Introduction

MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio is the company’s new flagship AMD Radeon graphics card based on the red team’s new crown jewel. The new RX 6950 XT is being launched at $1,099 (baseline MSRP), pushing the RX 6900 XT to prices under the $1,000-mark for the first time. AMD says that the RX 6950 XT is an “encore” of the RX 6900 XT, what its RX 6000 flagship would have looked like if launched in 2022. It is a lifecycle update for the series, improving in three key areas with the goal of taking on NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090, and possibly even trading blows with the RTX 3090 Ti (a card NVIDIA very likely launched with the RX 6950 XT on the horizon).

The RX 6950 XT is based on the same RDNA2 graphics architecture as the rest of the RX 6000 series. The underlying silicon is built on the same 7 nm process as the RX 6900 XT, too. There are three sets of improvements over the RX 6900 XT. First, GPU clock speeds have been increased with a minimal increase to the typical board power, with the GPU “game clocks” now 2100 MHz, compared to 2015 MHz on the RX 6900 XT, with the typical board power at “just” 330 W, compared to 300 W on the RX 6900 XT (compare this to the 450 W of the RTX 3090 Ti or the 350 W of the RTX 3090).

Memory gets a neat 12.5 increase in bandwidth, with AMD opting for faster 18 Gbps memory speeds, compared to 16 Gbps on the RX 6900 XT. This increases bandwidth to 576 GB/s, up from 512 GB/s on the RX 6900 XT. These are still low compared to the 900+ GB/s of the NVIDIA high-end, but helping matters is the 128 MB on-die Infinity Cache memory, which operates at 1.5 TB/s and accelerates the memory sub-system. The third area of improvement is shrouded in mystery. AMD says it’s at the firmware and driver levels, but does not elaborate.

The core configuration of the RX 6950 XT is the same as the RX 6900 XT. There are 5,120 stream processors across 80 RDNA2 compute units, 80 Ray Accelerators, 320 TMUs, and 128 ROPs. 16 GB is the standard memory amount, across a 256-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface cushioned by Infinity Cache. The 330 W typical board power at reference speeds means building RX 6950 XT cards with just two 8-pin PCIe power connectors is still possible (something that’s impossible for the RTX 3090 Ti).

The MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT packs a fairly large factory overclock of 2224 MHz game clocks (vs. 2100 MHz reference). The memory is untouched at 18 Gbps. The card features the company’s largest variant of the latest Tri Frozr Gaming X cooler featuring a heavy aluminium fin-stack heatsink ventilated by a trio of TorX 3.0 fans that are webbed at the edges to guide all their airflow axially. There’s also plenty of RGB LED illumination to be had, as this will be the most premium custom-design RX 6950 XT from the MSI marquee. The company is pricing this card at $1,250, a $150 premium over the AMD baseline.