ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT TUF EVO

[rskyline]

Why asus radeon if sapphire pulse is 400eur in de?

In my case it matches my Mobo.

 

[Chrispy_]

As a rule of thumb, Asus' flagship products are always good, and sometimes even the best on the market. They're never cheap though, so you have to decide if you're willing to pay the premium for the brand when other stuff is up to 25% cheaper for no obvious reason other than not having the ASUS markup.

Their midrange stuff is always overpriced and quality/stability/performance are absolutely not guaranteed. Occasionally - and this really is an exception to the rule - you'll find a midrange ASUS product that is priced competitively and best-in-class, but unless you know exactly what to buy and what to avoid, it's easier to just avoid anything non-flagship from ASUS unless you are specifically looking for "mediocre and overpriced".

 

[Fluffmeister]

Hmm, where is @IceShroom ? he loves to berate AIBs using 3 slot, 3 fan coolers on "apparently" efficient Nvidia cards.

 

[Dave65]

To little to late, id sooner give money to my X mother in law.

 

[1d10t]

Aren't the Evoke and Mech literally the same card but with different fan shrouds?

Yeah same card, but strange enough different BIOS. I tried to use RBE and MPT but edited BIOS cannot be flashed.
I was quite shock after came back to AIB after long hiatus since R9 290 reference , only to find that reference is much easier to tinker with.

 

[cucker tarlson]

88 on memory,good luck with that in the summertime inside a case.

Great new feature in this review with the framerate analysis. Thanks @W1zzard for your hard work!

framerate distibution is very interesting too.way cooler and more informative to show min fps in this way.

 

[W1zzard]

88 on memory,good luck with that in the summertime inside a case.

will be fine, it's still 2°C better than ref, and plenty of headroom

 

[rskyline]

If you don't care about price, the STRIX is better

Sorry to come back, but what about between STRIX and Nitro+? Strix is being working great here, but I'm kind of concern about thermals, all temps looks good, Junction stays around 95 Junction on AC Oddisey, but if you run Furmark, a couple of minutes after it will reach 110 Junction. Should I go ahead and change my Strix for a Nitro+?

 

[TKnockers]

Why asus radeon if sapphire pulse is 400eur in de?

Not the same gpu but close enough... i had 5700xt pulse. Aside all driver issues, the card had terrible buzzing sound every now and then while fans were spinning up or down... so build quality not so great. I had 5600xt strix... awesome card great build quality, silent as tomb.

 

[Chrispy_]

Sorry to come back, but what about between STRIX and Nitro+? Strix is being working great here, but I'm kind of concern about thermals, all temps looks good, Junction stays around 95 Junction on AC Oddisey, but if you run Furmark, a couple of minutes after it will reach 110 Junction. Should I go ahead and change my Strix for a Nitro+?

Both are good cards, and they run at their limits due to heavy overclocks/overvolts.

If you are concerned about thermals just use the AMD driver to drop the peak clock and power limit slightly, but if you have the time to spare, use OCCT or similar to work out how far you can manually undervolt your card. Chances are good that you can reduce temps by 20 degrees without losing any performance, just by tuning the voltages better.

 

[rskyline]

Both are good cards, and they run at their limits due to heavy overclocks/overvolts.

If you are concerned about thermals just use the AMD driver to drop the peak clock and power limit slightly, but if you have the time to spare, use OCCT or similar to work out how far you can manually undervolt your card. Chances are good that you can reduce temps by 20 degrees without losing any performance, just by tuning the voltages better.

Thanks for that man I'm gonna give that a try. I really like the Strix and the way it looks. Also I saw it has 2 fan headers and the nitro+ doesn't. I'm actually using one of those.

 

[Chrispy_]

Thanks for that man I'm gonna give that a try. I really like the Strix and the way it looks. Also I saw it has 2 fan headers and the nitro+ doesn't. I'm actually using one of those.

FYI the "auto undervolt" in the driver is pretty useless. If this is your first attempt to undervolt your 5700XT, then I can recommend the OCCT method. If you follow these instructions you'll be done in about 5-10 minutes.

Download OCCT and run the 3D test with shader complexity 8 to load up your GPU:

Then open the AMD driver and:

1. Set Tuning Control to manual
2. Enable the GPU Tuning slider
3. Enable the advanced control slider
4. Set the frequency to 1910. That's the median speed a Strix will average anyway (varies a bit depending on application/game) but you won't be losing much performance, if any, at 1910.
5. Start voltage at 1100mv and hit apply, check OCCT for errors.
6. Keep reducing by 25mv, until you see errors
7. Add 75mv to whatever value gave you errors, apply, and then save it as a preset.
8. Run some games, make sure it doesn't crash.

