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

Cooler Design: MSI RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8GB

In contrast to the larger RX 5700 Evoke, the card has a completely redesigned cooler, so that the former cooling and stabilization frame now only serves to stabilize the board and as a counterpart to the backplate, which is screwed here. There are no pads between this frame and the circuit board, as it spares all heat-relevant areas cleanly.

The four 6 mm heatpipes made of nickel-plated copper composite material are located behind the GPU heat sink embedded in the base plate, which is connected to the rear of the heatpipes. The voltage regulators are cooled by a separate heat sink anchored in the radiator. Exemplary. The cooling fins are arranged horizontally, which also aligns the exhaust air at the end to the two cooler ends.

The backplate actively cools the areas of the board below the memory and the voltage transformer. All in all, a full-blown cooling system has been installed on a quite economical card. This gives hope for a very quiet operation.

Cooler Design: MSI GTX 1650 Super Gaming X 4GB

This card generates almost 40 watts less waste heat (spoiler), so that the cooling system could be simplified considerably. The visible frame above the board stabilizes the card as there is no backplate and cools the memory and the three small but efficient voltage regulator phases of the GPU in equal measure.

We can see from the pads that MSI has applied all six pads, although only 4 memory modules were used. This in turn shows that this board is only a reused design of the cheapest entry-level models of the GTX 1660. In contrast to the much criticized Evoke, however, the pads are fully contacted.

The cooler itself is a block equipped with horizontally aligned fins, for which the same applies to the AMD card. There are three 6mm heatpipes behind the base plate, which doesn’t have an extra GPU heat sink.

As already mentioned, there is probably no backplate for cost reasons. It would not have been needed for cooling anyway.