Radeon RX 6750 XT Review With MSI: Strong 1440p PC Gaming
We attempted to test overclocking on the MSI Radeon RX 6750 XT MECH, but ran into a bit of a speed bump. While you can adjust the clock speed of the card up by as much as 11%, you can't adjust the power limit at all. What this means in practice is that the clock rate doesn't change under real-world conditions, because most of the time the card is being held up by its power limiter alone. Whether using AMD's own tools or third-party tools, we simply couldn't get any meaningful overclock out of the card whatsoever.
Notice the Power Limit slider having no room to grow.
One side effect of this is that no matter how much you fiddle around in the Performance Tuning window, with the stock cooler and power limitations, there isn't much additional performance to be had. The next section might shed some light on why you can't mess with this GPU's power limit much...
Total System Power Consumption Tests
Microprocessors have a "sweet spot" where they are operating at the maximum efficiency. This "sweet spot" is a specific combination of frequency and voltage settings that is usually well below the maximum stable frequency of the processor. As a result, faster, higher-clocked processors tend to have worse efficiency than slower processors on the same architecture and process node, generally speaking.
The Radeon RX 6759 XT's increased power consumption characteristics are not nearly as good as the 6700T. The 6750 XT is only slightly faster than the RX 6700 XT, yet consumes nearly 50 Watts more power under load. Some of this is surely down to MSI's customizations to our card; it's possible that MSI has already maxed-out the power limit. And the higher-clocked memory likely consumed more power than its predecessor's as well.
Either way, it's clear AMD has squeezed almost all it can from Navi 22. Not that most gamers should care all that much; an extra 50 Watts under full load won't even register in a well-cooled desktop system, and the cooler on the RX 6750 XT MECH is fantastic. We never this card crest an 85°C junction temperature in our testing.
AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT Summary and Verdict
Let's start off our conclusions by taking a look at a couple of scatter plots. The first plot graphs aggregated game performance (expressed as the averaged average frame rate of all of our game tests) versus power consumption:
We subtracted 200 watts from our power measurements to try and ballpark the GPU-only power.
Looking at the efficiency scatter, it's clear that these refreshed Radeons don't fare as well as their predecessors. It's not a mystery: when you take the same chip, boost its frequencies, then pair it with higher-clocked RAM, the card consumes more power. The Radeon RX 6750 XT doesn't fall into "offensive" territory, but it is clearly not as efficient as the 6700 XT.
Meanwhile, the value scatter compares that same aggregate game performance value against the suggested retail price for each card. AMD says consumers should hope to find the Radeon RX 6750 XT for around $549.99, which seems optimistic to us, and MSI wasn't yet able to share pricing information, though we have seen it at placed like NewEgg and Amazon at substantially higher price points.
Checking a few sites, we found this very card for sale for $619.99 at Newegg. $620 isn't as close to the MSRP as we'd like—especially not for a card that lacks any addressable lighting or other bells and whistles—but it's a darn sight better than what folks are asking for an Radeon RX 6800 or comparable GeForce card. As of the time of this writing, the cheapest Radeon RX 6800 we see is $759.99, which makes the $619 Radeon RX 6750 XT look a lot better than it otherwise would by comparison.
Overall, the Radeon RX 6750 XT is about what we expected looking at its specs. MSI's done a fine enough job putting this particular card together, although we have to object to both the extra-tall PCB and the backwards power connectors. Still, it stays cool and is completely inaudible while gaming. That's somewhat impressive in light of the higher power consumption of the Radeon RX 6750 XT itself.
The Radeon RX 6750 XT offers a modest uplift versus its legacy siblings, and unless you're concerned about a bit of extra power consumption, it delivers a touch of extra performance overall in exchange for sipping a bit more juice. Given the choice, however, we'd rather have a lower-clocked larger GPU, like a Radeon RX 6800. It'll be faster—especially in ray-tracing—and run cooler, to boot.
Ultimately, while we seem to be at the tail end of it, we're currently still in the grips of the GPU shortage, so if you see one of these for near-MSRP and you need a mid-range GPU, it's a solid offering for midrange gaming.
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