Reviews AMD Radeon RX 5700 Review

Price as reviewed: £380. Price per the chat in the body of the review: £330.

I understand that these cards have already had a pre-launch price cut, but the above is a bit confusing, especially if you're basing your final verdict on the lower price.

Regardless, if this card is available for £330 then it looks like the better value offering of the two new AMD products.

 

Yeah. It's much better looking too, though doesn't come with a back plate.

 

Again, it will be interesting to see what the AIBs can do with this card, and it's a bit rubbish that we're still a month away from seeing what they can do.

 

This looks the card to go for - although two big caveats:
1) the AIB cards with proper coolers need to not cost more. Btw why on earth does AMD still have stupid blower coolers - the point of these originally was Xfire as you could stack the cards better, but these don't even support Xfire if I understand correctly.
2) overclocking - there are rumours it's locked on these cards. It needs to work.

 

Crossfire isn't the only reason.
When faced with the poorly ventilated £20 cases cheapskates like Acer love to use a blower is an advantage as well.

 

But this is a £330 card, Acer won't stick this in their £20 case. Anyway I think it's the PC makers that pushed for proper coolers - remember the "Founders" Nvidia cards were basically for them (as it was a design for the life of the card so they could certify once) and they switched coolers a while back.

Gamers Nexus claims the 5700 clock is artificially locked (1800Mhz max?) for segmentation purposes.

 

Anandtech say the opposite - AMD doesn't impose any limitations, barring obvious power and thermal limits, just allowing each chip to boost to whatever it can... Which probably accounts for every review I've seen having quite a difference in benchmarks, noise and heat results. They got over 2000Mhz in a synthetic test, so I suspect AIB cards to be really quite potent.

 

Not on a 5700 they didn't.

 

Oh, I thought you meant the 5700 as a series, not the specific card. D'oh! I reckon those limitations will fall once the driver issues get sorted and the likes of Afterburner can get voltage control working properly though - Even if it's locked at a BIOS level, that won't hold for long.

 

Pretty sure I've seen the 5700 on YT reach 2ghz but the fan was 100%.

The drivers are also flaky apparently at the moment so we'll see. They're going to need water to really shine.

 

I defiantly feel rather daft paying for an RTX 2060 now .... Shoulda coulda kinda waited.

 

I bought a 2070 a few months back and have zero regrets. It was the best choice for me at the time, I've had several months of great use from it so far and will continue to enjoy it for a long time to come. You can always wait for the next big thing but at some point you just have to bite the bullet.