If you're a nerd like the rest of us, run a repeatable benchmark with your new undervolt and then again with the defaults to see if you've lost any performance. If you have, you can either live with it for the tradeoff in lower temps and noise, or you can set the frequency up to, say, 1950 and try again.

For what it's worth, my reference card will generate errors in OCCT at 1850MHz and 945mv. I would expect you can run 1910MHz at under 1000mv but it's the silicon lottery; your mileage may vary!

 

[rskyline]

FYI the "auto undervolt" in the driver is pretty useless. If this is your first attempt to undervolt your 5700XT, then I can recommend the OCCT method. If you follow these instructions you'll be done in about 5-10 minutes.

Download OCCT and run the 3D test with shader complexity 8 to load up your GPU:

View attachment 160611

Then open the AMD driver and:

1. Set Tuning Control to manual
2. Enable the GPU Tuning slider
3. Enable the advanced control slider
4. Set the frequency to 1910. That's the median speed a Strix will average anyway (varies a bit depending on application/game) but you won't be losing much performance, if any, at 1910.
5. Start voltage at 1100mv and hit apply, check OCCT for errors.
6. Keep reducing by 25mv, until you see errors
7. Add 75mv to whatever value gave you errors, apply, and then save it as a preset.
8. Run some games, make sure it doesn't crash.

View attachment 160619

For what it's worth, my reference card will generate errors in OCCT at 1850MHz and 945mv. I would expect you can run 1910MHz at under 1000mv but it's the silicon lottery; your mileage may vary!

Woah man, thank you so much for this, it's a great guide and everything is clear and well explained. I'll definitely save this info and give it a try later. Do you recommend the Asus app for controlling the GPU (GPUTweak) or it's better to use amd driver app?

 

[Chrispy_]

Woah man, thank you so much for this, it's a great guide and everything is clear and well explained. I'll definitely save this info and give it a try later. Do you recommend the Asus app for controlling the GPU (GPUTweak) or it's better to use amd driver app?

I'd recommend uninstalling the ASUS app. As a rule of thumb, you never want multiple applications running that perform the same function. The very best-case scenario is that they DON'T conflict with each other. More likely is that they'll fight and give you grief.

Honestly, the AMD driver is probably the best tuning app for a 5700-series card. There's no reason to muddy the waters with third-party software - and Asus in particular has a pretty ropey record when it comes to tuning utilities. In saying that, I haven't used GPUTweak so can't comment on that exact utility.

 

[rskyline]

I'd recommend uninstalling the ASUS app. As a rule of thumb, you never want multiple applications running that perform the same function. The very best-case scenario is that they DON'T conflict with each other. More likely is that they'll fight and give you grief.

Honestly, the AMD driver is probably the best tuning app for a 5700-series card. There's no reason to muddy the waters with third-party software - and Asus in particular has a pretty ropey record when it comes to tuning utilities.

Gotcha. I'll definitely give a quick clean to my GPU drivers/utilities and I'll start fresh just with amd software.

 

[Chrispy_]

I just watched the hardware unboxed review and teardown of the Strix 5700XT.

Their conclusion is that it's a really high-quality board design with an excellent cooler, let down by voltage tuning that is far too aggressive for no good reason.

That means it should respond really well to manual undervolting.

 

[Anymal]

benchmark only in sunny weather

I would like to address the fan overshoots you care to mention in your conclusions in your latest reviews which I appreciate very much.
5700 red dragon - Some fan-speed overshoot
5700 xt nitro+ - Quiet BIOS has some fan-speed overshoot
evga 2060 ko - Fan-stop temperature too low, fans spin up periodically
5600 xt red dragon - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up
5500 xt strix - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up
5600 xt phantom d3 - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up

What is the reason for that? My 1080 Ti Strix OC also do that sometimes.

 

[Chrispy_]

I would like to address the fan overshoots you care to mention in your conclusions in your latest reviews which I appreciate very much.
5700 red dragon - Some fan-speed overshoot
5700 xt nitro+ - Quiet BIOS has some fan-speed overshoot
evga 2060 ko - Fan-stop temperature too low, fans spin up periodically
5600 xt red dragon - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up
5500 xt strix - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up
5600 xt phantom d3 - Wrong fan-control configuration, RPM overshoot as the card heats up

What is the reason for that? My 1080 Ti Strix OC also do that sometimes.

Two factors:

1. The OEM has no idea what your ambient room temperature is going to be. The ideal fan curve has to be tailored for the worst-case scenario of a really warm room, which means that the fans will be too aggressive for a well-cooled 22C room in a colder climate or with air conditioning.
   
