MSI AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT MECH 2X 12G OC Compute Review

Power Tests

For our power testing, we used AIDA64 to stress the GPU, then HWiNFO to monitor power use and temperatures.

After the stress test has ramped up, we see it tops out at 217 Watts under full load and 10 Watts at idle. The power draw for the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT MECH 2X 12G OC matches up to RTX 3070 GPUs yet is a bit lower.

Cooling Performance

A key reason that we started this series was to answer the cooling question. Blower-style coolers have different capabilities than some of the large dual and triple fan gaming cards.

Temperatures for the MSI Radeon RX 6700 XT MECH 2X 12G OC ran at 80C under full loads, which shows MSI’s cooling solution performs struggles under high loads. However, it makes little noise. The idle temps we saw were 47C, which is also high for a GPU of this size. One can adjust fan speeds, but we tend to look at the stock performance since that is how the manufacturer has defined behavior.

Final Words

Ever since the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Update and Review we have seen a larger divergence in AMD’s consumer/ gaming GPUs for compute performance. AMD’s focus on ROCm and CDNA GPUs has certainly changed how we view the market. There are many sites that do gaming benchmarks, but on the compute side, things are a bit different. There is a lot more work getting consumer AMD GPUs to work in GPU compute scenarios that we test. NVIDIA, in contrast, focuses on offering CUDA support, and across its range. There are still cases where AMD performs well, but the strategic decision to focus on the higher-end GPUs as AMD readies exascale supercomputers can certainly be seen here.

Then again, with the GPU shortages over the past few quarters, a GPU that you can buy is often better than no GPU. For its intended workloads, which is primarily desktop and gaming, this GPU performs well. In the compute workloads we test it was competitive. That makes the card good, but perhaps not great.