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) |
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Korguz - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
maroon1 you keep pusing RT as the reason to get the 2060 over the 5600xt.. but do you even realize the performance hit you would suffer for using it ?? face it.. RT on this card.. is not a feature or rt future proof.. according to this review.. seems the 5600xt.. is rhe better cardsonny73n - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Forget ray tracing. RTX2060 is still a better card.Spunjji - Thursday, January 23, 2020 - link
"Forget the biggest reason I gave for this card being better... it's better anyway because reasons"-slow claps as the goalposts disappear over the horizon-
Duckferd - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
I think the factory overclocked Sapphire card is a very interesting option. DLSS and VRS have AMD equivalents that work very well (and Sapphire has its Trixx software), meaning the only thing that Nvidia has over it in the RTX 2060 is ray tracing and NVENC- NVENC being more consequential considering the performance loss from ray tracing. This is a very competitive offering.335 GT - Friday, January 31, 2020 - link
DLSS is like smearing vaseline over your lens. Great feature for internet trolls though.Irata - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
Care to elaborate on those features ? Ray tracing I get, although on the 2060 that's mostly a theoretical feature, but the rest...Or in short: What can those features do where the RX 5600 doesn't not have a similar feature under a different name that does the same thing ?
eva02langley - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
It does actually.https://youtu.be/qcAwR49zRCg?t=919
alufan - Tuesday, January 21, 2020 - link
have to be honest I bought a 2080 when they first came out and frankly I should have just gone with a 1080 or the equiv navi 64 etc the whole RTX thing is pointless hardly any games have it and the performance hit makes it something I can live without, maybe in a couple of gens it will work but right now nah I will save money and buy other stuffschujj07 - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
Except for the fact that in 6 of 9 titles the card reviewed here is FASTER than the 2060 while costing less. At Tomshardware they have the 5600XT faster in 8 of 11 at 1080p and 9 of 11 at 1440p. That means that the 2060 has worse performance per dollar than the 5600XT.Spunjji - Wednesday, January 22, 2020 - link
"Hur hur, I like paying too much for graphics cards"Thanks troll