Introduction

PowerColor today launched the Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil, its 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 a month following the July 7th launch of Navi. The Red Devil is positioned as an extremely premium offering, right in the middle of NVIDIA's RTX 2060 Super and RX 2070 Super and priced at $440 ($450 for a premium package with more accessories, which we cover in this review). The PowerColor RX 5700 XT Red Devil tops Navi with a factory overclock, a gargantuan cooling solution that looks a class above, and has many enthusiast features you'd expect from much pricier cards.

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 proces 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 CoreNext (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 ensures 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.

The PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil features a custom-design, triple-slot cooling solution that features a massive compound aluminium fin-stack heatsink that uses several copper heat pipes which pass through multiple fin stacks ventilated by a trio of fans. This overkill cooling solution not only gives you idle fan stop, but also supports the card's increased power limits and factory-overclocked speeds of up to 1905 MHz boost. You also get several features, such as Dual BIOS, with one of two BIOSes activating a "Quiet Mode" that significantly reduces fan noise when gaming, and an accessory package that includes an RGB mousepad. All this for a $50 premium over the $400 baseline.