Product Info

MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB

December, 2019

Type

Graphics Card

Price

$224.99 US

Announced back in October, the Radeon RX 5500 XT is launching today along with several custom variants from AMD's board partners. While the Radeon RX 5700 series targets the upper $300 US+ segment, the Radeon RX 5500 series targets the $150-$200 US segment which brings AMD back in the most crucial graphics market, the budget segment.

The Radeon RX 5500 series uplifts AMD by bringing a modern architecture design and moving away from its GCN design featured on the Polaris GPUs. This allows AMD to bring more streamlined graphics performance in modern workloads and gaming titles. AMD was already ahead of the curve in utilizing new techs such as HBM and smaller process nodes and Navi is no exception. Aside from the new graphics architecture, AMD has also introduced GDDR6 memory and a smaller 7nm process node for their mainstream lineup which is a big update from the 14nm process on Polaris and Vega series cards.

While the Radeon RX 5500 series cards bring new technologies and features to the segment, the tech itself doesn't come cheap. The Radeon RX 5500 XT is hence available in two flavors, directly competing against NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 16 SUPER graphics cards. The Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB has an MSRP of $169 US which is $10 US more than the reference MSRP of the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER which costs $159 US. The Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB has an MSRP of $199 US which is $30 US less than the reference MSRP of the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER which costs $229 US.

AMD Radeon GPU Segment/Tier Prices

Well, in terms of performance the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB is supposed to be much faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER at about 10-13% average. The Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB is said to be about 20% faster than the 4 GB variant. This should put the Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB models close to the GeForce GTX 1660 (non-SUPER). The higher memory buffer that the 8 GB model comes with should definitely help in high-resolution and modern AAA titles but again, these are marketing numbers and I will see how the card actually performs in my own set of benchmarks.

Unlike the GeForce RTX cards which had some feature advantage over the Radeon RX 5700 series cards, the GeForce GTX cards don't feature RTX/DLSS support. This puts them just on par with the Radeon RX 5500 series in feature set with the exception of the Turing NVENC encoder which does an exceptional job for gamers on a budget. The Radeon RX 5500 is supported by the latest AMD Adrenaline 2020 Edition bringing features such as Radeon Boost, Integer Scaling, Radeon Image Sharpening, Radeon Anti-Lag, and Freesync support. These are a impressive list of features on their own and something to really consider when comparing AMD's and NVIDIA's budget tier range of cards.

So for this review, I will be taking a look at the MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X. This is MSI's new and flagship custom design for the Navi 14 GPU that features dual TORX 3.0 fans along with the renowned MSI features such as Zero Frozr and Smooth heat pipe design. The card has an MSRP of $224.99 US which is a $25 US premium over the reference MSRP.

The AMD Radeon RX 5500 Series Family

The AMD Radeon RX 5500 series lineup is made up of several variants which include desktop and mobile parts but there are only two desktop variants with one of them making their way to the DIY market and the other one aiming the OEM market. The Radeon RX 5500 XT is the DIY variant while the Radeon RX 5500 is the OEM variant. We will only be focusing on the Radeon RX 5500 XT as that is the one we received for our review and is the only card that you can actually buy in the market.

AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB / 8 GB Official Specifications ($169-199 US)

The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT is a very important graphics card that is placed in a super competitive segment. Taking up the battle with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, the RX 5500 XT will not only compete against the upgraded Turing offering, but also the Radeon RX 590 which is currently being sold at discounted prices and has a really good price to performance value. Still, the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT packs a lot of crunch for a little beast that it is.

The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT features 1408 stream processors which mean that there are 22 CUs or compute units featured on the card. It also packs 88 TMUs and 32 ROPs with clock speeds rated at 1670 MHz base, 1717 MHz game, and 1845 MHz boost clocks. The card manages to deliver up to 5.20 TFLOPs of compute performance at 130W. The card comes in 8 GB and 4 GB GDDR6 memory options. The memory featured on the card runs across a 128-bit bus interface, delivering 224 GB/s bandwidth.

