The AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT & RX 5700 Review: Navi Renews Competition in the Midrange Market
by Ryan Smith on July 7, 2019 12:00 PM ESTPower, Temperatures, & Noise
Last, but not least of course, is our look at power, temperatures, and noise levels. While a high performing card is good in its own right, an excellent card can deliver great performance while also keeping power consumption and the resulting noise levels in check.
| Radeon Video Card Voltages | |||||
| 5700 XT Max | 5700 Max | 5700 XT Idle | 5700 Idle | ||
| 1.2v | 1.025v | 0.725v | 0.775v | ||
Looking at boost voltages for AMD's new midrange 7nm cards, we don't have too many points of comparison right now. But still, with AMD's drivers reporting a maximum boost voltage of 1.2v for the 5700 XT, not even the incredibly juiced Polaris 30-based Radeon RX 590 took quite so much voltage. It may very well be that TSMC's high-performance 7nm process simply requires a lot of voltage here, but it may also be a sign that AMD is riding the voltage/frequency curve pretty hard to get those high clockspeeds.
By contrast, the 5700 (vanilla) is a much more mundane card. With its lower clockspeeds, the card never goes above 1.025v according to AMD's drivers. Which given the impact of voltage on power consumption, it's actually a bit surprising the spread is so large.
| Radeon Video Card Average Clockspeeds (Rounded to the Nearest 10MHz) |
|||
| Game | 5700 XT | 5700 | |
| Max Boost Clock | 2044MHz | 1750MHz | |
| Official Game Clock | 1755MHz | 1625MHz | |
| Tomb Raider | 1780MHz | 1680MHz | |
| F1 2019 | 1800MHz | 1650MHz | |
| Assassin's Creed | 1900MHz | 1700MHz | |
| Metro Exodus | 1780MHz | 1640MHz | |
| Strange Brigade | 1780MHz | 1660MHz | |
| Total War: TK | 1830MHz | 1690MHz | |
| The Division 2 | 1760MHz | 1630MHz | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | 1910MHz | 1690MHz | |
| Forza Horizon 4 | 1870MHz | 1700MHz | |
Meanwhile clockspeeds are also an interesting story. AMD said that they would no longer be holding back their chips' top boost clocks, and instead let the silicon lottery run its course, allowing the best chips to reach their highest clockspeeds. The end result is that our 5700 XT is allowed to clock up to 2044 MHz, 139MHz better than AMD's official Boost Clock metric guarantees. More to the point, this is a substaintial jump in frequency over both AMD's RX Vega and RX 500 series cards, which would top out around the mid-1500s.
That said, the 5700 XT doesn't have the TDP or thermal cap to susntain this; I couldn't actually hit 2044MHz even in LuxMark, which as a "light" compute workload tends to bring out the highest clockspeeds in processors. Instead, the best clockspeed I was able to hit was a bit lower, at 2008MHz. So while the silicon is willing, the physics of powering a Navi 10 at such high clockspeeds are another matter.
At any rate, even with TDP and cooling keeping the 5700 XT more down to earth, the card is still able to hit high clockspeeds. More than half of the games in our benchmark suite average clockspeeds of 1800MHz or better, and a few get to 1900MHz. Even The Division 2, which appears to be the single most punishing game in this year's suite in terms of clockspeeds, holds the line at 1760MHz, right above AMD's official game clock.
As for the 5700, with its more conservative TDP, clockspeed specifications, and likely some binning, the card doesn't reach quite as high. Its 1750MHz max boost clock is just 25MHz over AMD's guaranteed clock. Meanwhile its clockspeeds are overall a bit more densely packed than the 5700 XT's; all of our games see average clockspeeds between 1630MHz and 1700MHz.
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Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
251mm2.ballsystemlord - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Thanks!eastcoast_pete - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
@Ryan: Thanks for the initial review! If I read it correctly, AMD is at risk of (again) screwing up on the driver side. I really hope that they get on this pronto, and put their collective backs into it. Even great hardware can suck if the software is buggy.moozoo - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
"In short, OpenCL doesn't have any good champions right now."Actually Intel, especially with their new discrete graphics card coming up. They would be mad to start a new GPU computer API and I'd expect Its unlike they would join AMD with Rocm or Nvidia with CUDA.
Intel's fpga's also have opencl and its an obvious direction for them.
They have been pushing intel ispc lately (unreal physics) for the cpu so it is not impossible they could push a gpu based version of that, but I think that's unlikely. ispc is more about pushing their cpu's avx512 against amd.
Also about fp64, I didn't see it mentioned anyway. for the minority like me that care, according to techpowerup it is 1:16 which would be great as I feared they would drop it all together as Intel has with Gen11. The techpowerup 5700xt entry is at https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-57...
FourEyedGeek - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
How effective is ray tracing on a RTX 2060 Super, it is all well and good to have a feature, but if most people who purchase the card do not enable it due to the massive performance hit, is the price premium worth it?To me it seems like the 5700 is a fantastic price to performance option, and the 2070 Super is the realistic minimum GPU you'd want if utilising ray tracing.
webdoctors - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
i don't have a card or the games but I think on a 2060 Super you'd be able to do really great at 1080P with RT. Honestly I'd rather have ray tracing and 1080P than non-RT at 4K.https://wccftech.com/geforce-gtx-ray-tracing-1080p...
This link shows the non-super 2060 hitting 60 FPS in Metro and Justice Tech so the 2060 Super should be great. I've seen demos like Bioshock with raytracing on and its just amazing. Ppl complaining about RT just doesn't make sense, the idea and tech has been around for decades and used by movie studios because its not the hacky way of visualization and its what your eyes perceive.
I'm glad we're having some evolution in gaming after DX11 in graphics thats in real image quality and not just the polygon increase the last few years. Sure its not cheap but Intel and AMD also doing it so the prices should come down when its standard. Look at how much SSD and DDR4 have dropped.
Bensam123 - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
No testing of input delay or anti-lag? Definitely one of the things I think a lot of gamers are looking forward to the most if they've heard about it and if they haven't they'll be interested once they do.That aside one of the most interesting things in the benchmarks is that the 5700XT is beating the 2070S in some 1080p tests, sometimes by a large margin. Given most gamers, especially competitive ones play at 1080p that's a pretty big deal.
isthisavailable - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
I want AMD to make a 2080ti super competitor (navi 20?), and stick 2 of those together on a single PCB, putting PCIe 4.0 to good use and taking the performance crown from Nvidia.jjj - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
lol going backwards in terms of perf per dollar vs Vega 56.Both Nvidia and AMD should be squashed by regulators in a sane world as this is ridiculous.
eva02langley - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Idiot...https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1870/ben...