Review: ASUS Radeon RX 5700 XT ROG STRIX

Why?

Every time I see arguments along these lines I question whether the people making it actually understand that these cards are designed with their power target in mind. It's not a flaw in the design or the process, it's what AMD (in this case) specified for the card.

As has been proven time and again if you really want lower power use then you can dial back clocks and voltages slightly for some huge power savings. The question is what percentage of potential users would be willing to take a 5-10% hit on performance for notably lower power usage. AMD reasoned that a more favorable positioning vs. the competition with regards to performance was more important than absolute power usage and I tend to agree with that.

For the sake of the argument, say AMD released the 5700/5700 XT at 120/150W rather than 180/225W and at just 10% lower performance. Now the 5700 compares less favorably to the 2060(s), similarly with the 5700XT and the 2070(s). Reviews would note the low power consumption but they'd focus far more on the performance deficit compared to the competition.

Forum warriors would complain about the lacking performance rather than the power usage and as forum warrior arguments go that's actually a more reasonable one.

A not insignificant number of people complaining about high power usage would, instead of praising the now low power usage, complain about low performance.

It's not a situation that would benefit either AMD or the vast majority of users.

TL;DR: The power usage of the Radeon 5700 series is neither a design flaw or a problem with the 7nm node. It's an active choice AMD made to hit the performance targets of the cards. You may disagree that choice, in which case you should think long and hard about what you really prioritize in a graphics card.

 

You could have upgraded your high end card since there is 2080 Ti. Therefore your statement is rather irrelevant to mainstream gaming GPU.

 

I got a few friends on Discord claiming the drivers suck and they get constant crashes, almost hourly. A few guys are wanting to return them and swap it out for a 2060 or 2070 super. I hope the custom cards ship with better drivers.

 

2080Ti costs 1300 euros and I'm not willing to pay more than what I paid for 1080Ti (800 euros), therefore your statement is rather irrelevant. Going by your ridiculous logic, ANY GPU that is more powerful than 1080Ti, no matter the cost, is technically a "valid" upgrade path. Go buy them Titans, folks!

 

You came to this thread, this review for a 400$ gpu to say how its borring becouse you cant upgrade. Talking about irrelevant posts, wow.

 

I still kinda like the rx580 for ~$170 atm on newegg. Its a lotta card for the money.

 

What's irrelevant about my post? I read the review knowing almost nothing about this GPU beforehand and that was my reaction. Was I supposed to know before reading review that this GPU is less powerful than 1080Ti? No need to dogpile on me. I'm just extremely disappointed in GPU market last 2 years. Oh and RX 5700 XT is 450 Euros for ref design and 500-550 Euros for models like STRIX. Hardly a cheap "mainstream" GPU.

 

AMD drivers problems are always extremely exaggerated anyway back when i owned AMD cards it definitely was. The last AMD card i owned was a 5870 or 5850 can't remember which one. Before that i owned a 9800pro flashed to XT and also a 1800XT i think. Also had a Radeon 7000 for a short while. I never had major drivers problems with them. But there was countless of posts on the internet saying the drivers were crap back then. You need to understand some guys hate AMD with a very very very strong passion. As strong as some guys love them. Maybe there's really drivers problems this time around but maybe they are just the usual anti-AMD trolls. Hard to know but i've not heard one reviews talking about major driver problems so far. I think you have to travel back to ATI Rage for major drivers issues anyway from my own experience but like i said i've not been on AMD for a long while so maybe things have changed.

 

What you are saying is that this is ok, because AMD chose to raise the clocks.

What I would say is that AMD had to raise the clocks, while being a whole node ahead.

Does it really require any more explanation than this?

 

@Undying I know you are a modder and a respected fellow , world wide and on this forum ... don't get me wrong ... but not all of use have 1500+ euros for a GPU . Here I must beside with the other side ... last 2 lines from Nvidia are super overpriced and RTX for now it's just a .... fantasy ... Maybe in 3 years things will evolve for the better as for now this is all we have

 

This "efficiency" thing is once again getting out of hand.
Everybody mentions it, no one actually says why it's important (to them). It's just a "this is better that is worse" case without any practical impact at this point.
Actually lot of people don't seem to understand the actual difference between power consumption and efficiency.

 

As you can see im in the same boat. You even have a better gpu than i do so i know how you and many others feel.

I do agree rtx is overpriced but these amd cards are not better either. Pricier than i would like. Lets wait for a next year and see what comes next. btw, thanks for the kind words.

