Review: MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Evoke 8G

First I read "(pardon the pun)" and I instantly was hoping for an Ewok joke there...

Great review as always, thanks @Hilbert Hagedoorn . And yes, no RGB...

 

Why no page
Product PCB and component overview?

 

Okay

 

Very nice design. But most cases are either black or grey, so the color is hard to match.
Performance is not much better than the reference design, but I think the card won't carry a huge price premium.
I've seen somewhere on the web that the card uses a PCB that's pretty similar to the stock one, but has better capacitors.

 

Gah! Seemed like such a nice card based on other reviews which did not cover noise as a major issue, but this review made me cancel my purchase (expected delivery Friday).

What I cant quite grasp, is that the new "Silent " BIOS only decreased noise levels to 53db, but there still seem to be alot of thermal headroom to decrease the fanspeed more than to 2000 RPM? Could you please do a test with custom fan curve at ~1700 RPM with stresstest to see load temp and acoustics? That would significantly improve the thoroughness of this otherwise great (but dissapointing) review.

Pretty please?

 

I love the look of this card minus the color. I think maybe a gunmetal gray color would look really neat and blend in nicer for most builds.

 

Hey and thanks for a quick response! Granted its not 50 DBa but its close to the reference design which is being trashed for it's noise levels. Apart from throttling my main goal my main goal is reducing db as much as possible so I'm very intrigued by MSI's balancing act here, cudos for them realising a "silent mode" but its still nowhear near silent while still having very low temp levels. I currently sit on a GTX 670 which is quoted to have ~42db noise levels and one of my objectives for a new PC is a quiet one. So unless they can release another bios update with lower RPMs or AMD fixes the fixed RPM-settings within the next 7 days, I will probably go with another card.

Awesome OC though, well done. What were the thermals while overclocked?

 

Goldfinger would have got a boner just by looking at this card...
If you want something comparable with the asus strix version then you should wait for the gaming X version. It will be a three fans low noise and even better cooled than this version.

According to the IPC channel the price for this will be 13990 Taiwan dollars (yuans) so approximately 445 USD.

 

I'd expect MSI doing better...

 

What's the point of an after market cooler that runs as loud as the crappy reference blower?
Temps are good, so there's probably some headroom to play with, but still...

 

So visually, the card's aesthetics are subjective of course but for me, unappealing. Aurally, the acoustics of the card are objectively... bad. So MSI kind of dropped the ball on this card...And there's no dent to blame either...

This is not to say that it isn't a capable card, far from it, it performs well but it's just not doing what you'd expect from an AIB card very well.

 

Well, performance to noise to temperature seems only marginally better than reference. Strix came out better.

But I have feeling that all of 5700 XT will have very similar performance. That's probably because they do not want to go way above TBP. But those that can cool better at lower noise level can at least be comfortably overclocked even via Wattman.

 

Why did they restrict the card like that? HH confirmed card is power limited, thats not fun. Vega went well above tdp even polaris did. This just made custom 5700's not that interesting if it does not offer additional performance compared to reference card.

 

No RGB

 

I don't know about that, as a general statement I mean.

Looking at various Navi reviews, mostly the reference models but including the AIB models now that they've started to pop up, there seem to be very little gains in overclocking the core even when the cards aren't power limited. The cards seem limited almost entirely by memory bandwidth and so far I haven't seen any review who's managed to get any good overclocks on the memory, even if the scaling is still there for what little gains there are.

Overall though, hasn't this basically been the case for the GPU market overall for quite a while? The reasonable max push for both vendors seem to land at about ~10% gains, usually at significant power costs.

IMO that doesn't make that custom cards less interesting though, especially on the AMD side with their generally terrible reference coolers. It's just about thermals and noise (and bling I suppose) rather than pure performance, and we haven't gotten the latter for a while.

 

That's because overclocking is a dying business. The big companies: AMD, Intel, Nvidia are already pushing their products at the very limit so you can't really gain too much by additional overclock.