AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT

Performance to shake up the mid-range market

- JARRED WALTON

AMD’S RADEON RX 5600 XT has joined the battle for the best graphics card. It’s a cut-throat competition, especially when it comes to mainstream GPUs that cost around $300 or under. AMD’s RX 5600 XT announcement is a great example of this—the company announced initial specifications and pricing, and Nvidia responded with a price cut on the RTX 2060. Then AMD counter-attacked with an updated RX 5600 XT VBIOS that boosted clock speeds and performance. It’s all a bit tit-for-tat.

As far as the core hardware goes, the RX 5600 XT plays it straight. This is the same Navi 10 GPU as the RX 5700, but with 6GB GDDR6 instead of 8GB. It has the same 2,304 GPU cores, but with potentially lower clock speeds. There are no “reference” RX 5600 XT cards, which means most GPUs will be factory overclocked. We’ve included specs for the Sapphire RX 5600 XT Pulse that we’re testing for this review.

Officially, the TDP of the reference model is 150W, and the “performance” BIOS for the Sapphire Pulse has a 180W TDP. In practice, the power use with the high-performance BIOS fell well short of 180W during gaming tests.

The problem is that AMD is still missing a direct answer to Nvidia’s ray-tracing capable RTX series hardware, which will likely come later this year as a high-end offering to compete with the likes of the RTX 2080 Super. Until then, the RX 5600 XT is supposed to fill the gap between the RX 5500 XT and RX 5700.

Even before we hit the performance numbers, it feels like the RX 5600 XT is priced a bit too high. We won’t be surprised if the street pricing on these cards starts high, then drops closer to $250. Regardless, the mainstream $200-$300 bracket is very congested— there’s lots of options, including previous-gen GPUs that are still floating around.