Final words and conclusion

.final words

I seem to have developed a bit of a soft spot for the new XFX card designs. I mean they look properly good, aren't screaming out loud with logos and Saturday night fever RGB, it's all just subtle with that all dark design. That, however, is a subjective statement as I might shout 'ooh', and you might shout 'ehww'. That is the reality of an aesthetic preference though. Other than that what can we say, the THICC2 runs a bit warmer than the THICC3. The performance is more or less the same due to the AMD limiters kicking in. We like the dual-BIOS mode, but the silent BIOS 'mode' is a little redundant as the performance BIOS (the default modus operandus) really, you can't hear either.  But there are two BIOSes and that is always nice as failsafe and perhaps a customized tweaked BIOS of your own eh? And if that fails, you simply switch back. That said, we expected the default performance to be a notch higher. While it does have a slight power envelope increase and higher-boost frequencies it lacks 14 Gbps clocked GDDR6 memory, which is a feature spec that AMD opened up fairly last minute and something that most board partners immediately jumped on-to. When you tweak a bit, you can get at that and an even better performance level really. However, the memory on this card would not run stable at 14 Gbps with the current BIOS. We settled at 13 Gbps. 

The THICC 2 is remarkably silent, I mean at that default 'performance BIOS' mode we reach an extremely low 35 DBa rating. There is also a silent mode BIOS, but the differences are so small that we left things as they are in performance mode. Temps are a notch higher overall just above at a ~75 Degrees C range, but I am fine with that as the tradeoff is just a very silent product. So yes, you take a Radeon RX 5700 (non-XT), remove two GDRR6 and lower the clocks, that in a nutshell is the 5600 XT. And with the cheaper price tag and a bit of tweaking, this could be a serious success. 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) and the premium clocked models closing in on 2060 Super. 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, the Radeon RX 5600 XT overall is a proper performance product 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. The cost of ownership for Polaris at the time of writing is, of course, a much better proposition. But overall, yeah we're not disappointed. 

.pricing

The XT overall as a reference product is priced at 279 USD. The 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. At the time of writing, we've seen this THICC 2 for $299 at eggy, and that is fairly spot on really. Way better than the 50 bucks over the AMD MSRP we have seen from some other brands.

.energy

The total power draw for the card we measure to be roughly 150~160 Watts. 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

Surprisingly enough when you look at aesthetics, overall performance, and acoustic performance the differences are not so big between the THICC 2 and THICC3. Realistically this two fan model runs somewhat higher in load temperatures but manages to remain to be a really silent product. It looks good as well albeit the HICC3 looks a notch sexier. Sure all that black is plastic, but yeah it looks good. Currently this THICC 2 is selling at 299 USD and that is roughly 30 bucks cheaper than the THICC3. I've always stated, this product series needs to be under that 300 USD marker, and as such, I do have a slight preference over THICC 2 compared to THICC3. Keep in mind though that with the current BIOS we could not achieve 14 Gbps on the GDDR6 memory. Not a huge deal at all, but all other cards we have tested can do that. That's said, the rest is easily tweaked to competing level performance, this card will not differ from any other premium product. The aesthetic design is fantastic, albeit I understand that's a subjective remark to make, the noise levels are close to perfect and the performance slightly better than the reference 5600 XT, and with a manual tweak at premium card level performance. How acceptable you deem 6GB to be? I mean the performance up-to WQHD really isn't an issue. Tweaking wise you'll bump an 8% extra out of the card. Overall it is a nice design and recommended for the more avid and casual PC gamer. For that 299 USD, you get a proper looking and performing product and silent as well. Remember that at a few tenners more you could also go with a 5700 (Non-XT) that has 8GB of graphics memory, so that was a bit of a dilemma while writing this conclusion as yes, pricing is everything in the graphics card arena but at an asking price of 299 XFX is pretty spot on. We're not sure if the THICC2 will get a revised BIOS at the time of writing. However overall for a card under that 300 USD domain, we can wholeheartedly recommend it. 

• 3DMark FireStrike + Time Spy + Port Royale)
• Download AMD Radeon drivers
• Download NVIDIA GeForce drivers
• Download PowerColor BIOS
• Download AMD BIOS Flash Software

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- Hilbert