Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT Pulse OC

[HEXUS]

The best graphics card at £250? We find out.

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[[GSV]Trig]

Love the releasing of the lower-spec cards so they can make the money before the one everyone really wants RX5950XT comes out and pushes all of the other prices down, good strategy though I guess...

[Kanoe]

I wonder if you will be able to flash the bios to get rid of the imposed limits like you can do with the 5700 non XT as they are based on the same die or whether the cut down mem interface will stop that from being able to happen.

[scaryjim]

I wonder if you will be able to flash the bios to get rid of the imposed limits like you can do with the 5700 non XT as they are based on the same die or whether the cut down mem interface will stop that from being able to happen.

I hope not - just causes trouble later. Way back when, I bought a second hand HD 4850. A couple of weeks later it statred crashing, and when I poked about it turned out the previous owner had flashed an OC card BIOS onto it.

I can't see a 5700(XT) bios working due to the memory issues, as you say, but no doubt someone will come up with a hacked/modified bios for it eventually. Whether it'd be worth the effort and hassle though? Personally I woiuldn't bother...

[will19565]

Trig;304]Love the releasing of the lower-spec cards so they can make the money before the one everyone really wants RX5950XT comes out and pushes all of the other prices down, good strategy though I guess...

not really as if I wanted performance, I could easily go and buy an Nvidia GPU (for the record, I'm not a fan of either, as I have had two graphics cards, an AMD 7870 GHz OC edition and an Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB) why would I wait for mostly unknown performance?

[philehidiot]

Trig;304]Love the releasing of the lower-spec cards so they can make the money before the one everyone really wants RX5950XT comes out and pushes all of the other prices down, good strategy though I guess...

Doesn't seem like a sensible strategy to me. I'd say there are a few reasons:
1) The top end may be an identical chip which is binned better / these chips are flawed with sections shut off. They may want a few runs to build up stock of the high end GPUs before release.
2) Drivers may be flawed at the moment. Mid range card optimisations may translate into gains for the release of the high end chip. Very often initial drivers are poor and these are the ones used for benchmarking. Getting experience in the wild with a less marketing critical card will give them chance to optimise before high end release.
3) How does releasing a mid range card before the high end one make them money? Surely the hype generated by the release of the flagship model will direct people to the mid range if they find its performance sufficient in comparative benchmarks?
4) AMD don't tend to compete at the very top end. They target the high volume price points. That's less sexy and aimed at the more pragmatic consumer.

[ohmaheid]

Good to see AMD finally getting to grips with temps and noise, not to mention performance metrics.
All in all - a great addition to the lower/middle graphics card stack, which will give the green team sleepless nights.

[ohmaheid]

Am i wrong, or is the author suggesting that the 5600xt is more expensive than the rtx2060?
Is it not the other way round?

[Xlucine]

An overclocked overclocked card, yet it draws less power than the equal performance 2060? Neat. The AIBs using 5700 designs is very handy for the last minute clock change, this is the opposite of the 590 abortion (i.e. cards with TDPs that completely outstrip their cooling)

The complaint about not being able to cut price further from AMD is interesting - 7nm is hardly a new process these days, and the competition has a massive die. It's an older process, but some sources of dead dies (like dust particle concentration) can only go so low - the exponential drop in working dies gets to be a brick wall once you go big enough. I suspect part of the "cost" is the opportunity cost - a wafer of navi is one less wafer of zen2, and that could make a lot of high-margin 3950Xs.

The 2060 leads to a further interesting comparison with the transistor efficiency of the dies - both the navi chip and turing one have ~10.5 bn transistors, but different amounts turned on (90% of the shaders in 5600X, and 83% in 2060). The turning chip also has RTX stuff that's effectively wasted silicon in hexus benchmarks, I wonder how much of the efficiency difference is due to a better design in navi and how much is from going slow&wide in the architecture?

My final point: Isn't competition great?

[Gentle Viking]

The people wanting / getting a 5950XT card, will be people with a all together thicker wallet, and what those people buy should not have a impact on the prices of this card.
Only what Nvidia or other sell in this performance / price segment will have any say in regard to prices on this product.

Dont get me wrong i want 5950 XT too, from a geek perspective, form my actual need ( 1080 screen ) and financial perspective i will not pay what a 5950 XT card will be ( which i assume will be like similar performing Nvidia cards.
My 5700XT are about as expensive as i will ever pay for a GFX card with money i worked hard for,,,,,, but with a major lotto win that would change for sure.

[DanceswithUnix]

Am i wrong, or is the author suggesting that the 5600xt is more expensive than the rtx2060?
Is it not the other way round?

You seem to be right.
On Overclockers their cheapest 2060 is £270 for a single fan Palit model. This Sapphire card is £255.

[Corky34]

Easy mistake to make what with the amount of 60 series cards there are, it took me a while just to make sure i wasn't confusing the GTX 1660, GTX 1660 Super, GTX 1660 Ti, RTX 2060, and the RTX 2060 Super with each other.

[[GSV]Trig]

Is there actually a decent up to date comparison site?

With the number of reviews Hexus does, is there some sort of online queryable database we can look at so we can see what performance differences there are?

[cptwhite_uk]

I think the main issue for the 5600 XT is the price you can get the 5700 XT for these days....£339 gets you a 25% performance uplift and 2Gb extra RAM which is going to give it a longer life expectancy. This is for the PowerColor dual fan model:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/powe...-graphics-card

https://www.ebuyer.com/912834-powerc...BoCzW8QAvD_BwE

It's not quite as price efficient but it's not far off. £20 premium for the extra performance, otherwise the bang per buck scale linearly.

I guess 5600XT is a good option at £255 for 1080p as things currently stand if you're on a strict budget, but if you stretch the extra £85, I think the upgrade to the 5700XT is worth consideration.

Whats great is we now have a good range of options in the £200 to £400 range, all with either 6Gb or 8Gb of vRAM:

All options priced below are based on dual fan / third party models, except the 1660 Super, which is a single fan Palit option (good enough for 125W TDP)

GTX 1660 Super 6Gb - £200
RX 5600XT 6Gb - £255
RTX 2060 6Gb - £273
RX 5700 8Gb - £295
RX 5700XT 8Gb - £340
RTX 2070 8Gb - £355
RTX 2060 Super 8Gb - £359

All options are justifable at their respective price and both nVidia and AMD have viable option through the price spectrum.

[scaryjim]

You seem to be right.
On Overclockers their cheapest 2060 is £270 for a single fan Palit model. This Sapphire card is £255.

I'm not sure the article was suggesting the the 2060 was cheaper though - it's not how I read it. More that the price cut 2060 would've been better value if AMD hadn't rushed out a higher performance BIOS at the last minute to try to match the 2060 performance.

A £255 card that's 10% slower than a £270 card isn't really a compelling purchase...

[ohmaheid]

I'm not sure the article was suggesting the the 2060 was cheaper though - it's not how I read it. More that the price cut 2060 would've been better value if AMD hadn't rushed out a higher performance BIOS at the last minute to try to match the 2060 performance.

A £255 card that's 10% slower than a £270 card isn't really a compelling purchase...

I don't think there's any benchmarking on ANY tech publication that makes the 2060 10% faster. If anything, the 5600xt is slightly faster across the game average especially on ultra settings.