Review: Radeon RX 5500 XT MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, Sapphire and PowerColor

ATM still happy with my 580. Let`s see what the 2020 will bring.

 

Honestly I'm not sure why people complain about the speed or price of these cards.
The market currently has a LOT of old-stock cards like 1060's from nVidia and LOTS of 5xx cards to burn through before ending up with these 5500 XT's front and center. So I reckon they want to blow through the old stock on the holiday season before these land at prices possibly 10~25$ lower on promotional sales. That is what would make good business sense, in any way.
Source: Just had to replace my RX 480 this month, so I was watching card prices left and right for weeks, finally settled on a 2070 Super (over the 5700 XT models, because of both the support of texture tools and features for game developers from nVidia, and also because of texture corruption being constant in Fallout 4 which I still play from random time to random time). Really happy with my purchase, to be honest, it's quite fast but would have been a better feeling buying it at the 400~420$ price of the nice 5700XT models, if a tighter budget had necessitated that. I got 3 years out of my RX 480 so it lived a good life, but that was never really a 'fast' card to begin with when it was new.

On another note, please pass up the 4GB models if possible. I am designing a city in a driving game (BeamNG.Drive), and where 1gb is useless, 2gb is bare minimum, 4gb is 'meh', and 6gb is 'today's minimum' you should look for spending 175~200$ (US Dollar) or more, 8gb is great and where you should be. Even my RX 480 was 8gb and honestly, I was using 4gb of the VRAM up when it was new in 2016, so in 2019, I would definitely give the 4gb a pass. 4GB is alright for e-sports gamers / casual gamers, that want a pretty good card for their PC but don't have the cooling/power/budget of a dedicated gamer or gaming PC. It's OK to not be able to use high settings for a part time or casual gamer, but if you make games or heavily into mod making, you will definitely do yourself a disservice by going for anything less than a 6~8gb model. I'd reckon to go for more than that, but there's absolutely nothing aside of a Vega 64 Premier that has over 8gb that you can touch under 499$. The vega 64 Premier as a 400$ (used!) card is just not attractive or competitive, neither is the Radeon VII - even when both cards have 16gb. Regular Vega 56 and 64 cards have only 8gb and sell for pennies compared to a year ago, but for current purchases, it's best to just give them a pass in favor of something much more power efficient - unless your deaf or your house heater is broken. Not to offend any Vega 56 or 64 owners in the slightest, they were good models from 12~18 months ago or more, but have since been eclipsed quite a bit now.

I will mention that above all this, the TL DR of it all is:
The RX 570 8gb is the "current steal" for price to performance, the 8gb of VRAM will make sure you don't have to worry about muddy textures anytime soon. If you want good price to performance and must have the most VRAM, Give the 5500 XT a pass until the RX 570 8gb is out of stock, otherwise the 5500 4gb is a little faster than the RX 570 4gb model, but not by too terribly much. Let price make the decision for you as often market conditions differ by individual as much as personal preference.
After 3.5 years since the introduction of the Rx 470, rebadged a year later as a Rx 570, I'd say it's lead a pretty good solid life. It's not over quite yet, just know you're buying a card who's main GPU is a bit dated if you do - by comparison the 5500 XT core is Navi and much newer along with some newer features and a bit more efficiency (though not nearly as efficient as I'd have hoped!).
*When the RX 480 corrupted the desktop and I had to pull it and throw in an old Radeon HD 7850 2GB I got in summer of 2013 on discount for 155$, while it was plenty fast, 2GB of VRAM is really what's killing the cards today. PLEASE OH PLEASE if you enjoy gaming and have decent eyesight or a big screen, get the 8GB model even if you do 1080p. With 8GB of VRAM, a 3D artist can put so much more love into a scene and even 8GB is limiting at some point, but manageable.

 

@anticupidon Vega is just too power hungry and the cheapest is 230€ right now. Also, second hand market is scary for me, not into it. I don't do compute work, so no use for a compute card.

I doubt AMD will cut prices, I bet availability will be tight too as they're making money with Ryzen and the low end GPU market isn't very profitable. And even if they cut prices, it won't be reflected here, as prices rarely drop here.

@Eastcoasthandle I agree that for 1080p 4Gb are still enough, I just don't want to be in a tight spot 1 year from now. Although you could drop a quality setting or two and live.

@airbud7 1660 Super is way more than that here, unfortunately.

@warlord I think they don't want to stop making Zen2 to make Navi. Remember TSMC is production limited.

@Andy Watson games are tested maxed out (mostly) I bet with some tweaks you could play with 90% IQ and a good bump in frame rate.

 

Just grab a rx580 8gb at 160$. It performs similiar to rx590 and 1660 with a slight overclock. Still a great deal.

 

People should really avoid buy gpus now like the plague. Especially amd ones.

Both consoles at the end of the next year are gonna destroy Vega and Navi 1.0 series. With what psychology someone would invest money on dead tech? People should be patient unless you change gpu every year.

Anything less than rtx 2080 at the moment is gonna compete and lose.

 

Buying a 700Eur 2080 is also dumb idea when nvidia is preparing new more capable gpus for the same price.

 

well 1650sS is as fast as 1660 so...no surprise

 

well the consoles will still have gpu so it's reassuring to know they won't run their graphics on oxygen.

 

What graphic you looking at because from where I stand it punishes all 4-6 GB Nvidias too.

 

"What benefits will you have at PCIe gen 4 with a graphics card? Absolutely nothing, really. Running PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 will not make a difference in performance as that PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slot is not even loaded (bandwidth) more than a few percent. "

This seems presumptuous rot, & u provide no evidence. No mention afaik that you even used pcie 4?

what ur saying is u didnt measure it when pcie 4 would have effect - ie - when gpu memory is maxed out - not uncommon w/ 4GB, & increasingly doable w/ 8gb on modern games.

show us perf for this using pcie 3 vs pcie 4?