ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 5700 XT Review

ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT Strix Review

Introduction

Often when a new Graphics Processing Unit is released it comes in a wave of cards from a variety of manufacturers. The charge is often led by what is referred to as the reference model from the GPU manufacturer themselves – AMD or Nvidia – alongside all the takes upon the formula from the usual suspects.

The release of the latest AMD Radeon GPU, Navi, coincided with the launch of their Zen 2 architecture and was available solely as an AMD reference card for a short period of time. Despite the potential limits of the reference cooler we found it to be a card which neatly combined those two elements so popular for anyone looking to upgrade their visual fidelity, performance and price point. In fact it was the first card in some time, Radeon VII included, which did for AMDs GPU range what the Ryzen CPUs had done for their processors; took on the competition face to face and succeeded. Given that in recent years most GPUs from AMD had come with large caveats about being good value, or perhaps worthy of purchase if you’re determined to have an all AMD system, the Navi architecture was a good quality graphics card full stop.

As good as the design of modern reference cards might be, there is always a joy in looking at the partner cards with their substantial cooling. The extra cooling removes any potential thermal limitations and really shows us of what the new GPU is capable. Given that we already knew how much we liked the Radeon RX 5700 XT we couldn’t wait to discover what performance the triple fan ASUS Strix model had to offer.

Technical Specifications

Architecture Navi
Manufacturing Process 7nm
Transistor Count 10.3 Billion
Die Size 251 mm2
Compute Units 40
Stream Processors 2560
Base Clock 1470 MHz
Boost Clock 2100 MHz
ROPs 64
Memory 8GB GDDR6
Memory Bandwidth 448 GB/s
Memory Interface 256-bit
Board Power 225W