A look at MSI’s RX 5600 XT MECH & GAMING X – CES 2020

A glance at MSI’s RX 5600 XT MECH & GAMING X – CES 2020

Last night, AMD officially revealed its Radeon RX 5600 XT, a mid-range graphics card that’s designed to outperform Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti, delivering gamers outstanding 1080p gaming performance. 

At CES 2020, MSI has become AMD AIB partner to talk to us about their RX 5600 XT series, which will range from reference clocked models to higher-end factory overclocked variants. All of these graphics cards feature 6GB of GDDR6 memory and the same 2304 stream processor count as AMD’s Radeon RX 5700. 

Like other custom Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards, MSI’s MECH and GAMING series models will release on January 21st worldwide. 

Both of MSI’s RX 5600 XT cards ship with dual-fan cooling solutions, with the MECH series acting as the company’s budget-friendly offering while their Gaming series models ships with a larger, heavier cooler design that features RGB lighting support. 

MSI’s MECH series cooler is an upgraded version of MSI’s VENTUS series design, giving MSI’s, so far, AMD-only MECH cooler an advantage over its older Nvidia-only Ventus counterpart. Like MSI’s MECH cooler design, MSI’s new Gaming X cooler design also remains as an AMD-only heatsink.

As expected, even MSI’s high-end Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming X model features lower clock speeds than AMD’s reference Radeon RX 5700. This limitation is likely due restrictions that AMD has placed on its AIB (Add-in-Board) partners to prevent the RX 5600 XT from outperforming AMD’s more expensive Radeon RX 5700. This leaves us to wonder if the Radeon RX 5600 XT has much untapped overclocking potential. Could AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT be an overclocking monster?