NVIDIA design looks nicer being darker overall due to that darker theme.

Coil whine

The MSI Gaming X card, much like any other card these days, does exhibit coil squeal, moderate amounts of it, and we started noticing it once we passed 150 FPS in games. Is it annoying? It's at a level you can hear it for sure. In a closed chassis, that noise would fade away in the background. However, with an open chassis, you can hear coil whine/squeal. Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially at high framerates; this can be perceived. So at 33~34 DBa, we could not hear the fans, but some coil whine was definitely there (depending on the game title).

Pricing

Limited availability and nauseating price levels these days for a graphic card are becoming bothersome. I mean, even for us true hardcore PC gamers, it's getting more and more difficult to explain why people should put down this much money to be able to play computer games on a PC. I mean, the spread is $999 for the 6900 XT, $649 for the 6800 XT, and $579 for the cheapest 6800 model based on the reference design. The Gaming X TRIO  has a 250 USD price premium coming from that reference design. It's far too steep, TBH, but I would like to mention I monitored the street price, and these are very fluent and artificially inflated at the moment.

Tweaking

AMD does enforce cap again on the memory; we don't like that as we feel we could have gone a notch further. Results will vary per board, brand, and even card due to cooling (GDDR6/GPU/VRM), and where we'd hit 2500 MHz (stable) on cards like the Sapphire and XFX ones, the Gaming X TRIO did well. Your power limiter is the decisive and dominant factor; lowering or increasing the power budget allows for higher framerates; we could add 9%. Combined, we could apply 2650 MHz on the GPU clock without anomalies and crashes whatsoever. Depending on load, game/app, and board assigned power, we now see the dynamic clock frequency hovering in the 2575~2650 MHz range (the power limiter will make this a dynamic value). That's still impressive.  All that tweaking and extra energy consumption will bring you a max of 3~4% extra performance at best, but seen from reference, you just gained roughly 7~8% perf in Ultra HD gaming. Also, and let me reiterate this, for an overclock to be successfully listed here, it needs to pass 4 game runs (different games) in ultra HD to be deemed stable.

Conclusion

We like the Gaming X TRIO edition of this MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT. However, there are three pillars that we would have liked to see improved though, first, we think the factory tweak compared to the competition is a tiny bit shy. Secondly, the aesthetics do not feel right with the grey inserts, and thirdly, of course, the price of 849 USD / 899 EUR is nauseating. I mean, throw in another 100 bucks, and you can get yourself a reference 6900 XT already (well, theoretically speaking, as in relation to the availability, things there are just painful to observe also). Granted, performance among all premium boards is the same with perhaps that 1~2% differential and roughly 4 maybe 5% over the reference design. Technologies like raytracing are now becoming a norm for gaming. With Big Navi, aka the 6800 and 6900 series, AMD is back to the table with a deck of cards that offers support for that full DirectX Ultimate feature set. Not just that, they've made some big bets with the architecture. The infinity cache definitely brings them where they need to be performance-wise. You can see that the L3 cache hit rate works really well for them in 1920x1080 up-to 2560x1440. However, at Ultra HD, these cards slow down a notch, likely due to GDDR6 memory being used on that 256-bit wide memory bus. But even there, the cards remain extremely capable and is a UHD class graphics card. The Gaming X TRIO definitely is a recommended product based on its hardware; the design works well both acoustically and temperature-wise. Next to that, you'll have some better OC potential available compared to the other cards we tested. We do miss a Dual BIOS is as a fail-safe is always nice to have. Then again for reasons of silence, it's not needed to have a silent or performance modus operandus. As far as RX 6800 XT cards will come and go, this one ranks high up on that premium list. The challenge however is actually finding one in (r)etail and also the willingness to put down that kind of cash for it. Personally, I'd say wait and sit it out until prices settle to normalized levels. I have been puzzling giving the product an award, really it's pandora's box, isn't it? Our recommended award is solely based on the hardware, game performance, acoustics, and temperatures. Would we weigh in pricing in regards to an award, it likely wouldn't get one. I do hope I am making that clear enough. But hey, considering the low availability, they'll sell as soon as an etailer will receive stock no matter what we say.

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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.