Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The MSI Radeon RX 6950 XT Gaming X Trio uses the familiar triple fan cooler design that we've seen from MSI for several years now. It's a slight step down from MSI's top-tier Suprim X design, which is only used on Nvidia GPUs, and gives additional RGB strips on the front of the card. There's also a Gaming Trio (no "X") that uses the exact same design but with a 2324 MHz boost clock.
The MSI card measures 325x141x55 mm, a 2.5-slot width that nevertheless fully blocks any adjacent expansion slot. It would give a bit more breathing room if you were to use the next slot after that, however, which is why many companies seem to be avoiding the full triple slot width. Compared to the Sapphire Nitro+ Pure, MSI's card is a hair longer, 1cm taller, but 1.6cm thinner. Overall, it's similarly bulky and will need a large and spacious case, and MSI's card also weighs 1594g, just 12g more than the Nitro+ Pure.
There's not a ton of RGB lighting on the Gaming X Tri, unlike with MSI's newer Suprim X design. There are six diagonal LEDs on the front of the card (which will usually end up facing the bottom of the PC case), the MSI logo and dragon shield icon on the top of the card, and then a longer LED strip that runs about half the length of the card and can easily be seen from the back and top views. It's enough RGB lighting for most people, but not quite in the same "burn your eyes out" realm as cards like the Sapphire RX 6950 XT Toxic.
Display connectivity consists of the ubiquitous triple DisplayPort and single HDMI 2.1 outputs . There might be a few people that would prefer dual HDMI ports, since those technically have higher resolution and bandwidth support than DP1.4, but all the ports can drive at least 4K at 60Hz — check our DisplayPort vs HDMI guide for more information.
MSI includes three 8-pin power connectors on its RX 6950 XT, which means up to 75W more power (while remaining in spec) compared to the Sapphire card. That's not necessarily a good thing. AMD specs the 6950 XT at 335W for the reference model, in which case dual 8-pin connectors plus the PCIe slot should be sufficient. As we'll see later, the Gaming X Trio blows well past the 400W mark, which means the extra power connector was required. However , its competition manages to get by with dual 8-pin and a single 6-pin, and uses about 70W less power. Perhaps the additional power headroom was required to eke out every last ounce of performance, but the 1–2% increase we'll see in a moment hardly warrants it.
For cooling, MSI has three of its 90mm Torx 4.0 fans with a partial outer rim that helps improve airflow and static pressure. I do wonder how much of a difference the removal of half the rim makes, but cooling at least didn't appear to be a problem. As with so many other GPUs, it's also interesting to note that the heatsink fins are oriented parallel to the IO bracket at the back, meaning that all the perforations hardly matter — most of the heat from the graphics card will be vented into your case, so you'll want at least one or two exhaust fans.
- MORE: Best Graphics Cards
- MORE: GPU Benchmarks and Hierarchy
- MORE: All Graphics Content
Intel 13th and 14th Gen 'Raptor Lake' instability troubles: Everything you need to know
Nvidia RTX 3050 A Laptop GPU specs revealed and it's as weak as expected — comes with just 1,768 CUDA cores and 4GB VRAM on a 64-bit bus
Intel 13th Gen CPUs allegedly have 4X higher return rate than the prior gen — retailer stats also claim Intel CPU RMAs are higher than AMD
