MSI RX 5700 XT Evoke OC Review

MSI's RX 5700 XT Evoke OC ships in a mostly black box, with an image of the graphics card visible from the front, alongside some AMD Radeon branding.

Inside, there's not much in the way of accessories – just a quick start guide and ‘thank you' note.

The card itself is obviously most notable for its unique ‘champagne gold' colour scheme, and usually we don't comment too much on the overall look of a card as it is obviously subjective. I would say for the Evoke, however, going with this gold design is potentially limiting the target audience of the card as you'd need a very specific colour scheme in your own system for this to fit in nicely. Some of you simply may not care, but I reckon if you are spending £440 on a graphics card, you will probably want a colour coordinated build and that may be tricky for the Evoke.

It does feel good in the hand, however, as the shroud is made almost entirely from metal (it feels like aluminium). Most partner cards have plastic shrouds so this is definitely a plus for the Evoke in terms of its build quality. We also get a look at those two Torx 3.0 fans, measuring 90mm across. These stop spinning once the GPU core falls below 60C.

Here we can see how the shroud wraps around the edges of the card, too, with some nickel-plated heatpipes also visible from the sides of the Evoke.

In terms of overall dimensions, it's a relatively small card by modern standards – measuring 254 x 129 x 51 mm. It's a 2.5 slot design so may not work inside all ITX cases, but generally this should in most cases.

The front side of the shroud is also home to the MSI logo, though it is important to note there is no RGB lighting anywhere on the card.

As for the backplate, this is a full-length design and carries on with the gold colouring. Realistically, I think this is likely to prove a ‘love it or hate it' colour option – it's certainly not understated, that's for sure.

Power connectors and display outputs are both the same as the reference RX 5700 XT – meaning the Evoke requires 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin PCIe power connectors, while video outputs consist of 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI.

As for the PCB, MSI has modified this over the reference design but it is not a complete re-working. There is still a 7-phase power delivery configuration for the GPU, and 2 phases for the memory, while the memory modules are manufacturer by Micron – each chip is labelled ‘9KA77D9WCW'. We can also get a look at the GPU itself, with a die size of 251mm², and it is fabbed on TSMC's 7nm process.

Moving onto the heatsink, this looks quite similar to Sapphire's RX 5700 Pulse design. It uses a single aluminium fin stack, with four heatpipes each measuring 6mm across. There's a nickel-plate copper coldplate for the GPU and VRAM, too, while a smaller coldplate is off the right for the MOSFETs.

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