MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio Review

Name: MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio
Brand: MSI

W1zzard

on Feb 18th, 2021,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: MSI

(48 Comments) »

Introduction

Today, we bring you our first review of a custom design Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card in the MSI RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio. When AMD originally announced the RX 6000 series "Big Navi," with the RX 6900 XT release set for its own exclusive date, the company hadn't made up its mind on whether to enable custom-design RX 6900 XT boards, which explains why it took some time for board partners to come up with custom designs. The MSI Radeon RX 6900 XT is the company's flagship graphics card from the red team, designed to square off against NVIDIA's fastest, such as the GeForce RTX 3080 or even RTX 3090. It supercharges the fully-unlocked "Big Navi" silicon with a custom-design PCB bolstered by a stronger VRM design, triple power inputs, and the company's latest Tri-Frozr cooling solution.

The Radeon RX 6900 XT by AMD is the company's fastest GPU from this generation, and the flagship product based on the new RDNA 2 graphics architecture that debuted on next-gen consoles, before making it to the PC. This common architecture enables easy optimization of games to the PC platform, as they're already optimized for the console hardware. RDNA 2 is AMD's first graphics architecture with full DirectX 12 Ultimate readiness, including real-time raytracing through Ray Accelerators, fixed-function hardware. The RX 6900 XT is based on the same 7 nm "Navi 21" silicon as the RX 6800 series, but maxes it out, with all its 5,120 stream processors enabled, as well as 80 Ray Accelerators, 320 TMUs, and 128 ROPs.

Real-time raytracing is the holy grail of consumer 3D graphics, and today's GPU vendors have figured out how to combine conventional raster 3D with certain real-time raytraced elements, such as lighting, shadows, reflections, etc., to significantly increase realism. Even this much raytracing demands enormous amounts of compute power. AMD's approach has been to deploy fixed-function hardware for the most compute-intensive part of the raytracing pipeline, while relying on a mighty SIMD setup for other raytracing-related tasks, such as denoising. A by-product of this approach is vastly improved raster 3D performance. Not only are the stream processors doubled over the previous generation RDNA, but they also run at significantly higher engine clocks.

AMD has also doubled the amount of memory to 16 GB and uses the fastest JEDEC-standard 16 Gbps GDDR6 memory, although the bus width is still 256-bit, yielding 512 GB/s memory bandwidth. AMD has worked around the bandwidth problem by deploying a fast on-die level 3 cache directly on the GPU, which it calls Infinity Cache. This 128 MB scratchpad for the GPU, when combined with the GDDR6 memory, belts out an effective bandwidth of 2 TB/s. AMD has also taken the opportunity to update the multimedia acceleration and display I/O capabilities of their GPUs.

MSI takes things a step ahead of AMD by giving the RX 6900 XT a powerful VRM solution that pulls power from three 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and using its premium Tri-Frozr cooling solution deployed across all Gaming X Trio graphics cards from both the RX 6000 and NVIDIA RTX 30 series. This cooler features a chunky aluminium fin-stack heatsink, the company's latest generation TorX fans, a blinding amount of RGB bling, and other innovative features, such as a mechanism that counteracts PCB bending. MSI's MSRP for the RX 6900 XT isn't known, but we doubt it's anywhere close to AMD's original MSRP. We're expecting this card to sell for $1800 or higher—that's the price point of other premium-design RX 6900 XT cards on the market right now.

Radeon RX 6900 XT Review Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX Vega 64	$400	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$650	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$370	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070	$340	2304	64	1410 MHz	1620 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2070 Super	$450	2560	64	1605 MHz	1770 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
Radeon VII	$680	3840	64	1802 MHz	N/A	1000 MHz	Vega 20	13230M	16 GB, HBM2, 4096-bit
RTX 2080	$600	2944	64	1515 MHz	1710 MHz	1750 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Super	$690	3072	64	1650 MHz	1815 MHz	1940 MHz	TU104	13600M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3060 Ti	$800	4864	80	1410 MHz	1665 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 2080 Ti	$1000	4352	88	1350 MHz	1545 MHz	1750 MHz	TU102	18600M	11 GB, GDDR6, 352-bit
RTX 3070	$850	5888	96	1500 MHz	1725 MHz	1750 MHz	GA104	17400M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800	$950	3840	96	1815 MHz	2105 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX 6800 XT	$1200	4608	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3080	$1100	8704	96	1440 MHz	1710 MHz	1188 MHz	GA102	28000M	10 GB, GDDR6X, 320-bit
RX 6900 XT	$1550	5120	128	2015 MHz	2250 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
MSI RX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio	$1800	5120	128	2105 MHz	2340 MHz	2000 MHz	Navi 21	26800M	16 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RTX 3090	$2000	10496	112	1395 MHz	1695 MHz	1219 MHz	GA102	28000M	24 GB, GDDR6X, 384-bit

Packaging

The Card

The MSI GeForce RTX 6900 XT Gaming X Trio is a huge piece of hardware. We've seen this massive cooler design on several other MSI cards before, both for AMD and NVIDIA. Visually, the card looks identical to the MSI RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio. On the back, you'll find a high-quality backplate out of metal.

Dimensions of the card are 32 x 14 cm, and it weighs 1575 g.

Installation requires three slots in your system.

Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 1.4 and one HDMI 2.1.

The card has three 8-pin power inputs. This configuration is rated for up to 525 W of power draw.

The AMD Radeon RX 6000 series doesn't support multi-GPU.

Teardown

MSI's heatsink is huge, the main component provides cooling for the GPU and memory chips. Six heatpipes quickly move any heat away from the GPU core, to a large array of fins, where it is dissipated in the airflow of the three fans.

Once the main heatsink is removed, three additional components become visible. A metal reinforcement bar is run along the top edge, which helps prevent sagging. Two additional heatsinks provide cooling for the VRM circuitry.

The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

High-resolution PCB Pictures

These pictures are for the convenience of volt modders and people who would like to see all the finer details on the PCB. Feel free to link back to us and use these in your articles or forum posts.