MSI RX 6800 XT GAMING X TRIO 16G Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look

Without a doubt, this is one gorgeous looking graphics card. However, I knew it would be, as it’s a Gaming X Trio card, and they all look broadly the same. Even the Nvidia design is quite similar but tends to use darker colours on the angular highlights. This has a much more bold two-tone look to it, and I really like it!

The TORX fans look great, and they use that funky new design where each pair of blades are joined together at the ends. This helps create a better vortex of air over the card and even helps reduce noise levels. With three fans, all independently controlled, noise levels and cooling levels should not be a problem; it’ll even run completely silent if the temperatures are low enough.

The card sits at 2.5 slots thick, which is pretty common these days. Of course, there’s a huge amount of radiator in there, with good ventilation on both sides of the card. It takes 2 x 8-pin PSU headers to power the card, the same as found on the card’s AMD version.

The card actually has three distinct radiators covering the PCB, with a large array of heatpipes to help distribute heat between them. There’s a lot of metal here though, a large fin count, which makes the card quite heavy.

At the rear, you’ll find three DisplayPort and a single HDMI port.

The card may be big and heavy, but this gorgeous backplate will help keep it nice and straight. Of course, it also makes it even heavier too, but also provides even more protection for the PCB and massively increases the heat dissipation abilities of the GPU.

Down the side, you’ll find a frosted bar, which is ARGB back-lit.

It’s nice and bright and can be fully customised from the Dragon Center software.

There are six ARGB lights on the front too. It’s not overdone, which I like, but still enough to satisfy the RGB fanatics.