XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC 3 review - Introduction

XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC 3 Ultra
Triple THICC the way you like it

We test and review the new XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC 3 Ultra. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is basically an RX 5700 however with 6GB of GDDR6 and lower clock frequencies. THICC 3 is a product that is extremely pleasing to the eyes really. We have a lot to talk about. XFX is offering a fantastic looking product offering very silent performance, at 329 USD.

Days before the 5600 XT launch something happened, NVIDIA lowered RTX 2060 pricing to 299 USD. And there's where AMD made an 180 degree turn and pretty much created two separated SKUs for the 5600 XT. That would be the reference product, and then the factory tweaked (OC models) with greatly enhanced specs like a 180 Watt power envelope (opposed to 150 W), an increase of the maximum turbo clock as well as a bump in GDDR6 memory data-rate going from 12 towards 14 Gbps. Interesting for sure. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is not replacing the Radeon RX 5700 graphics card. The two products address different market needs. The Radeon RX 5600 XT was specifically designed and optimized to deliver the best 1080p gaming experiences, while the Radeon RX 5700 – with its additional memory and memory bandwidth – was specifically designed for 1440p gaming. Yeah, AMD hasn't been wasting any time, Ryzen 3000 at 7nm, Radeon VII at 7nm, then the Radeon 5700 and 5700 XT, as well as the 5500 series. All at 7nm fabrication. We now add the 5600 XT series. The basis of the product that we test today is the NAVI GPU, with a die fabbed at a 7nm fabricated package and 6GB of GDDR6 graphics memory (12 Gbps) these cards are released in an aim to compete with the GeForce RTX 2060, will it be capable to do that? We can already tell you that the numbers will be interesting to see. The most important aspect, however, is pricing. Where the Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cost 349 and 399 USD respectively the 5600 XT series starts at 279 USD. The NAVI GPU is based on what AMD refers to as RDNA architecture (Radeon DNA). The Radeon 5000 series is the first commercial consumer graphics card that is PCIe Express 4.0 compatible. Both the Radeon 5600 and 5700 are offered with 2304 shader processors. The GPU game clock is dynamic at 1130~1375 MHz with a peak boost clock to 1.560 GHz for the no- OC (reference) model card. NAVI cards are fitted with GDDR6 memory, that means HBM2 is no longer used opposed to what you have been seeing with Vega 56/64, a clever choice as HBM2 memory is difficult to assemble onto the die substrate (lot's of yield issues there) and that makes it very expensive, next to being an expensive memory type to purchase. 

Graphics card	5700	XFX THICC3	5600 XT	5500 XT	RTX 2060	GTX 1660 Ti	GTX 1660 Super
Architecture	RDNA 1.0	RDNA 1.0	RDNA 1.0	RDNA 1.0	Turing	Turing	Turing
Manufacturing processes	7 nm DUV	7 nm DUV	7 nm DUV	7 nm DUV	12 nm FFN	12 nm FFN	12 nm FFN
Chip size (die)	251 mm²	251 mm²	251 mm²	158 mm²	445 mm²	284 mm²	284 mm²
Code Name	Navi 10	Navi 10	Navi 10	Navi 14	TU106-200	TU116-400	TU116-300
Transistors graphics chip (million)	10,300	10,300	10,300	6400	10,800	6600	6600
PCI Express standard	4.0 ×16	4.0 ×16	4.0 ×16	4.0 ×8	3.0 ×16	3.0 ×16	3.0 ×16
FP32 Shaders / TMU	2.304 / 144	2.304 / 144	2.304 / 144	1.408 / 88	1.920 / 120	1.536 / 96	1.408 / 88
ROP	64	64	64	32	48	48	48
GPU Boost Clock Games (MHz)	1625	1750	1560	1717	1680	1770	1785
Compute power FP32 (GFLOPS)	7488	6336	6336	4835	6451	5437	5027
Memory bus (bit)	256	192	192	128	192	192	192
RAM speed (GT / s)	14.0	12.0	12.0/14.0	14.0	14.0	12.0	14.0
memory type	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6
Memory bandwidth (GB / s)	448.0	288.0	288.0 / 336.0	224.0	336.0	288.0	336.0
Storage capacity (MiB)	8192	6144	6144	8,192 / 4,096	6144	6144	6144
Typical power consumption	180 Watt	150 Watt	150 Watt	130 Watt	160 Watt	120 Watt	125 Watt

XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC 3

So XFX is offering a THICC 2 (299 USD) and THICC 3 (329 USD) version, referring to the cooler and fans. That compact design card holds two fans and the bigger version THICC 3 offers three fans, both follow 0dB mute fan technology, which allows the fans to stop spinning when the GPU core temperature remains below 60 Celsius.  The backside holds a backplate that adds structural rigidity.  You connect this card with a 6- and 8-pin power header. It has been widely addressed by us already. The latest firmware has small TGP tweak (higher power envelope) + it's boost frequency at 1750 MHz. XFX, unfortunately, did not apply a GDDR6 data-rate increase towards 14 Gbps, which does hurt additional performance towards some of the competing products from Sapphire and PowerColor in the same price range. The card thus features 6 GB of GDDR6 memory running at 12 Gbps and that means a memory bus width at 192-bits, delivering bandwidth of 288GB/s. Tweaking wise AMD is restricting frequencies again. We'll discuss that in the overclocking section of the article. The card offers one HDMI 2.0b port and three DisplayPorts v1.4. The card itself has no RGB, but and this is a personal notation, it looks stunning in design and style.