Introduction

AMD today launched the Radeon RX 5600 XT to capture the sub-$300 graphics market. At a starting price of $279, it sits between the RX 5500 XT 8 GB and the RX 5700. The RX 5500 XT, which launched just weeks ago, is plenty capable for 1080p gaming, much like the GTX 1650 Super. What AMD was lacking in its product stack, however, was a product to compete with the GTX 1660 Ti and GTX 1660 Super—something that can game at 1080p max details or high frame-rates in e-Sports gaming. This is where the RX 5600 XT steps in with the promise of future-proofing your 1080p setup for the next few years. In this review, we have with us the Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT Pulse, a factory-overclocked version.

The Radeon RX 5600 XT is designed to be significantly faster than the RX 590, which was launched to serve this market segment, but fell behind the GTX 1660-series. It's an even battle between AMD and NVIDIA here since neither brand offers real-time ray-tracing in this segment. The RX 5600 XT is price-matched with the GTX 1660 Ti. AMD already put out its performance claims in its CES 2020 keynote address, where the RX 5600 XT is shown beating the GTX 1660 Ti. NVIDIA recently brought the RTX 2060 down to $299. NVIDIA's cheapest ray-tracing capable card barely budged from its $350 price until now. This would have been NVIDIA's lure to get you to spend a bit extra for ray-tracing, but AMD had its own surprise.



Just days ago, AMD revised the limits for the RX 5600 XT custom designs. These include a roughly 10% increase in GPU frequency, a staggering 15% increase in memory clock, and higher power limits so the GPU can sustain boost clocks better. The idea here is to erode the performance lead the RTX 2060 has against the original specs of the RX 5600 XT, but there's a big catch. RX 5600 XT inventories with original specs have already been shipped across the globe for its January 21 market-availability, which means the revised specs have to be implemented via a BIOS update.

AMD carved the Radeon RX 5600 XT out of the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon by enabling the same number of compute units as the RX 5700, at 36, but narrowing the GDDR6 memory bus to 192-bit and lowering memory amount to 6 GB. The 36 RDNA compute units work out to 2,304 stream processors. Other vital specs include 144 TMUs and 64 ROPs. The memory clock of the RX 5600 XT is set at 12 Gbps (GDDR6-effective) originally, which works out to 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The GPU is clocked at 1375 MHz "gaming" clocks, with up to 1560 MHz boost clocks, but with the new BIOS, these clocks are significantly dialed up, to 1615 MHz gaming and 1750 MHz boost on the Sapphire RX 5600 XT Pulse. These clocks vary from partner to partner, adding to the confusion. In this review, we've tested the card with both the original specced Sapphire Pulse BIOS and the new BIOS version to highlight the performance gap between the two versions.

The Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT Pulse features the company's proven Dual-X cooling solution that offers idle fan stop and a highly optimized fan-curve to keep noise down. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, much like most RX 5600 XT cards out there which sell at or near the $279 MSRP. The Sapphire Radeon RX 5600 XT Pulse costs $289, a tiny $10 premium more.