Introduction

We have with us the ASUS ROG STRIX Radeon RX 5500 XT OC, which is arguably the most premium RX 5500 XT model on the market. ASUS has built a completely custom card with an upscaled design—designed to take the RX 5500 XT to the next level with a premium 7+2 phase VRM, dual-BIOS, a meaty triple-slot, dual-fan cooling solution, and ASUS-exclusive goodies, such as case-fan headers.

The Radeon RX 5500 XT is the most affordable rendition of AMD's latest RDNA graphics architecture and part of its "Navi" family of 7 nm GPUs. It comes in two memory-based variants, 4 GB and 8 GB; the one we have on the ROG STRIX card here is 8 GB. The RX 5500 XT is designed for 1080p 60 Hz gaming with details cranked up, and at around the $200 mark, it competes against the likes of the GeForce GTX 1650 Super and GTX 1660.



Based on the 7 nm "Navi 14" silicon, the RX 5500 XT is built using 1,408 stream processors spread across 22 of the chip's physically present 24 RDNA compute units. The GPU features a 128-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface and uses high-density memory chips to achieve 8 GB. Other key specifications include 88 TMUs and 32 ROPs. An interesting aspect about the GPU is its host interface, PCI-Express 4.0 x8 (which falls back to gen 3.0 x8 on currently available Intel platforms).

As mentioned earlier, for the RX 5500 XT STRIX in this review, ASUS deployed a heavy triple-slot cooling solution that has some serious finnage, as well as a pair of Axial-Tech fans that guide all their airflow axially (vs. laterally). The cooler, more importantly, provides idle fan stop and runs very quietly. Among the ASUS exclusives are an RGB LED cutoff and a 4-pin PWM fan header to let you spin one of your case fans in sync with the GPU fans. As its name suggests, ASUS is giving the card factory-overclocked speeds of 1735 MHz core (compared to 1717 MHz reference), while leaving the boost frequencies unchanged at 1845 MHz. ASUS is pricing the ROG STRIX RX 5500 XT O8G at $230, a rather steep $50 premium over the $180 reference, which puts it into GTX 1660-series territory.