An OEM, stock AMD RX 5500 has been tested by German website, Heise Online, and the results are intriguing. Performance is a little less than an AMD RX 580, but it did so at around half the power draw. It also crushed the Nvidia GTX 1650 and is close in performance to a GTX 1660.
When paired with an Intel Core i7-8700K and 32GB of RAM, the RX 5500 managed a score of 12,111 points in 3DMark Fire Strike, while the comparison RX 580 Nitro + managed 12,744. The GTX 1660 Overclocked, managed 12,525. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p and ultra settings, the RX 5500 managed 59 FPS average, where the RX 580 and GTX 1660 hit 65 and 69 FPS, respectively.
While this might not be a massive improvement over existing entry-level cards, the RX 5500 is designed as a GTX 1650 competitor and these results show it's more than capable of that. That said, this is an OEM version of the RX 5500, which won't be released to the general public. It will be overclocked by board partners with additional power delivery and cooling enhancements. With a price expected to be around the $150 mark, this could make the card incredibly competitive.
Then there's the 5500 XT with 8GB of GDDR6 memory to consider, and that should easily beat the 1660 considering what we've seen here.
The only question is what this will mean for the RX 580 and 590? Considering the new 5500 cards are roughly comparable, we can't expect prices to fall too far. It may be that they stay roughly the same as stock clears and then we see those cards falling at the wayside.
Are you interested in either of the new cards from AMD?
Image source: Heise.de
