Introduction

The ASRock Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi OC+ is the company's new flagship custom-design graphics card based on the new 7 nm AMD RX 5700 XT Navi graphics processor. This card arrives hot on the heels of AMD's add-in board partners launching custom-design Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards a little over two months following the July 7th launch of Navi. Just like with their motherboards, the Taichi is an all-out design including a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler, RGB lighting, dual BIOS, and upgraded VRM circuitry. Out of the box, the card is running at 1935 MHz Game Clock and 2025 MHz Boost clock, which is a significant increase over the AMD reference design. The card is available right now, priced at $480.

The Radeon RX 5700 XT is AMD's first true performance-segment graphics card in over two years since the RX Vega series. It's based on the brand new "Navi" architecture that leverages the 7 nm silicon fabrication process and brand new number-crunching machinery AMD calls RDNA compute units. These constitute the biggest update to AMD's GPU design since the very first Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture circa 2013. Together with clock speeds, RDNA is designed to bring about massive IPC improvements over GCN. The silicon also has a number of architectural changes. An interesting series of price adjustments and product launches ensure that even at its starting price of $399, it offers a bit more price-performance than NVIDIA.



AMD had originally planned to launch the Radeon RX 5700 XT at $449 and the RX 5700 at $399, with the two cards beating the $499 NVIDIA RTX 2070 and $349 RTX 2060 respectively. This forced NVIDIA to refresh its lineup with the new RTX 2070 Super at $499 and the RTX 2060 Super at $399. The RTX 2060 Super in particular was carefully crafted not to cannibalize the RTX 2070. AMD seeped into this imbroglio of NVIDIA and slotted the RX 5700 XT at $399 and the RX 5700 at $349, at which prices they outclass the RTX 2060 Super and original RTX 2060 respectively. NVIDIA didn't adjust prices of its RTX 2060 Super or RTX 2070 Super any further, and we hence have a fair bit of headroom between the RTX 2060 Super and the RTX 2070 Super in which AMD's board partners can launch custom-design RX 5700 XT cards with factory-overclocked speeds and other goodies, such as quieter coolers.

At the heart of the Radeon RX 5700 XT is the 7 nm "Navi 10" silicon with an impressive 10.3 billion transistors crammed into a 251 mm² die. Unlike the "Vega 20", Navi is a more traditional GPU in that the package only has the GPU die and is surrounded by memory chips. AMD opted for cost-effective 256-bit GDDR6 memory over exotic design choices such as HBM2. At a memory frequency of 14 Gbps, Navi enjoys a healthy memory bandwidth of 448 GB/s. It also features the latest-generation PCI-Express gen 4.0 x16 host interface with full backwards compatibility for older generations of PCIe, so you can pair it with AMD's new Ryzen 3000 processors on an X570 chipset motherboard. The buzz-words "7 nm" and "PCIe gen 4.0" are extensively used in AMD's marketing, as if to suggest that Navi is a generation ahead of NVIDIA's Turing, which is built on 12 nm and has PCIe gen 3.0.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Documentation
• ASRock stickers

The Card

ASRock came up with a completely fresh look for their Navi Taichi. While we have seen first designs of the new heatsink at Computex, it's great to see it on a finished product. The front is held in black with gray highlights. On the metal backplate you'll find some gold-colored cogwheels inserts, which add a nice bit of bling to the card. Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include four standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.0b ports.

AMD took the opportunity to update the display controllers handling these outputs by leveraging DSC 1.2a (display stream compression), which unlocks very high resolution and refresh-rate combinations over a single cable. Among the single-cable display modes supported are 8K 60 Hz (which took two DP 1.3 cables until now), 4K 240 Hz, and 1080p as high as 360 Hz. On top of these, the outputs support HDR and 30 bpc color-depth for better color accuracy in creative applications.


The board uses two 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.


AMD's Navi generation of GPUs no longer supports CrossFire. DirectX 12 does include its own set of multi-GPU capabilities, but implementation requires game developers to put serious development time into a feature only a tiny fraction of their customers might ever use.

ASRock made good use of that area by positioning their BIOS switch feature here. The second BIOS runs at reduced fan speed for a quieter experience.


This little switch near the power connectors lets you turn off all the RGB lighting with the switch of a button. Easy to use and no software needed—this is the way it should be done.

Disassembly

ASRock is using five heatpipes and a copper base on their cooler. This piece of the cooler also provides cooling for the VRM circuitry.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a second heatsink that takes care of cooling the memory chips becomes visible.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how it has some thermal pads to provide a little bit of extra cooling for GPU and memory chips.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.