The 8 GB model is launching at an MSRP of $199 US which is close to the $229 US of the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER while the 4 GB model is launching at an MSRP of $169 US which is $10 US higher than the $159 US GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER (4 GB). In terms of performance, the 4 GB variant has performance that matches the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER while sipping in more power. The 8 GB model should offer slightly better performance than the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER with its higher frame buffer uplifting the performance in games with high-res textures.

AMD Radeon RX 5000 '7nm Navi RDNA' GPU Lineup Specs:

Radeon RX 5500 "7nm Navi RDNA GPU" Feature Set and A Word on HW-Enabled Ray Tracing

While we would share a few tidbits of the RDNA architecture itself below, there are also some highlights we should mention for the Navi GPU. According to AMD themselves, the Navi 14 GPU will be 12% faster at the same power and should consume 30% lower power at the same clock speeds as Polaris GPU. The AMD Navi 14 GPU has a die size of 158mm2 and delivers 1.7x perf per area over the Polaris 10 GPU. The chip packs 6.4 Billion transistors while the Polaris 10 GPU packed 5.7 Billion transistors on a die that was almost 70% bigger.

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Also, when it comes to ray tracing, AMD is indeed developing their own suite around it. According to their vision, current GCN and RDNA architecture will be able to perform ray tracing on shaders which will be used through ProRender for creators and Radeon Rays for developers. In next-gen RDNA which is supposed to launch in 2020 on 7nm+ node, AMD will be bringing hardware-enabled ray tracing with select lighting effects for real-time gaming. AMD will also enable full-scene ray tracing which would be leveraged through cloud computing.

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New Compute Unit Design

Great Compute Efficiency For Diverse Workloads

2x Instruction Rate (enabled by 2x Scalar Units and 2x Schedulers)Single Cycle Issue (enabled by Executing Wwave32 on SIMD32)Dual Mode Execution (Wave 32 and Wave 64 Modes Adapt for Workloads)Resource Pooling (2 CUs Coordinate as a Work Group Processor)

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As you can tell, AMD is changing a lot in terms of architecture with RDNA (Radeon DNA) compared to GCN. There's a new Compute unity design, a more streamlined Graphics pipeline & a multi-level cache hierarchy. Aside from the GPU architecture, support for GDDR6 memory is another major change that brings AMD's graphics cards on par with NVIDIA in utilizing modern memory designs for higher bandwidth.

Contents

1. Intro2. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Overview3. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Package4. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Closer Look + Teardown5. Test Setup6. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Benchmarks (VULKAN)7. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Benchmarks (DirectX 12)8. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Benchmarks (DirectX 11)9. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Thermal Tests10. MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Power Consumption11. Conclusion - A Heavy Price To Pay For 8 GB and Better Cooling

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Wccftech Rating

The MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X graphics card for just a $25 US premium over the MSRP gives you an absolute beast of a cooler with fantastic aesthetics, cool & quiet operation, a custom PCB with a factory overclock and 8 GB of GDDR6 memory for under $250 US while delivering performance on par or even better in some cases than the GTX 1660.

Pros

A true replacement for Radeon RX 400/500 series Faster Than GTX 1650 SUPER 4 GB Graphics Card Massive 8 GB GDDR6 memory under $250 US Huge efficiency increase over Polaris cards Runs very cool and quiet with 0db fan technology Great factory overclock out of the box Amazing Shroud design with Twin Frozr 7 Performance and Silent Mode Options in Dragon Center App TORX 3.0 cooling system with finned aluminum heatsink First GPUs Built Entirely on 7nm Process node PCI-e Gen 4.0 Support Good I/O (DSC 1.2a for 8K 60 Hz, Triple Display Ports 1.4 HDR, HDMI 2.0)

Cons

Very High Price ($224.99 US) No dedicated hardware for Ray Tracing Not a lot of overclocking headroom left Power consumption still not on par with NVIDIA's 12nm

Buy for $224.99 US from bit

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