RX 5600-XT

The 6GB AMD 5600 XT is a slightly cheaper, BIOS restricted, version of the 8GB 5700. The majority of 5600 XT’s should operate reasonably quietly as the single fan reference design was skipped for this release. Although the reference design is absent there are, however, several variants which range in performance between the GTX 1660S and the RTX 2060. Performance is more varied than usual because of last minute BIOS changes. The best versions of the 5600 XT (Sapphire Pulse) were distributed to reviewers (good luck finding one of these at MSRP). These models are capable, with BIOS updates, of performance that almost matches the RTX 2060. At $280 USD the higher performing SKUs could make sense for users that are happy to tinker with or return faulty hardware. During our GTAV testing reflection MSAA resulted in very poor, almost matt, reflection fidelity (the same bug appears on several Navi and Vega cards). Whilst playing Project Cars 2 our 5600 XT PC crashed several times. Given the vast number of software (and hardware) problems since day one of the 5000 series launch, it’s ironic that AMD’s latest 20.1.3 driver does not even offer an option to skip the installation of a boatload of new system shortcuts, gimmicks and other bloatware. ^{[Jan '20 GPUPro]}