5700 and 5700 XT

Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT

As you've learned by now, AMD is announcing two cards today, with a launch next month. Both GPUs are based on NAVI-10, the regular Radeon RX 5700 is a bit cut down (we'll call this NAVI 10 PRO). The other one, the XT has everything enabled. Both cards offer HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.4, PCIe Gen 4.0 support and both come with an 8 and 6-pin PCIe PEG power connector as well as 8GB GDDR6 graphics memory. You'll see that the XT model has had a redesign, a shroud with a bit of a bump, it looks nice really. But it is the same style blower cooler residing under there as we have seen for years. Interesting to know is that these GPUs are not using thermal paste, but much like Radeon VII a graphite thermal pad, which conducts heat much better then silver enhanced paste. 

The board power design is 180 and 225 Watt for the Pro and XT models and both come with a 7-phase digital power delivery design. All this info is of course based on the reference products. AIB board partners will release their customized products in the weeks to follow after the RX 5700 is available in July. Let's briefly dissect the two cards.

Radeon RX 5700 XT

The first model is the new XT premium mainstream 2560x1440 solution. Please note, the NAVI10 series is going to replace the Vega lineup, which will slowly fade out of the market. Why, well, these cards sit right on top of that performance, even slightly better.  The Radeon RX 5700 XT has the full shader cluster-enabled, that totals up towards 2560 Stream/Shader processors. It has 64 ROP partitions and 160 Texture units. You'll notice a Boost clock up-to 1.9 GHz, with the average gaming clock hovering in the 1.75 GHz domain. The card will be tied towards 8GB GDDR6 memory (256-bit memory bus). At 14 Gbps that brings in a solid 448 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The board power of this card is 225 Watts.

Radeon RX 5700

The next model is positioned slightly lower mainstream 2560x1440 solution. The RX 5700 (and I do call this the NAVI 10 PRO SKU) has had a bit of a trim and cut-down in the shader cluster engine, it totals up towards 2304 Stream/Shader processors. So 2304:64 shaders per node means that it has 36 Shader nodes compared to the 40 on the XT model. Other than a few changes like clocks, we're really looking at a very similar product overall. With its 8GB 256-bit memory it as well has 64 ROP partitions and 144 Texture units. You'll notice a Boost clock up-to 1.7 GHz, with the average gaming clock hovering in the 1.6 GHz domain. The card will be tied towards 8GB GDDR6 memory (256-bit memory bus). At 14 Gbps that brings in a solid 448 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. This card will have a board power of 180 Watt.  The design of the non-XT model is a bit more styled after the Radeon VII.

Let's place the most common denominators in a table and compare a bit back and forth with Polaris just to get you an idea where we're headed with this new release.

Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary edition

Out of the blue (this card was not mentioned in our pre-brief), AMD also announced a 50th-anniversary edition of the 5700 XT at 499 is introduced with a higher boost frequency. The card has a game boost of 1830 MHz en a peak boost of 1980 MHz. We will add it to the charts later on as I am typing this directly from the event in a busy crowd.