XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra Review

Name: XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra
Brand: XFX

W1zzard

on Mar 23rd, 2020,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: XFX

Pictures & Disassembly »

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.

Radeon RX 5600 XT Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 590	$200	2304	32	1469 MHz	1545 MHz	2000 MHz	Polaris 30	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1660	$200	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	2000 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1070	$300	1920	64	1506 MHz	1683 MHz	2002 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56	$260	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1660 Super	$230	1408	48	1530 MHz	1785 MHz	1750 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1660 Ti	$270	1536	48	1500 MHz	1770 MHz	1500 MHz	TU116	6600M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
GTX 1070 Ti	$450	2432	64	1607 MHz	1683 MHz	2000 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 5600 XT	$280	2304	64	1375 MHz	1560 MHz	1500 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
XFX RX 5600 XT THICC II Ultra	$290	2304	64	1560 MHz	1620 MHz	1500 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
XFX RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra	$320	2304	64	1660 MHz	1750 MHz	1500 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RTX 2060	$300	1920	48	1365 MHz	1680 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	6 GB, GDDR6, 192-bit
RX 5700	$330	2304	64	1465 MHz	1625 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
GTX 1080	$500	2560	64	1607 MHz	1733 MHz	1251 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5X, 256-bit
RTX 2060 Super	$400	2176	64	1470 MHz	1650 MHz	1750 MHz	TU106	10800M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit
RX Vega 64	$375	4096	64	1247 MHz	1546 MHz	953 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit
GTX 1080 Ti	$700	3584	88	1481 MHz	1582 MHz	1376 MHz	GP102	12000M	11 GB, GDDR5X, 352-bit
RX 5700 XT	$380	2560	64	1605 MHz	1755 MHz	1750 MHz	Navi 10	10300M	8 GB, GDDR6, 256-bit