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Being a long time nvidia fanboy and disgruntled as the 1000 and 2000 series pricing and how well AMD have been performing in reviews, I thought I'd stick it to nvidia and buy a 5700 XT. I've been looking for a while as it seems most of the non-blower reference cards take up 3 slots (and advertised as 2.n slots, but you try shoving anything in that third slot). Powercolor have come to the rescuse with their Dual and Red Dragon lines (not Red Devil), which fit in two slots.
Scan have dropped the price on the Red Dragon from £425 to £390, so I lept at bought one (free delivery thanks to Hexus). Arrived a few days later and immeditely got installed.
DirectX 12 has promised multi-GPU capabilities where you can mix and match different brand GPUs, let alone different models. And whilst no games actually support this, let me settle this for once - you can't stick an AMD and an Nvidia card in the same computer due to incompatible drivers. They won't work alongside each very well at all.
Installation
On to the actual card. Installation was fine, box was void of anything apart from the card and packing - almost single-use plastic free, but not quite. No bungs, adapters or cables etc. This card is taller than the standard expansion slot to cater for bigger fans, not a problem in my case, but may be for some people. The power connectors are on the top edge, meaning you room for the extra tall card and your power cables.
3D performance
As noted above, previously I was running an MSI 1070 Ti,.
- Time Spy gave me ~6800 which increased to ~8700.
- Rainbow Six Siege average ~30-50fps at 1080, ~10fps at 4K.
- Rise of Tomb Raider 1080 don't know because I had vsync on (oops), 4K ~5fps.
- Civ 6 saw a couple of millisecond off the frame time down to 8ms in 1080, and 5 down to 15ms in 4K.
I got bored of benchmarking at this point and got on with it.
Noise and thermals
I generally saw low 1000 rpm speeds, and I only ever heard the fans at full pelt when the driver locked up. I generally keep a frame-cap on to avoid excess heat, and it certainly wasn't a problem. I generally found temperatures less than 70°C for most 1080 gaming. Temperatures dropped to 50°C quickly after gaming at which point the fan turns off. There is a bit of lag before they'll turn on/off to avoid a constant switching on and off.
I couldn't heard the card over my CPU radiator during most gaming.
This card has a backplate, which is a nice touch. The heatsink fins run the width of the card and not the length as I find more common. This means the heat will be ejected to the top of the card, and into your motherboard. Instead of out the case and towards the front. I'm unsure whether that's a good or a bad thing.
Overlay and tools
Previously I've used the Nvidia overlay to do things like recording of game footage, and saving last X minutes. I was pleased to find that the AMD software supplies a similar product, with some differences:
- The overlay doesn't appear to capture the mouse, so when you move your mouse around and click on things in it, your game will be reflecting those actions. In Wildlands my guy looked like he was twitching and firing off random shots.
- The microphone track can be recorded separately, but this is a separate file and not a separate track in the file, you have to combine and line-up your audio yourself if you do this.
- Surround sound is recorded by default (not sure if nvidia supports it, never tried, not interested).
- Easy selection of monitor bit-depth etc, more fine grained controls in many areas
- Just as confusing to navigate, and looks just as stupid as the GeForce Experience app.
I was able to overclock my ageing IPS panel to 72Hz without problem.
Drivers
After my initial attempt to run two driver sets side-by-side failed miserably, I cleaned and installed the latest WHQL drivers. These were unstable. I rapidly cleaned and went to the latest (19.9.3), these were less unstable.
But as many people are reporting - omg - this is terrible. My computer crashes. You know, those things you used to see back in the nineties? Frequent graphics driver crashes and occasional black screens with fans going into oblivion waiting for somebody to button the system.
I'm getting through one or two restarts a day, and I don't use my computer all day! Flash points seem to be transitioning states (full screen, tabbing, waking for sleep). Most of the time it works, but not all the time. I've lost work-in-progress as I fell out of the habit of saving my progress many, many years ago.
2D Performance
Argh. Writing this post has been terrible, it feels like I'm on a remote desktop. Dragging windows around often (not always) feels like I'm trying to pull them through treacle. VMWare virtual machines sometimes exhibit mouse lag. It's ironic that anti-lag is a thing AMD are bigging up.
Frankly, it's frequently unusable *reboot*.
Now. I might be able to spend hours of my life troubleshooting this and working out what setting causes the problems, but I can't be bothered. I don't spend an eye-watering amount for that.
The long and short of it is I'm going to send it back due to poor drivers. The small boost in 4K performance is welcome as it kept things closer to 60fps, but even then, it still can't do things in ultra, there are compromises that have to be made. Given the resale value of my old card, I think I'll just save my money and spend it on games instead.
I have been burnt by this experience, and I'm greatly disappointed as I'd like to move away from the monopoly boys, but these experiences remind me why I don't.
No idea how to resize pictures for this forum.
1070ti
5700 XT
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Originally Posted by nazhuggybear
