Gigabyte Radeon RX 5600 XT Gaming OC review - Final words and conclusion

.final words

All by itself as a GPU, NAVI sits fairly close towards last-gen Vega performance levels. So the improved architecture works out well for AMD, it just works. Depending on how and where you measure the performance overall is at the very least interesting and in that respect the Radeon RX 5600 XT is fighting off the 1660 running to 2060 series from NVIDIA (with exceptions here and there). The OC SKU as tested today takes that even further. Then there is, of course, the discussion on how relevant you find hardware-accelerated Raytracing support. Most of you don't care at this time, but much like anything in the tech industry, anything and everything will evolve, so this year we will likely see say a 5800 with just that.   

.performance

As mentioned, Radeon RX 5600 XT show good performance in the 1920x1080 and Quad HD resolutions 2560x1440 realm of resolutions and sits at Radeon VEGA level performance. That is not a bad position to be in reality as that includes the newer titles like Battlefield V, Metro: Exodus and others. Obviously architectures differ compared to NVIDIA but also last-gen VEGA, and that means you'll be seeing wins and losses in perf compared to team green as well as that vega series. 6GB versus 8GB is a bit of an icky thing, I do prefer 8GB cards and would always recommend that. That said at Full HD, 6GB seems to be pretty decent, but for any graphics card close to 300 USD or above, I would say 8GB was the better way to go. The rDNA architecture does show strength and IPC increase, especially seen from Polaris the results are pretty amazing. 

Shortly before launch, AMD submitted a new BIOS for all brands OC SKUS (the factory tweaked models), that firmware increases performance and was a bit of an unusual move to witness really. It invokes a higher TGP along with the OC models specifically to run faster (~7%) as well as an increase for the GDDR6 memory from 12 to 14 Gbps. The reference clocked models, on the other hand, will not benefit from that advantage.

.pricing

The XT overall as a reference product is priced at 279 USD. The Gigabyte custom boards are roughly that same amount of money. We expect some boards to be more premium and more expensive. in this price category I, however, feel you should not be passing 300 bucks.

.cooling & noise levels

The WindForce 3X cooler certainly is beefy and thick, the acoustics are reasonable at a measured 38 DBa. At such acoustics values, you are looking at a product performing in the 70 Degrees C range/delta. 

.energy

The TDP for this XT we measure to be roughly under 180 Watts, which matches the TGP if 180 Watts that Gigabyte assigned to this OC SKU. That number varies a bit per game title, workload, resolution and even refresh rate of course. It's an okay wattage, especially compared to the competition's products with the same performance bracket.

.conclusion

Let's do more with less is a thing you often see in the technology sector, most processors are the same, just binned and reconfigured. For a more mainstream GPU they figured, well we can design multiple GPUs, but that is expensive. So with the RX 5600 they simply use the 5700 and reconfigured things a bit. There's nothing wrong with that, and as you guys confirmed, the 5700 series has been a hit from the very beginning. So I expect the same for the 5600 series, albeit a notch slower at a starting price of 279 USD this might become a very attractive gaming GPU in both the 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 resolution domain. The Gigabyte Gaming OC card looks nice, comes with RGB options, these are however disabled at default, you can enable them with the RGB Fusion software suite. The looks are good, we see a nice metal backplate and yeah, it's just a matter of how much you are willing to spend on a graphics card versus how acceptable you deem 6GB to be? I mean the performance up-to WQHD really isn't an issue. Tweaking, AMD again is firing off-limits on the memory and GPU clock. So all cards will get the same results: we do like the OC / Factory tweaked models as they bring in at roughly 7% extra performance and once manually tweaked, and that is a value rises to roughly 10% (seen from reference performance of course). OC model or not? It depends, if you are not shy of tweaking yourself, then the perf is all (roughly) the same. The factory tweaked models however get you at maximum performance all by itself, for just a tenner more in most cases. Overall a nice design and well-performing product. Certainly recommended for the more avid and casual PC gamer.

• 3DMark FireStrike + Time Spy + Port Royale)
• Download AMD Radeon drivers
• Download NVIDIA GeForce drivers
• Download OC 180W TGP firmware

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