   
2. RPM Overshoot is a common side-effect of delayed-average readings. OEMs don't link the fan speed directly to GPU temperature because your GPU temps fluctuate rapidly and you would hear the fan speed rising and falling all the time if there was no smoothing. OEMs smooth out the fan speed changes by sampling several seconds of GPU temperature and taking an average. Unfortunately this average sample adds a time-delay that can cause the fans to react too slowly to sudden GPU temperature spikes; This means the temperature keeps on rising and slingshots the fan controller much further up the fan-speed/temperature curve until the average temperature sample matches the current GPU temperature again. Better fan control uses a more complex algorith that combines a shorter sampling period to average, but adds hysterisis to limit how fast the fans can change speed.

 

[W1zzard]

What is the reason for that?

The reason is AMD's stupid fan control mechanism on Navi and a failure to properly communicate to AIBs how it works, so many of them didn't configure their BIOS properly. I've personally worked with several of them to help fix their fans.

This shouldn't happen on NVIDIA, because they use a different fan control algorithm. Some small overshoot is possible, as @Chrispy_ explains

 

[Anymal]

Why the hell they changed fan control mechanism with Navi if it worked on Vega and older gpus? How stupid, fan control is common for all gpus no matter amd or nvidia. Thousands of hours for gpu development and than aib shits on it.

 

[W1zzard]

Why the hell they changed fan control mechanism with Navi if it worked on Vega and older gpus? How stupid, fan control is common for all gpus no matter amd or nvidia. Thousands of hours for gpu development and than aib shits on it.

Because AMD cards were known to be noisy in the past, so they thought they'd be smarter than the engineers before them.. now there really is no fan "curve" anymore, it's just some constraints and the fan algorithm (tries) to do the rest

and than aib shits on it.

not a fault of the AIBs

 

[Anymal]

Not all of your 5700 series reviews has fan overshoot stated in conclusion. Maybe is aib fault.

 

[W1zzard]

Not all of your 5700 series reviews has fan overshoot stated in conclusion. Maybe is aib fault.

In some way it is, because they didn't change the right settings, problem is AMD didn't tell them how to use the settings to get the correct result

 

[Chrispy_]

I have to admit, my Zotac 2060S has an awful fan curve with audible, irritating fan overshoot using the auto fan algorithm. I made a simple fan 'curve' that runs 30% under 60C and 60% above that.

Meanwhile, my reference 5700XT overshoots only when it's overwhelming the cooler on full boost. Undervolted - even just a little bit so that reported power user is down by 20W - the fan algorithm is good enough that i never notice the fan speed changes.

@W1zzard - Do you think the problem is that Navi exposes more temperature data than any other GPU before and vendors are just inexperienced? It would seem that AMD themselves know how to get the fan speeds right (after a shaky launch issue on the vanilla 5700) but the vendors are maybe inexperienced. Maybe I'm being naive but I can't help but feel that the issue isn't that complicated - you have a peak junction temperature that needs to stay under 110C and ideally at 95C target but it fluctuates too fast - so you average and apply some hysterisis to avoid oscillating either side of a target temperature. This isn't a new problem and it's not reinventing the wheel, it's just no longer acceptable to link that temp directly to the fan speed curve.

It sounds like you've had in-depth discussions with OEMs on this - I'd love to hear more detail about how they used to do things and what they did to fix the overshoot issues.

 

[rskyline]

FYI the "auto undervolt" in the driver is pretty useless. If this is your first attempt to undervolt your 5700XT, then I can recommend the OCCT method. If you follow these instructions you'll be done in about 5-10 minutes.

Download OCCT and run the 3D test with shader complexity 8 to load up your GPU:

View attachment 160611

Then open the AMD driver and:

1. Set Tuning Control to manual
2. Enable the GPU Tuning slider
3. Enable the advanced control slider
4. Set the frequency to 1910. That's the median speed a Strix will average anyway (varies a bit depending on application/game) but you won't be losing much performance, if any, at 1910.
5. Start voltage at 1100mv and hit apply, check OCCT for errors.
6. Keep reducing by 25mv, until you see errors
7. Add 75mv to whatever value gave you errors, apply, and then save it as a preset.
8. Run some games, make sure it doesn't crash.

View attachment 160619

If you're a nerd like the rest of us, run a repeatable benchmark with your new undervolt and then again with the defaults to see if you've lost any performance. If you have, you can either live with it for the tradeoff in lower temps and noise, or you can set the frequency up to, say, 1950 and try again.

For what it's worth, my reference card will generate errors in OCCT at 1850MHz and 945mv. I would expect you can run 1910MHz at under 1000mv but it's the silicon lottery; your mileage may vary!

So I found an incoonvenience, not related to this guide or the outcome (I was able to keep the GPU cooler by ~10 C, which is great, but the GPU fans won't do the 0db, so they will run all the time, I don't really care about the sound anyway and I bet they last even if they are nonstop, and the second thing is that I've added a bottom fan as intake to help the GPU to get more cool air. Without ASUS app is just off all the time, is there any workaround you know to not get the asus app?