Introducing the Radeon 5500XT with the Powercolor Red Dragon 5500XT 8GB

Powercolor Red Devil RX 5500 XT

Being a lower-cost model the Red Dragon gets a simple fold open flap design and I am fine with this as I would rather packaging be simple than for consumer cost to be higher simply to have a pretty package which you wills ee long enough to unpack the card. PCIe 4.0 is listed on the front along with the 8GB VRAM, also Freesync 2 HDR and Fidelity FX and 7nm are listed here as well.

The rear of the packaging shows several features both in bullet and pictorial format. the most notable would be the metal backplate which when we dig into the card we will see if its claimed 1.5mm thick metal plate is used for additional cooling or fi ti is just aesthetic and stiffening. also, DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC is interesting although the point at which you would need DSC would be pushing the bandwidth at 4K and I don’t really think many will try this more mainstream model at 4K. 8K streaming is also listed and is possible for video playback and the card should be able to handle that with ease, but once again, I don’t think anyone that can afford an 8K panel would limit their capabilities with a sub-$200 GPU. I do think the marketing team really wanted a few more bullets here which is why you get these two, Radeon software, and Driver optimizations which are not features as much as a requirement for the card to operate and be updated. But, I digress.

Opening the package we find the RX 5500 XT in place with a small piece of foam to take up the excess space to protect the card from jostling around during shipping. Our card was already opened, most likely for pre-testing as these were sent directly from AMD for review purposes.

The only accessory with the Red Devil 5500 XT is a multi-fold paper quick start guide. Most will not need this as the RX 5500 XT has a single 8-pin PCIe connector and the slot on the motherboard it is placed into, there’s not much to know here, but in case users have quick installation queries this should help.

The Red Devil RC 5500 XT is a smaller card model as most lower-cost mainstream cards tend to be. The front of the card is covered largely with the dual cooling fans and shroud which push airflow through the fin stack below. One of the fans has a hub-mounted Red Dragon logo, while the other has the Powercolor logo. The rear backplate is indeed solid metal and black coated. IT has a Red Dragon logo along with pass-through holes for the fin array that is past the edge of the PCB to allow better airflow for the cooler.

Here you can see the rear I/O of the card

• 1x Displayport 1.4 (with DSC support)
• 1x HDMI
• 1x DL-DVI

The outputs on the Red Dragon 5500 XT is a strange one admittedly. I guess I have gotten used to the omission of the DVI port as of recent so I was a bit shocked to see the all-digital triple connector array.

The power for the RX 5500 XT is a single 8-pin PCIe cable which should power this tiny GPU just fine. It ill be interesting to see how far we can push this GPU without having to jump through powerplay hoops to get more out of it, I do feel like that is outside most users comfort zone.

Now let’s look under the shroud of the Red Devil 5500 XT.