MSI’s Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming Z, Before And After

The Original RX 5600 XT, Gone In A Flash

The Guru of 3D received an RX 5600 XT Gaming Z from MSI to test, with a BIOS update right before release which added similar increases in clock speed and memory rate to what we have seen on other cards.  They also reveal an interesting tidbit about a card with a very similar name, the MSI RX 5600 XT Gaming X which will see the same frequency boosts to 1750 MHz Boost and 1615 MHz Game, however the memory rate will not be increased to 14 Gbps as most other 5600 XTs but will remain at 12 Gbps. 

In theory this would mean that the Rev. 2.0 models of the Gaming Z will be designed specifically with the increased memory rate in mind, perhaps a slight tweak to the implementation of the Twin Frozr design or possibly even swapping out the Micron GDDR6 with a different type?  Either way it is going to make shopping for one of these cards a little more interesting that you might want.

The good news is that the updated BIOS should work on any RX 5600 XT running at reference clocks, be it an X or a Z, so you should be able to flash to the frequencies you want.  This particular card has plenty of thermal headroom, Guru3D overclocked it to the limits AMD placed on the card, 1820 MHz GPU and 1860 MHz memory with a result of ~1775 MHz in game on the GPU and memory effectively 14880 MHz.