Caught in frog green sandwich: MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X in test – price will decide success

1 - Introduction and Overview 2 - 8 GB vs. 4 GB, important info and test system 3 - Tear Down: PCB and components 4 - Tear Down: cooling system 5 - DirectX 11: GTA V 6 - DirectX 11: Far Cry 5 7 - DirectX 12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider 8 - DirectX 12: F1 2019 9 - DirectX 12: Total War: Three Kingdoms 10 - DirectX 12: Tom Clancy's The Division 2 11 - DirectX 12: Metro Exodus 12 - Power consumtion and real PSU recommendation 13 - Clock rates, overclocking and temperatures with infrared 14 - Fan curves,fan speed and noise with audio-chamber test 15 - Summary and conclusion

Fan speeds over temperature curve

AMD’s fuzzy logic for the fan control doesn’t have to be understood, but that’s where our MorePowerTool comes in, in order to smooth it out a bit. You can smoothen both the start-up and the rest of the process. The GeForce comes with the usual start-stop hysteresis and behaves rather moderately. So both cards fans are running extremely slow and MSI’s new TF7 design (Twin Frozr 7) with now 14 rotor blades lives up to its name. Cool and quiet. That’s how you like it.

In pure numbers it looks like this

Noise emission

One hears almost nothing and that is quite suitable to fire the cosy deep red fireplace ambience of two evenings with sympathy. What was not possible with Polaris is now finally possible with Navi. So you can let the fireplace and love glow and not the living room PC with 3D-animated combustion process. Cooling down 145 watts is of course no witchcraft, but it’s virtually inaudible. So that’s a perfect fit.

Smaller card, less power consumption and even more silence when turning the fans. Whereby, these are values that can only be measured in very, very quiet or insulated rooms. The 30 dB(A) against the 29.8 dB(A) are really nothing to get upset about with both cards.