Welcome the Radeon RX 5600 XT, Featuring the XFX RX 5600 XT Thicc II Pro

Final Thoughts

The RX 5600 XT proves itself to be a competent performer and barring NVIDIA’s drop in price for the RTX 2060, the 5600 XT would have had a nice space to sit within. However, with the price reduction, the stack becomes far more compressed. However, all is not lost yet, as we will have to wait to see what 3rd party AIB cards will launch at but form a quick Newegg scan we found the same $279 price point which AMD stated at their release event to be occupied primarily by 1660 Ti’s with the cheapest RTX 2060 being $329 as of the time of writing. There was a recently announced during CES RTX 2060 KO Ultra from EVGA which falls into the $319 range, but we have not tested this card yet and cannot verify its performance versus the other RTX 2060 models we have tested.

I think that AMD and the RTG team deserves some recognition here as they have made a GPU that is well segmented and the right price to attract some gamers over to the red side from the existing massive pool of GTX 1060 users. However, without features such as Tensor cores or RT cores, this may weigh heavily on some user’s minds due to more and more popular titles having eye candy available via ray tracing.

Heres how the score breaks down

Value – 92 The RX 5600 XT at its stated MSRP is a solid deal for a 1080p gaming card, however, NVIDIA’s Turning has been out for over a year and they are about due to drop something new unless they follow the PAscal timeline at which point it could be another year. All signs (rumors) indicate that NVIDIA has something waiting in the wings for the right time to drop.

Performance – 93 The RX 5600 XT performs well and falls within the space which AMD laid out for it. In many cases, we find that claimed performance can fall short, but happily, I can say that this is not the case with the RX 5600 XT.

Innovation – 90 AMD has not reinvented the wheel here as they simply created a lower binned RX 5700 with 6GB VRAM on a 192-bit bus, but they did it in such a way that it fills an important gap in price/performance. The ability to repurpose parts to fit where you need them could be seen as an innovation of sorts and no different than what others do in the space.

Quality – 80 Quality includes not just the feel and quality of the part but the quality of the experience. The experience overall the RX 5600 XT runs great, however, XFX’s iteration has some either really bad luck or some poor component choices. The VRM as a whole looks to be well equipped on paper but when I pull a card apart and find three of the eight VGPU VRM inductors cracked that is a red flag. However, this being a GPU launch review I want to make it clear that the GPU is solid, but the execution is found lacking on the part of the XFX finished product. Add to this AMD’s arbitrary locks to overclocks which can be quite maddening since the card has more in it, especially in memory, but no way for most gamers to see these performance tweaking capabilities based on enforced limits.

AMD/RTG did a great job with a “filler card” as it fills an important space where price/perf is paramount. Many gamers don’t care about 4K performance or endless FPS and are looking for the best bang for the buck to satisfy their gaming needs. I think AMD’s RTG team did well with the 5600 XT and they will likely find a large swath of 1080p gamers giving the red team a shot.