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Overclocking
I would like to preface this section with a few details about overclocking AMD. First up there are arbitrary limits imposed by the driver/software and therefore the memory was severely limited to 1860MHz or 14,880MHz effective. As always there will be tweaking and tuning options to go beyond this limitation whether it be modification to powerplay tables or other software workarounds, but we test it as most users would with their own PC. While some enthusiasts users may tune and tweak to the limit most will not overclock at all, so we made an attempt representative of what you can do out of the box with the easy to use tools publicly available. Such as the drivers tuning tab, along with tools such as precision or afterburner.
One thing to note when pushing AMD is that stability may not be present when overclocking so always test with a benchmark so you have a comparative score, otherwise your overclocking expeditions could net you worse than stock performance due to underlying instability.
First up is standard Time spy which we were able to push the default boost clock from its 1807 stock clock to 2045 netting us about an 8% gain. This GPU overclock along with the memory overclock net us a gain of approximately 5% going form a graphics score of 4792 to 5000.
Time Spy Extreme is a heavier loading 4K version of the DX12 benchmark. The same overclock levels we saw a Graphics score of 2240 vs the stock speed score of 2132. This nets us a gain of approximately 5% once again. This could help the RX 5500 XT to reach a more competitive showing against the GTX 1660 but then again 1660 could overclock as well and that’s a rabbit hole I would rather not jump down at this time.
With that, I think we have takes a pretty good look at the new RX 5500 XT, and now all that’s left is to wrap it up.
