Test: MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio

Summary

Expert rating

Opinion

A somewhat expensive, large and unwieldy card, but if you have room, you get both quiet and efficient cooling. The new Radeon graphics chip isn’t significantly different from what we’ve seen before, and with new generations of graphics cards on the way, it might be worth the wait, even if the card itself is good.
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Tested Product: MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio
Award: SEK 7,300 at Amazon Sweden

AMD’s latest graphics card generation, the RX 6000 series, is almost two years old. The first circuits and cards arrived in the fall of 2020. Since then, AMD has released GPUs in different price and performance classes. The new 7000 series is expected in the fall, but AMD continues to complement the 6000 series with additional variants. Here we test the recently released Radeon RX 6750 XT, in a graphics card from MSI.

The Radeon RX 6750 XT places itself between the RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 in terms of price and performance. Prices for graphics cards with this processor are between roughly SEK 7,000 – 8,000. Our tested card, the MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio, belongs to the more expensive ones. You can find it for just under 8,000 in several stores

Gaming X Trio is a graphics card in a larger format. It has, as the name suggests, three large fans that sit in a row, making the card more than three centimeters long. The advantage is efficient cooling and that the fans usually do not need to run at high speed and disturb you.

The disadvantage is, in short, the outer dimensions. The card can be a challenge to get into some computer cases. Make sure you have a spacious one. It is also relatively thick. The rear panel takes up two slots, but beyond that the fan part sticks out by another slot’s width.

A challenge to assemble

The fans also stick out at the top, it can be tricky to screw the card in depending on how your computer case is designed. You also get a support rail that you can mount under the card. It can be combined with other cards in the same place. It is also not necessary, but if you move the computer around, it can be an extra security.

The card has a diode stripe and an rgb-illuminated logo along the back, but no excessive light play. These, like the fans, can be checked via MSI Center, a program that also checks the computer’s motherboard, if it is also from MSI. The program is strangely slow with long wait times, but it’s easy to use if you’re patient. You don’t have much control over the fans, just a standard mode and a quieter, both of which have automatic fan control.

The Radeon RX 6750 XT is basically an RX 6700 XT, but with a tuned base clock frequency and faster speed of its 12 gigabytes of graphics memory. It sounds tempting on paper, the RX 6700 XT was already good for gaming on a 1440p screen, and here we should be able to get more out of the frame rate.

Less lift than expected, but still fast

But it turns out that even though the base clock frequency is higher, the dynamic boost frequency is largely unchanged. The boost, which allows graphics cards to push through short sequences in games, prevents dips in frame rate. It varies greatly from game to game whether the RX 6750 XT provides any real advantage, especially compared to the overclocked RX 6700 XT cards of which there are many.

It’s possible that memory speed provides advantages that we don’t see, but they don’t affect the benchmark tests we do. Here we get results that are consistently just above the slightly overclocked Asus card with RX 6700 XT, which we tested last year, but only marginally. We otherwise get exactly the same pros and cons.

Games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Borderlands 3, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and Flight Simulator float along steadily at between 60 and 80 fps, with no noticeable dips on a 1440p screen. Even performance-wise problem children like Cyberpunk 2077 and Watch Dogs Legion do well with averages stably above 60 fps. Overall, we would say that our card pulls roughly on par with a Geforce RTX 3070 card.

Same drawback as before

As long as you stay away from ray tracing, or use it very sparingly, that is. It’s still AMD’s Achilles heel. Some games that support Fidelity FX image enhancement can compensate with it, but only to a certain limit. We will have to wait for the next generation of Radeon architecture and hope for improvements on that point. On the other hand, games can look very good, even with just a little ray tracing on. It’s not quite the graphics revolution that Nvidia likes to paint it as.

Now it is no longer a tug of war over the graphics cards. Most variants are in stock in stores without you having to pay extortionate prices. This means that an additional Radeon card, which in terms of price and performance is very close to several others, is not as easy to recommend.

But it is a solid purchase in the class just below the top models. MSI’s card, with its massive cooling, has the advantage of both providing stable operation under high load and never getting loud. If you find a good deal, just go for it. But only if it’s a good deal.

Specifications

Product name: MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT Gaming X Trio
Tested: June 2022
Product type: Graphics card
Manufacturer: MSI
Graphics processor: AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, up to 2,600 MHz boost
Interface: PCIe 4.0
Connections: 3 display port 1.4a, hdmi 2.1
Memory: 12 GB gddr6
Length: 327 mm
Award: SEK 7,300 at Amazon Sweden

Performance (in computer with i9-9900K/16GB ram)

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL): 105,717 points
3dmark Time Spy (DirectX 12): 12,101 points
3dmark Fire Strike (DirectX 11): 26,942 points
3dmark Port Royal (RTX ray tracing): 6,308 points
VR Mark: 9,999 points