PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil Review

1. Introduction2. PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark Fire Strike & Time Spy (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Battlefield V (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Metro Exodus (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)11. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)12. Clock Speed13. Temperatures14. Acoustics15. Power Consumption16. Overclocking Part 117. Overclocking Part 218. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

Custom Navi graphics cards are coming thick and fast now. We've already looked at solutions from Sapphire and MSI, and today we turn to PowerColor with its RX 5700 XT Red Devil. The Red Devil series has long been popular with enthusiasts for its beefy coolers and custom PCBs, and the RX 5700 XT model in for review is no different – it sports a thick, triple-fan cooler and beefed-up power delivery alongside a factory overclocked core. With an MSRP of £449, is PowerColor onto a winner?

One of the first things you'll notice about the PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil – apart from its sheer size – is the new colour-neutral design. The Red Devil cards, as the name suggests, have always had prominent red accents on the shroud but here PowerColor has toned things down significantly. The 5700 XT Red Devil is also the first of the series to sport any form of RGB lighting.

Aesthetics aside, PowerColor has applied a decent factory overclock to the card, with a rated game clock of 1905MHz. Alongside that, there is dual-BIOS functionality allowing users to choose between the ‘OC' BIOS for maximum performance, or the ‘Silent' BIOS for lower noise levels. This will be a focus of our review today.

 

	RX 5700	RX 5700 XT	RX Vega 56	RX Vega 64	Radeon VII
Architecture	Navi	Navi	Vega 10	Vega 10	Vega 20
Manufacturing Process	7nm	7nm	14nm	14nm	7nm
Transistor Count	10.3 billion	10.3 billion	12.5 billion	12.5 billion	13.2 billion
Die Size	251mm²	251mm²	486mm²	495mm²	331mm²
Compute Units	36	40	56	64	60
Stream Processors	2304	2560	3584	4096	3840
Base GPU Clock	Up to 1465MHz	Up to 1605MHz	1156 MHz	1274 MHz	1400 MHz
Game GPU Clock	Up to 1625MHz	Up to 1755MHz	n/a	n/a	n/a
Boost GPU Clock	Up to 1725MHz	Up to 1905MHz	1471 MHz	1546 MHz	1750 MHz
Peak Engine Clock	n/a	n/a	1590 MHz	1630 MHz	1800 MHz
Peak SP Performance	Up to 7.95 TFLOPS	Up to 9.75 TFLOPS	Up to 10.5 TFLOPS	Up to 12.7 TFLOPS	Up to 14.2 TFLOPS
Peak Half Precision Performance	Up to 15.9 TFLOPS	Up to 19.5 TFLOPS	Up to 21.0 TFLOPS	Up to 25.3 TFLOPS	Up to 28.1 TFLOPS
Peak Texture Fill-Rate	Up to 248.4 GT/s	Up to 304.8 GT/s	Up to 330.0 GT/s	Up to 395.8 GT/s	432.24 GT/s
ROPs	64	64	64	64	64
Peak Pixel Fill-Rate	Up to 110.4 GP/s	Up to 121.9 GP/s	Up to 94.0 GP/s	Up to 98.9 GP/s	115.26 GP/s
Memory	8GB GDDR6	8GB GDDR6	8GB HBM	8GB HBM	16GB HBM2
Memory Bandwidth	448 GB/s	448 GB/s	410 GB/s	483.8 GB/s	1 TB/s
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	2048-bit	2048-bit	4096-bit
Board Power	185W	225W	210W	295W	300W

Diving into the core spec of the card, based on the 7nm Navi GPU, of course this 5700 XT has 40 Compute Units and 2560 Stream Processors, with 8GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory. We already mentioned the 1905MHz rated game clock, which is an increase of 150MHz over the reference card. Do bear in mind, however, that game clock is only the ‘expected' GPU clock when gaming, and frequency is very dynamic with the new Navi cards. We will look at actual clock speed under load later in this review.

Another point to note is in regards to total board power. By default the card ships with the OC BIOS enabled, which has a 220W power target (interestingly 5W less than reference). By moving to the Silent BIOS, however, the card engages an 180W power target. PowerColor hasn't disclosed clock speeds for the Red Devil using the Silent BIOS, but it's a certainty that the card will run slower with 40W less power available to it – this is also something we will examine later in the review.

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