 

Well I think the thing that stands out is that the 5700xt Strix is almost 25% higher power draw than the ref but only about 2% better performance.

 

Great review Hilbert!
It seems that Asus is in a bit of a pickle, considering that with their top cooler they have managed to tame Navi, but only just. Physics is stubborn like that -> dissipating 250W from 250mm2 is no trivial feat.
And now ASUS is puzzled whether to ask 50 euros which barely justifies STRIX brand and the extra cost, or to ask 80-100 euros which puts them dangerously close to 2070 Super vulgaris.
IMHO if you're into 5700XT, 50 euros overcharge for STRIX is a great deal.

OK I'll try to explain my point of view on efficiency with a real-life example:

Imagine there is a 2070FE out there which consumes only 90W.
GPU temperature at 55°C, fans barely spinning (OR NOT), and similarly the case fans engaging but only just.

That's what happens during heavy 3D gaming when I undervolt/undrclock mu Super to 2070 perf. level ~ 1600MHz @ 0.7V.

Zero dust intake, zero noise In practical terms, minimum wear&tear, heat emission so low that I forget about it even during these hot days.

Brother, in my book that's comfort, that's piece of mind and mission accomplished That's why I am in love with efficiency AND power consumption.

 

$350 Would have been the perfect price/performance for this card.

 

Yes, because aside from the textbook strawman you're not actually making an argument.

Is it too hot/loud?
Is the performance too low?
Is 7nm a disappointment?

The 5700/5700XT is the Polaris, talking about performance tiers, of RDNA. It's comfortably competing against GPUs twice its physical size and we can reasonably expect larger/more powerful variants to come along eventually.

Node shrinks are great but they aren't going to be a panacea, for which I'll give three examples.

• Sandy Bridge. I'm still using a 2600K, a processor made on Intel's 32nm node. Todays processors in the same tier has seen multiple full node shrinks and architectural refinements, which using the "node shrinks solve all" reasoning should render the 2600K worse than obsolete. Yet it's still competitive for what it is.
• Nvidia's Turing. The architecture offers a very modest performance uplift, relatively comparable power envelope and significantly increased die sizes compared to Pascal. Sure, it's a smaller node change but surely there should be an absolute outrage about that? Yet there isn't, the only real complaint is the price - which I personally find to be valid.
• AMD's Radeon 7. Representing a relatively straightforward die shrink of Vega it's 33% larger than Navi and has 50% more CUs yet the performance is practically on par. Which product is the "real" 7nm?

The point I'm making, to be abundantly clear from the outset, is that the process node isn't everything. And for every node shrink it's going to be less important, as absolute scaling becomes ever more difficult.

Aside from pricing (and the terrible reference cooler - though that's par for the course with AMD unfortunately) I just can't see these terrible flaws of Navi.

I'll add to my previous point about power to put things in perspective; Let's assume AMD released the 5700/5700XT at 120/150W rather than 180/225W at a 10% performance deficit. I've already mentioned I feel this would compare less favorably to the 2060(S)/2070(S) even at a slightly lower price point because people care more about performance than power and the perceived ranking of the cards matter. Let's further assume that AMD priced the cards at last-gen midrange prices rather than current-gen, ie. $199/$249 rather than $349/$399.

Now the cards are amazing, surely? Sure, they don't quite reach the 2060(S)/2070(S) in performance but the GPU's are half as big, use notably less power and are much cheaper. Yay, go 7nm!
Except that the only things that's changed compared to reality is an undervolt and a price cut, the silicon is exactly the same.

And people would just complain about the performance instead...

TL;DR: The 7nm node shrink is not a panacea. Navi is a 250mm2, 40CU GPU that punches way above it's weight but the architecture changes are ultimately more important.

 

It's really no different now. Every new architecture from AMD has a few "growing pains" that generally get sorted within a few driver releases. Most of the problems people have are user induced but instead of fixing botched settings or a botched configuration, they ignorantly blame drivers. I haven't reinstalled Windows since 2014...... So, started at Windows 8, upgraded to 8.1...then upgraded to Windows 10 and the 2 updates per year (including 1903...)....across 3 motherboards and processors, 3 AMD graphics cards and 3 NVidia graphics cards. By all rights, I should be having issues. Amazingly, my system is completely stable. Apparently I'm doing something wrong since I'm not having all these claimed driver issues. The issues are definitely exaggerated and in a lot of cases, fictitious.

 

Most amd issues are amd caused, not user caused.