XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC II Ultra review - Game and boost? Clocks and PCIe 4.0

Game Boost

Starting at the NAVI series is that next to the traditional base and dynamic boost clock, you now see no less than three clocks. It's a clusterfrack of confusion the boost clock really is AMD saying'; hey look - we can get to 1.9 GHz as well. Meanwhile, in game, that clock will be quite a bit lower. So we now have to deal with a base, game and boost clock, it is just retarded really as basically you can also say, hey my car can do 300 Kph, but really it drives at 200 KpH and in the city 50 KpH. The third distinction (base/game/boost) just makes no sense. Why still list the base clock? With an application behaving viral like say Furmark, you’ll see the Radeon RX 5700 (XT) specced at 1605 MHz base clock frequency. Gaming on a heavy on the GPU title (which is what I call normal gaming) will result in a 1755 MHz clock frequency. However, where it can for very short periods of time - boost towards 1905 MHz as briefly as that will be. But arguably you are going to see a 1.7 ~1.8 GHz dynamic clock when gaming, differing per title and workload. AMD has indicated that the boost peaks can be even higher than 1.9 GHz. So as far as clear values go, my guess is as good as yours. The dynamic clocks are of course regulated by limiters to be found in power draw, load, heat, voltages, etc. Yeah, I'll stop ranting now.

PCI-Express Gen 4.0

That elephant in the room, PCIe 4.0. We’ve mentioned it already, AMD really wanted to be first with anything and everything PCI-Express 4.0. Yes, AMD has been making big bets with the 2019 products, one of them is making a strong and solid move to surpass the competition, with PCIe Gen 4.0.

The 7nm AMD Radeon RX 5700-series gaming graphics card family featuring high-speed GDDR6 memory and support for the PCIe 4.0 interface, on a Ryzen 3000 proc, with X570 motherboard and say a Radeon 5700, you’ll be hard-pressed to run out of bandwidth as each lane get doubled up in that bandwidth, per lane. Of course, there has been a recent PCI-Express Gen 5.0 announcement as well, for ease of mind I already inserted it into the table. What benefits will you have at PCIe gen 4 with a graphics card? Absolutely nothing, really. Running PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 will not make a difference in performance as that PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slot is not even loaded (bandwidth) more than a few percents.