MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB GDDR6 Graphics Card Review – Navi 14 With High End Cooling For $225 US

MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB Package

The MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X graphics card comes inside a large cardboard box. The front of both packages has a large "MSI" logo on the top left corner & the "Gaming X" series branding on the lower-left corner. A large picture of the graphics card itself is depicted on the front which gives a nice preview of the new Gaming X design, exclusive to AMD Radeon graphics cards.

The packaging also comes with an AMD 50 sticker since the red team celebrated its 50th year anniversary in 2019. Other features of the graphics card are also mentioned such as the RDNA architecture, 7nm, Fidelity FX, Freesync 2 HDR along some specs such as 8 GB GDDR6, PCIe 4.0 support, and OC edition.

The back of the box is very typical, highlighting the main features and specifications of the cards. The three key aspects of MSI's top tier custom cards are its new TORX Fan 3.0 cooling system, the Twin Frozr 7 thermal design, and the wave curved heatsink. A large list of product specifications and features are also mentioned which you can see in the picture below.

The sides of the box once again greet us with the large Radeon RX branding. There's also the mention of 8 GB GDDR6 memory available on the card. The higher memory bandwidth delivered through the new GDDR6 interface would help improve performance in gaming titles at higher resolution over GDDR5 based graphics cards.

Outside of the box, the graphics card and the accessory package are held firmly by foam packaging. The graphics card comes with a few accessories and manuals which might not be of much use for hardcore enthusiasts but can be useful for the mainstream gaming audience. The card is nicely wrapped within an anti-static cover which is useful to prevent any unwanted static discharges on various surfaces that might harm the graphics card.

Useful manuals and installation guides are packed within an MSI labeled letter case. There is an MSI Quick Users Guide, a Support bracket installation guide, a sticker letter, the MSI DIY comic, and a single driver disk. It's best to ignore the driver disk and install the latest software and graphics drivers directly from the AMD and MSI official web pages as the ones shipped in the disks could be older versions and not deliver optimal performance for your graphics cards.

After the package is taken care of, I can finally start talking about the card itself. The card itself is simply stunning to look at and the shroud is really well-built with great texturing along the sides.

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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

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