Introduction

We have with us the ASRock Radeon RX 5600 XT Phantom Gaming D3, the company's premium, factory-overclocked RX 5600 XT offering. This is a card of many firsts. It has a PCB that is designed specifically for the RX 5600 XT (most other cards reuse RX 5700-series boards). It pairs this tiny PCB with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution that offers idle fan stop and is designed for low noise as it can handle the heat output of the RX 5600 XT with ease.

AMD designed the Radeon RX 5600 XT to dominate the sub-$300 market segment by offering the highest performance in this class at a starting price of $279. The competition between AMD and NVIDIA is more balanced here because NVIDIA's GTX 16-series lacks ray-tracing hardware, leaving it to compete with AMD on its terms. Before launch, AMD showed off graphs of the RX 5600 XT significantly outperforming the GTX 1660 Ti, forcing NVIDIA to coax its partners into designing cost-effective versions of its GeForce RTX 2060 at $299. In a last-minute response to this move, AMD revised the specifications of the RX 5600 XT, giving partners the freedom to deploy 10%–15% higher GPU clocks and faster 14 Gbps memory compared to its stock 12 Gbps. Soon after launch, ASRock released an easy 1-click BIOS updater for their Phantom Gaming D3 that enabled these new specifications. We used these specifications in all our testing of the card. ASRock provides full warranty for the higher memory clocks.



Under the hood, the RX 5600 XT uses the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon with mostly the same core configuration as the RX 5700, but with a quarter less of its memory size and bandwidth. This 6 GB 192-bit GDDR6 setup gives the card about 288 GB/s of bandwidth at 12 Gbps. AMD's performance target for the RX 5600 XT hence is 1080p gaming at high frame rates (90 FPS or more), while retaining the ability to play today's games at 1440p with fairly high details at around 60 FPS.

ASRock chose to give this card a single 8-pin PCIe power input configuration and 14 Gbps memory after the post-launch BIOS update. The new BIOS runs the GPU at up to 1750 MHz boost, around 1670 MHz game clocks, and 14 Gbps for the memory. The cooling solution for this card is designed for cards of a higher segment, with its chunky triple-slot aluminium fin-stack heatsink and three fans, which will definitely help with noise and temperatures. ASRock is pricing the RX 5600 XT Phantom Gaming D3 at $290, a small $10 premium over AMD's $280 baseline.