AMD finally lifted the lid off of its next-generation graphics cards. Originally codenamed Navi, these RX 5700-series GPUs offer performance comparable to upper-mid-tier Nvidia RTX graphics cards at hotly competitive prices. Set to hit store shelves around the world on July 7, these cards are powerful and efficient, although their cooling looks to leave a lot to be desired.
Announced at the Next Horizon gaming event at E3 2019, AMD's newly debuted graphics cards followed along behind announcements for AMD's full product stack of Ryzen 3000-series CPUs and had quite an act to follow. But they did a pretty good job of it. They aren't going to dethrone Nvidia at the top of the graphics pile, but there are some intriguing elements of these cards which suggest that could be a lot of performance to unlock with them through overclocking and aftermarket cooling.
The first of the two cards based on AMD's new RDNA architecture is the 5700. It's a 36 compute unit card with just shy of 8TFLOPs performance. It has 8GB of GDDR6, a base block of 1,465 MHz, a "game clock" or typicaly boost clock speed of 1,625MHz and a top-shelf boost clock of 1,725Mhz in extreme situations and when cooling is adequate.
It has a TDP of just 180w, far lower than anything we've seen from top AMD cards in recent years.
The 5700 XT is slightly more impressive, with a full 40 compute units, additional stream processors, a base clock of 1,605MHz, a game clock of 1,755MHz, and a boost clock of 1,905MHz. It increases compute power by around 20 percent and has a higher TDP of 225W.
These cards are priced at $380 and $450 respectively.
There's also a special, 50th anniversary edition AMD card which bumps clock speeds by a couple of percent points and increases the price to $500.
With each GPU only sporting a standard blower cooler, though, we would expect there to be a lot of overclocking potential if additional power can be pumped through these cards with some improved cooling like WC monoblock or hybrid cooling designs.
