MSI Showcases Early Designs for Its Flagship AMD RX 6800XT Graphics Card

In recent years, MSI has built some excellent graphics cards under its Gaming X Trio moniker, which unsurprisingly have therefore turned out quite popular. Because of this, we're naturally curious to see what updates MSI is bringing to its Gaming X Trio design with the latest iteration AMD Radeon graphics cards, and happy to say that the company has shared early details during an MSI Insider Livestream.

For all intents and purposes, the card's design will be in large part identical to that of the RTX 3000-series Gaming X Trio line, which is no surprise as the GPU makers often share cooler designs between their Nvidia and AMD product lines. 

This means that the RX 6800XT Gaming X Trio, the flagship board design for MSI's high-end graphics cards, will look much like that of the RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio (our review here), packing three fans along with a shroud that has aggressive, but modern angular styling. RGB wil be provided by six small stripes on the faceplate, MSI logo on the side, and an addressable RGB strip along the backplate of the card, which should look quite good from all angles in many systems. 

However, contrary to the RTX 3080 Gaming X trio, the gun-metal gray accents will be swapped for a lighter color silver to differentiate between the lineups, the print on the side will read Radeon, and the board design itself will be subject to a few differences because -- at the end of the day, they're different graphics cards.

If you intend on prepping your system for this card, ensure you have a chassis that's big enough (about 330mm GPU space is a safe bet), and a potent power supply with two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors.  

AMD's RX 6800XT is the company's latest GPU with 72 compute units that run at a game clock of 2015 MHz, but can boost up to 2250 MHz under the right conditions, and packs 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, with a board power of 300W. Of course, MSI's card will likely feature slightly higher clocks and be a tiny bit more power hungry, but its big cooler should help keep things quieter overall. 

The 6800XT is slated to be available on the 18th of November, but naturally, we'll have to see in practice whether AMD and its partners can deliver enough units at launch. No word on pricing yet about this RX 6800XT Gaming X Trio, but expect a premium over AMD's 6800XT MSRP pricing ($649) once prices settle after the launch as this is a more lavishly equipped card.