Introduction

We have with us for review the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Dragon graphics card, positioned just a notch below the RX 5600 XT Red Devil. The Red Dragon brand represents high value as it's still a factory-overclocked product with such goodies as a quiet cooling solution with idle fan-stop, but a more compact dual-fan cooling solution, and dual-BIOS. The PowerColor Red Dragon also features a minimalist industrial design that looks great with its solid matte black surfaces and chrome rings around the fan intakes.

AMD created the Radeon RX 5600 XT to stamp leadership over the Full HD (1080p) gaming segment under the $300 price point by beating NVIDIA's entire GeForce GTX 16-series, at least that was the original plan. With the GTX 16-series lacking ray-tracing hardware, the playing field between AMD and NVIDIA is truly leveled. NVIDIA's decision to allow its partners to come up with RTX 2060 cards at $299 from its $349 original price prompted AMD to revise clock speeds with an objective of matching the RTX 2060 at the last moment, which led to BIOS update chaos. Luckily, the PowerColor RX 5600 XT Red Dragon tested in this review was announced after the specs update and comes with the latest BIOS out of the box. There's even prominent branding on the box to reflect that.



Based on the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is configured with 2,304 stream processors across 36 RDNA compute units, 144 TMUs, 64 ROPs, and a 192-bit wide GDDR6 memory interface, holding 6 GB of memory. On some of the cheapest RX 5600 XT cards, the memory ticks at 12 Gbps, but on the PowerColor Red Dragon, it does 14 Gbps out of the box. What's more interesting is that PowerColor enabled all of the revised-specs without increasing the number of power connectors. The card makes do with a single 8-pin PCIe power input.

The PowerColor RX 5600 XT Red Dragon in this review comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 1560 MHz game and 1620 MHz boost compared to the original 1375/1560 MHz reference specs. Its cooling solution features an elaborate aluminium fin-stack heatsink with a direct-touch heat-pipe base and a pair of large 100 mm fans, which turn off when the GPU is idling. The card is strictly two slots thick, but a good inch taller than what constitutes "full-height." The company is asking $299, or a mere $20 increase over the $279 baseline pricing for the RX 5600 XT Red Dragon. In this review, we take it for a spin across our test bed.