Introduction

We have with us the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT Gaming X, a premium custom-design graphics card based on the new RX 6700 XT AMD is debuting today. With the RX 6700 XT, AMD is taking the fight to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, which heats things up in the sub-$500 market segment. With the new RDNA2 Radeon RX 6000 series, the playing field is mostly leveled as AMD now supports real-time raytracing. AMD took everyone by surprise with its Radeon RX 6800/6900 series launch, spring-boarding the company back into the high-end segment, and the company is planning a similar move on the performance segment.



The Radeon RX 6700 XT debuts AMD's new 7 nm Navi 22 silicon that's roughly as big as the GA104, with a similar transistor-count. It packs 40 RDNA2 compute units, which makes for 2,560 stream processors running at speeds in excess of 2.40 GHz, 40 Ray Accelerators, specialized hardware that accelerate raytracing by calculating ray-intersections, 160 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. AMD has also raised the standard memory size with this generation, and the RX 6700 XT comes with 12 GB of it—a 50% increase over the RX 5700 XT. The only "gotcha" is the narrower 192-bit memory bus width. The memory clock is increased to 16 Gbps, and AMD deployed Infinity Cache, a fast on-die 96 MB cache that works to improve the overall memory system bandwidth. We get into the details on the next page.

The MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT features the company's latest MSI Performance Gaming Twin Frozr cooling solution. While this is smaller than the triple-fan Tri Frozr, it's one of the heavier cards in our lab today, with a chunky triple-slot heatsink. You also get plenty of RGB goodness. As a Gaming X SKU, MSI has given the card factory-overclocked speeds of 2.63 GHz maximum boost, compared to the 2.58 GHz reference. MSI hasn't provided any pricing information, but we expect it to end up selling for at least $750.

Our Radeon RX 6700 XT launch-day coverage includes six articles including this one. Do check them out!
AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (reference) | ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 6700 XT OC | Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT NITRO+ | PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT Red Devil | XFX Radeon RX 6700 XT Speedster Merc 319