The XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT Ultra THICC II comes with a clean, understated design that looks modern and doesn't use a lot of bright colors. This fully custom design RX 5700 XT uses a dual-fan, triple-slot thermal solution and has one of the largest out of the box overclocks available at this time. Out of the box, XFX has overclocked their card to 1980 MHz rated Boost. This translates into a 4% performance improvement over the AMD reference design, which is more than on most other Navi cards, but the differences are in the single-percent digit range, which probably isn't enough to base your buying decision on. At 1440p, AMD's Radeon VII flagship is only 4% faster than the Ultra THICC, and the RTX 2070 Super is 7% ahead. Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070, the XFX card delivers 5% higher FPS. NVIDIA's recently released RTX 2060 Super is 9% behind, and the difference to the RX 5700 is 15%. With these performance results, we can definitely recommend the RX 5700 XT for maximum details gaming at 1440p resolution, or high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p.

XFX's cooler looks good and improves temperatures and noise levels over what the AMD reference design can offer. We measured temperatures of 76°C under heavy load, which puts the card right in the middle of other custom designs we tested. Noise levels, on the other hand, are not that impressive. With 39 dBA using the default BIOS and 37 dBA using the quiet BIOS, noise levels are not nearly as good as on some other custom designs. Part of the reason for that seems to be that XFX's card uses a lot of power, which of course gets turned into heat and puts additional load on the cooler. A clear win over the AMD reference card is the inclusion of idle fan stop, which completely shuts off the fans during idle, desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming. XFX's dual BIOS implementation lets you pick whether you prefer to focus on temperatures or noise levels, but I feel that the difference between both BIOSes is too small to really have that much of an effect. All our testing in this review was done after updating both BIOSes to a new version XFX provided to fix high fan noise. I uploaded them to our database (Performance, Quiet).

As mentioned before, gaming power draw is high, much higher than what we've seen on other custom designs. It seems that in order to achieve stability at their high out-of-the-box clocks, XFX has bumped up the power limit quite a bit, and possibly voltage, too. While the AMD reference used around 220 W in gaming, the Ultra THICC II clocks in at around 285 W with peaks reaching 300 W. You get a few percent more performance in return, but overall, the loss of power efficiency is staggering, bringing the card down by 25%, which is close to Vega efficiency levels. While I'm sure power cost won't matter to many, the increased heat output affects thermals and noise because the cooler has to get rid of the excess heat. With a 8+6 power input configuration, the card is specced for 300 W power delivery, and we measured slightly more in Furmark: 304 W. I can see why other reviewers would focus on that for more drama and clicks, but I don't think it's worth worrying about much.

Overclocking our sample was slightly easier than on the AMD reference design. Memory overclocking especially worked correctly now. Perhaps that's because XFX uses Micron chips instead of the Samsung chips on the reference design. On NVIDIA, we see significantly better overclocking from Samsung than from Micron—here, it's reversed. Memory overclocking is held back by the slider-adjustment range in Wattman, which only goes up to 1900 MHz. We've encountered this obstacle in the past with AMD; let's hope they reconsider putting artificial OC limits into their driver. GPU overclocking yielded the second-highest GPU clock of all RX 5700 XT cards tested so far, but the differences in performance are small enough to not play a major role in a buying decision. After manual overclocking, we gained only 1.8% in real-life performance since the card already comes with high clocks out of the box.

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 XFX, their RX 5700 XT Ultra THICC II will retail at $440, which is a $40 premium over the AMD reference RX 5700 XT. The out-of-the-box performance increase of 4% can justify a $20 bump, and the better cooler and idle fan stop should be worth another $10, so XFX isn't totally off. Still, with many board partners releasing custom designs around the same price point, competition will heat up. For example, the Sapphire Pulse is $410 with slightly lower performance, but better noise and similar temperatures. PowerColor's Red Devil is $440, too, but with much better noise and temperatures and nearly the same performance. Going more expensive, we have the ASUS RX 5700 XT STRIX and of course NVIDIA's RTX 2060 Super custom-design cards. That's why I feel a more appropriate price for the 5700 XT Ultra THICC II would be $420–$425. XFX does offer the non-Ultra THICC II at exactly the same price point, but lower out of the box clocks—I'll check on whether I can get a sample.