Welcome 7nm, AMD NAVI is here! – AMD Radeon RX 5700XT and RX 5700 Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

I actually did not think I would be able to do an overclocking section for this review as WATTMAN was broken, or not broken but it would screw up the thermal target when you tried to overclock. AMD came through literally at the 11th hour with a driver that will support overclocking as initially they promised a day-1 driver to fix the issue but they came through early. So, with that we now have some overclocking results, although I could not bypass the WATTMAN limits so the RX 5700 is a bit hamstrung being limited to 1850MHz.

First up, we have the RX 5700 and it topped out at the WATTMAN limit for GPU of 1850, however I do hope that aftermarket apps such as afterburner can bypass that limit soon as I feel like this card had more in it. the memory I was able to get 512MHz extra from it for a total uplift from 14000MHz to 14512MHz. With Time spy this overclock netted a grpahics score gain of 384 points or a gain of 5%.

Time Spy Extreme for the RX 5700 with the same overclock shows a graphics score gain of 167 points or a 5% gain in graphics performance.

Now moving to the Radeon RX 5700XT, we find that the limit in WATTMAN is much higher and that our GPU could not actually reach the max of 2150MHz with stability. our max stable GPU clock was 2123MHz while the memory we were not able to move it much with only a 304MHz bump up to 14,304MHz.

First up is Time Spy, and we see a graphics score increase of 652 points or 7% over the default run.

Moving to Time Spy Extreme, we see a graphics score jump of 240 or 6%

While I am glad Iw as able to show overclocking, I did not like how WATTMAN held the RX 5700 back, and even when trying to bypass it with the most current beta of Afterburner it would not budge. I hope that these preliminary results are just the start and we may be able to get way more form these cards as drivers are refined. But for quick and dirty runs its not too awful bad.

With that, I think at long last it’s time to wrap this up and get this show on the road.