The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Review, Feat. Sapphire Pulse: A New Challenger For Mainstream Gaming
by Ryan Smith on January 21, 2020 9:01 AM ESTThe Test
As is usually the case for launches without reference hardware, we’ve had to dial down our Sapphire cards slightly to meet AMD’s reference specifications. In this case, Sapphire’s secondary (quiet) BIOS offers reference power and memory settings, so for our reference-spec testing, we’re using that BIOS, with the GPU underclocked by 85Mhz to meet AMD’s official specs.
Finally, as the RX 5600 series is focused on 1080p gaming, this is what our benchmark results will focus on. Though I have also tested the card at our 1440p settings to see just how well it might do as a 1440p card – the lack of VRAM admittedly not doing it any big favors there – and these are posted below our 1080p results.
Finally, we’re using the latest drivers from AMD and NVIDIA.
| CPU: | Intel Core i9-9900K @ 5.0GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Z390 Taichi |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Phison E12 PCIe NVMe SSD (960GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4-3600 2 x 16GB (17-18-18-38) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon RX 5700 Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB AMD Radeon RX 590 AMD Radeon RX 580 AMD Radeon R9 390X NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 441.87 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.1.1 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1903) |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
202 Comments
View All Comments
Targon - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Performance per dollar within a given price category makes sense, but in many situations, lower end cards will end up being better when it comes to performance per dollar. Beyond $400, your performance per dollar does drop, but you can't argue when people want a $600+ card because they want to game at 4k resolutions and the $400 cards just can't handle that resolution.thecoolnamesweretaken - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
While I agree with you I wish more benchmarks included the 1070 Ti rather than the 1070. I imagine as an owner of such a card I must be in the extreme minority or perhaps reviewers never bothered to acquire one since it was released so late in the cycle before the move to the RTX 20xx architecture.Retycint - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Seconded. The 1070Ti was a relatively popular mining card (at least in my country) and hence the local used market is flooded with used 1070Ti's for about $170-180, which is an absolute steal for the performance and basically renders the entire mid range market obsoleteKrayzieka - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Is this With the new driver boost?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
This is with the lastest drivers. AMD's Radeon Boost (dynamic resolution) feature is not enabled.maroon1 - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
AMD's Radeon Boost features is horrible specially if you running below 4KWatch some review like a hardware unboxed about it. They even recommend not using it for 1080p because you sacrifice a lot of image quality
Duckferd - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
All contextual. If you are running at 1080p on certain games with an APU, for example, it's still worthwhile with a minimal amount of boost (83%) because it keeps frametimes consistent when you're already constrained and most need it (i.e. panning in FPS games).How 'horrible' it is also depends on whether you can perceive the dynamic resolution changes as well. This is going to vary quite a bit depending on user configuration and tolerance, but I think the feature is worthwhile to include.
Cooe - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Did you even watch that Hardware Unboxed video? They were very extremely impressed with the performance/visuals at 4K (and using a resolution downscaler of ANY KIND on lesser resolutions is an inherently horrible idea, not anything wrong with AMD's approach), though of course, the algorithm still has it's issues and was more like a proof of concept than anything you'd want to daily drive yet. But your original comment is absolutely NOT the point they ended at, so please don't spreading nonsense.Spunjji - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
It's possible that spreading nonsense is maroon1's actual job :/Irata - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Well, Techspot really liked it and found it a lot better thsn DLSS in their review.