PowerColor's Radeon RX 5700 Red Dragon is an outstanding RX 5700 custom design. It addresses all major shortcomings of the AMD reference card, like thermals and noise, and achieves that feat while staying within a compact dual-slot footprint. Out of the box, PowerColor has overclocked their card to 1720 MHz rated Boost. This translates into a 2% performance improvement over the AMD reference design, which is not a lot, certainly not enough to buy the card based on that difference. At 1440p, the Radeon RX 5700 XT is 11% faster, NVIDIA's RTX 2060 Super is 6% ahead, and the RTX 2070 is 10% faster. Compared to both the RTX 2060 and Radeon RX Vega 64, the Red Dragon is 7% faster, and Vega 56 is 15% behind. With these performance results, we can definitely recommend the RX 5700 for gaming at 1440p resolution, with details cranked up high, but not to the max in some titles.

PowerColor's thermal solution is a night-and-day difference to the AMD reference. Back in our launch-day review, we were disappointed by the AMD card, especially for thermals and noise. PowerColor has successfully addressed all those issues, and the card is now running a few degrees cooler than the AMD original, but what's more important is that it's whisper quiet. Even with the default "performance" BIOS, the card is among the quietest we ever tested at 31 dBA. Thanks to a dual-BIOS feature, you can quickly switch to a BIOS with a more relaxed fan curve and lower power limit that reaches 29 dBA in heavy gaming, which is almost inaudible and, in my opinion, worth the small performance hit. What's also worth highlighting is that PowerColor can achieve all this with a dual-slot cooler on a compact board design that's only 24 cm long (so it will fit all cases). Another improvement over the AMD reference is that idle-fan-stop is included for the perfect noise-free experience during idle, desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming. What's a bit odd is that the fan-control logic has some overshoot. When the card goes out of idle, the fans will ramp up, reaching 1500 RPM (1200 RPM w/ quiet BIOS). After a minute or so, the fan-speed algorithm realizes that it rose too high and reduces fan speed gradually. This in turn increases temperature a bit, so fan control has to play catch up again. After a dance of around 10 minutes, fan speed will finally have reached the right balance between fan RPM and temperature—I'm sure this can be solved more elegantly. All our testing was performed using an updated BIOS provided by PowerColor, uploaded here: Quiet BIOS, Performance BIOS.

Power consumption of the Red Dragon is a bit higher than with the reference design, but that's a complete non-issue in my opinion because the cooler handles the increased heat output with ease. While around 10% efficiency is lost, that seems to be the norm for overclocked cards, going by our RX 5700 XT reviews.

Overclocking the Radeon RX 5700 is complicated. Many years ago, AMD decided to artificially limit overclocking on all their cards, often without consequence because overclocking potential wasn't that great anyway. Things are different for Navi, though. All our RX 5700 XT review samples (eight so far) ended up being limited by the memory overclocking range in Wattman, and the RX 5700 non-XT is no different. What makes things even harder on the RX 5700 is that GPU overclocking ends up limited by the slider range, too. This definitely results in lost OC potential because we only saw overclocking gains of 1%. Some people are flashing XT BIOSes on to their non-XT cards for higher OC limits as a work around, which should be pretty safe if the XT BIOS uses the exact same board design and cooler. Another method is the MorePowerTool.

On the topic of raytracing, I'm sure you've already made up your mind on whether it's something you're interested in or not, but I don't doubt for a second that NVIDIA is pushing the technology very hard with their excellent developer relations, and it looks like the adoption rate is improving. We're also hearing rumors that next-gen consoles will feature some sort of raytracing technology, too. I'd say, it's not a big deal for the near future, but it could become relevant in the years to come, so if you're future-proofing for many years to come, this could be a factor. My recommendation is not to worry about the future too much and look at what you need today to buy a new card when you need it, selling the old one to offset the cost.

According to PowerColor, their Radeon RX 5700 Red Dragon costs $360, which is only a $10 increase over the AMD reference. At that price point, the decision is really a no-brainer. I can't see any reason to buy the AMD reference design now with the Red Dragon available. It will be interesting to see how other custom designs for the RX 5700 do here because I'm not sure if there is much that can be improved over PowerColor's Red Dragon. With those temperature and noise levels, a larger triple-slot cooler won't make much of a difference other than being more expensive. Maybe some other card will eke out another 1% in factory-overclocked performance, which won't matter much, either. The RTX 2060 is a hair cheaper, but not as fast, and its 10% higher efficiency can't really make much of a difference. At $400, I feel like NVIDIA's faster RTX 2060 Super is a bit expensive compared to what PowerColor's RX 5700 offers unless you absolutely want RTX raytracing support.