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

Welcome the mainstream 1080p focused Navi

AMD’s Radeon team has been hard at work finessing the 5700 series of GPUs and pushing them to get the most out of the 7nm Navi that they can. Meanwhile, late December is normally not very busy with releases as all applicable releases are weeks if not months before to ensure market saturation in time for the holiday. However, here we sit, less than two weeks from Christmas and AMD is dropping another GPU upon us.

While I am sure many have been waiting with bated breath for a uber high-end GPU capable of taking on the 2080 Ti, that is not what we have today. Today we have the 5500 XT which is the smaller Navi focused on 1080p performance. This card, therefore, is set to combat in the range of the GTX 1660 and the GTX 1650/SUPER variants. This is not a bad thing, it is simply a note to temper expectations moving forward. I am not saying that a higher-end Navi to compete at the top is not coming, it’s just not here as of yet.

The Radeon RX 5500 XT GPUs come to market as follows.

• Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB –  MSRP $199 (Source: AMD)
• Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB –  MSRP $169 (Source: AMD)

The 5500 XT was supplied as a partner card (Powercolor in our case) similar to how Nvidia samples their more mainstream models. You will note as listed above that the 5500 XT comes in two flavors being equipped with 4GB framebuffer along with 8GB with a nominal price premium for the latter. The card we are looking at today is the Powercolor Red Devil 5500 XT 8GB.

Let’s read on and take a look at AMD’s new 1080p focused RX 5500 XT.