Introduction

We've reviewed the XFX RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro last week. Today, we have its bigger brother on our test bench, the XFX RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra. It's a factory-overclocked RX 5600 XT priced at $320, a $40 premium over AMD's baseline pricing, or $30 more than the THICC II Pro. Launched this January, the RX 5600 XT turned out to be an ace up AMD's sleeve. It is designed to disrupt the sub-$300 graphics card market where the lack of ray tracing among NVIDIA's GTX 16-series offerings levels the playing field with AMD. After some pre-launch specifications revision and drama because the required BIOS update wasn't preinstalled, AMD designed the RX 5600 XT to beat the entire GTX 16-series and go on to trade blows with NVIDIA's then-$350 GeForce RTX 2060. NVIDIA later got some of its partners to launch cost-effective RTX 2060 cards at $300.

The Radeon RX 5600 XT is designed to dominate AAA gaming at 1080p with frame rates approaching three figures, while also being able to game at 1440p with fairly high details and around 60 FPS. This lets you future-proof your 1080p setup for at least the next three or so years or gives you the ability to get a 1440p display later this year. The RX 5600 XT has been an entirely partner-driven launch with no reference-design card from AMD.



AMD carved the Radeon RX 5600 XT out of the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon by giving it an identical core configuration as the RX 5700, but narrowing the memory bus. 36 out of 40 RDNA compute units are enabled, amounting to 2,304 stream processors, 144 TMUs, and 64 ROPs. The memory interface is narrowed to 192-bit (compared to 256-bit on the RX 5700 series), and the card is endowed with 6 GB of memory (same as the NVIDIA RTX 2060). With a much lower power limit than the RX 5700, the RX 5600 XT can make do with a single 8-pin power connector, but some vendors choose to add a second power input.

The XFX RX 5600 XT THICC III is a custom-design card that features the company's new THICC board design with a few very important changes. The cooler shroud is made more airy, acting on community feedback received for the RX 5700-series THICC cards. XFX also worked on improving the heatsink's base plate for more efficient heat transfer between GPU and heat pipes. Unlike most other boards on the market, the card is a perfectly dual-slot design. The "III" in "THICC III" denotes a triple-fan setup—the THICC II has two fans. Out of the box, the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC III is factory-overclocked for 1750 MHz boost (compared to 1560 MHz reference) and uses 12 Gbps (GDDR6-effective) memory even though 14 Gbps chips are installed. Thus, memory overclocking headroom should be excellent.