Introduction

The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT is available starting today, and we have with us the ASUS ROG STRIX RX 5600 XT TOP we will take for a spin. The Radeon RX 5600 XT is AMD's entrant to the "premium 1080p experience" segment NVIDIA mastered with its GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Super. With a starting price of $279, the RX 5500 XT is already capable of 1080p gaming at up to 60 FPS, but the RX 5600 XT is packed with a lot more muscle: 900 more stream processors to increase frame-rates significantly. The mandate for the RX 5600 XT is to then offer maxed out 1080p gaming with frame-rates of around 90 FPS to ensure that even 2-3 years down the line, the games of tomorrow are more than playable at 1080p. The card can also play at 1440p with high details, but you'll have to be clever with your game's graphics settings.

The Radeon RX 5600 XT is cut from the same cloth as the RX 5700-series, down to the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon. It has the same 2,304 stream processor count as the $349 RX 5700, but its memory bus is narrowed to 192-bit, and memory amount lowered to 6 GB. The ROG STRIX RX 5600 XT TOP comes with clock speeds of 1750 MHz boost and 14 Gbps memory, which is a significant step up from the reference clocks of 1650 MHz boost and 12 Gbps memory. It's not just that ASUS got very creative with its overclocking, but that AMD made a last-minute decision to dial up clock speeds of factory-overclocked RX 5600 XT cards to improve the SKU's competitive positioning against the GeForce RTX 2060.



In its 2020 CES keynote, AMD put out performance guidance for the RX 5600 XT, in which it claims that the card is faster than the entire GTX 16-series, including the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Super. Lowering prices of the GTX 16-series SKUs could cause chaos in the already crowded $200-$300 segment, and so NVIDIA decided to lower the prices of its RTX 2060 to $299. This is mainly because the GTX 16-series lacks ray-tracing hardware and squares off against AMD purely on gaming performance without ray-tracing. Bringing the RTX 2060 in at $299 could lure some RX 5600 XT series buyers away. In response to exactly this, AMD revised the clock speeds of at least some RX 5600 XT cards at the last minute, which we'll touch on more later in this review.

The ASUS ROG STRIX is the company's top-dog RX 5600 XT offering, and comes with a large DirectCU III triple-slot, triple-fan cooling solution which offers idle-fan stop and quite some RGB LED bling. The card puts out additional RGB and 4-pin fan-headers, so you can sync your case fans to the GPU. At a price of $330-$340, the ROG STRIX RX 5600 XT commands a large premium over the $279 MSRP.

You might be wondering why this review's name was updated from "STRIX OC" to "STRIX TOP" after posting. ASUS just informed us that the sample they originally sent was the "STRIX OC" (1560 MHz Game, 1620 MHz Boost, 12 Gbps memory), but with the new BIOS the card became the "STRIX TOP" (1670 MHz Game, 1750 MHz Boost, 14 Gbps memory), which is a new SKU specifically for overclocking the memory. The "STRIX OC" regular users buy will also receive a BIOS update (1670 MHz Game, 1750 MHz Boost, 12 Gbps memory), so GPU clocks match the TOP as only memory speed remains at 12 Gbps. The STRIX TOP will ship to retailers with the correct BIOS preinstalled after Chinese New Year.