PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 5700 XT Review – A decent graphics card over NVIDIA’s RTX 2070 SUPER

Graphics card is crucial to provide an eye-pleasing visual treat during a game-play. Thus, most graphics card manufacturers out there come out with their own customized cards based on NVIDIA’s and Radeon’s board design, to attract PC enthusiasts to actually buy their product.

Today, I am about to share my experience using a graphics card known as Red Devil RX 5700 XT from a Taiwanese licensed-vendor called PowerColor. Read more on how your GPU’s were made. The standard given accessories consists of a driver installation CD, an installation guide and Red Devil card for aesthetics purpose.

Design Overview

Unlike the standard FE card or Radeon’s card design that appears less bulky, the Red Devil RX 5700 XT is slightly bulky and heavy for its size.

Moving into the design overview of the card, it comes with three cooling fans to allow a better heat dissipation from the card under heavy load. According to PowerColor further, the card features newer cooling module, equipped with five heatpipes with additional 30% of heat-sink surface for a quieter performance. The chassis of the cards feels solid and from here, I can see how much PowerColor’s engineer designed the card based on users feedback previously by doing their own R&D research over the internet.

Next, a metal backplate is not only for aesthetics purpose but also allow the chassis of the card to be more solid. The fin stack gets a uniquely designed open-air to allow a better airflow in the components of the card. The Red Devil logo allows the card to shine if tuned through its driver.

The Red Devil RX 5700 XT features four display connector options, an HDMI port and three display ports. Say if you having more than two monitor setups, the card does the job for you already without requiring to buy a display port hub.

Unlike the previous generation graphics card, the Red Devil RX 5700 XT requires two 8-pin PCI Express-cable connectors. The power supply that responsible to channel the power to the graphics card is from Corsair, the CX550M.

Specifications

The following are the specification of PowerColor’s Red Devil RX 5700 XT card:

Graphics Engine	AXRX 5700 XT 8GBD6-3DHE/OC
Video Memory	8GB GDDR6
Stream Processor	2560 units
Engine Clock	1905MHz (Game) /up to 1770MHz (Base) / up to 2010MHz (Boost)
Memory Clock	14.0 Gbps
Firstname	256-bit
Memory Interface	Lastname
DirectX Support	12
Bus Standard	PCIE 4.0
Standard Display Connectors	HDMI/ DisplayPort x3
OpenGL	Support
CrossFireX Technology	Support (DirectX 12/Vulkan)
AMD Stream Technology	Support
AMD Eyefinity	Support
AMD Hypermemory	Lastname
Maximum Resolution	DisplayPort & HDMI: 4096×2160
Board Dimensions	300mm*132mm*53mm
Minimum System Power Requirement (W)	700W
Extension Power Connector	Two 8-pin PCI Express Power connectors

Benchmark PC Specification

Table 2 below shows the specification of the benchmark PC used to benchmark the graphics card:

Processor	Intel Core i5-8400 @ 2.80GHz
Memory	32GB @ 2667MHz
Motherboard	ASUS TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING
Storage	SSD: 2 x 120GB SSD HDD: 2TB
Display	ASUS TUF Gaming VG249
Operating System	Windows 10 Pro Version 2004
System Type	64-bit operating system
Power Supply	Corsair CX550M

The benchmark PC used has a pretty entry-level standard specification of a gaming PC. In order to make the game looks fair, I don’t really use any third-party antivirus since Windows Security getting better and better, I don’t turn off it during the benchmark test. In addition, I’ve ensured that no any background services running, which you can enable or disable under Settings > Privacy > Background Apps.

Radeon Driver

Before the I start to benchmark the graphics card, it is safe to ensure that the installed driver is on its latest version. This is very crucial so that, by the time the benchmark result is being collected, there will be no performance degradation since the graphics card runs on its latest issued driver. The driver runs in Radeon Software Version, 20.9.1 that went live for the public access back on 9th September 2020.

Benchmark Analysis

The first graphics benchmark conducted was, Open Graphics Library or OpenGL, known generally among PC enthusiasts, to get a detailed review on how well the card render the graphics while being productive or under heavy load such as extensive game-play. The test was done via Cinebench R15 software. The PowerColor Red Devil card was left under stock settings.

Based on Figure 9 above, the PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700 XT performs quite well. I able to hit 153.02 fps while the processor outputs 927 cb (multi-core) and 169 cb (single-core).

Next test involves using 3DMark software to benchmark the graphics card, further. Since I am using the demo ‘free’ version, I only able to access to the free benchmark features given, this includes Time Spy (Figure 12), Fire Strike (Figure 13), Night Raid (Figure 14) and Sky Diver (Figure 15). To my surprise, the graphics card did achieve a good mark under extensive GPU test environment offered by the provider. The Red Devil RX 5700 XT although being paired with a standard processor, it does performs well for a benchmark software.

Heaven is one of my favorite benchmark software when it comes to benchmarking graphics card. Figure 14 on above shows the Superposition scores for the Red Devil RX 5700 XT under to different resolutions, a standard 1080p and 4K optimized. Based on the conducted test and when compared with a few online benchmarks on the similar card, I must say, I am impressed with the scores though it still scores below GTX 1080 Ti card by NVIDIA.

Figure 15 above shows the Unigine Heaven benchmark under two different display quality settings, a standard high and ultra. The scores between the modes don’t differ much, but still the high settings does score pretty well compared to the ultra settings.

Core	1741 MHz
Memory	1750 MHz
Temperature	79°C
GPU Load	95%
Memory Load	65%
Fan Speed	53%

To see how well the graphics card will performs under heavy load, I’ve used a simple GPU stress test provided by Furmark. Since it’s free, so I’m hopped in to load a stress test on the card. Table 3 above shows the result from the stress test conducted for two hours. Based on the test, the Red Devil RX 5700 XT operates statically at 79°C with GPU load locked at 95%. It is still recommended to implement a proper cooling solution since my reading may be slightly inaccurate since the internal cooling solutions used by the benchmark PC is pretty standard.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, based on my personal experience, the Red Devil version of PowerColor Radeon RX 5700 XT performs well in my basic benchmark test. Do note that, not all benchmarks achievable by everyone as, it depends on the number of background process running on while the benchmark process going on, type of antivirus used (some slows down the computer performance) and etcetera.

Overall, with recently launched RTX 30 series, the RTX 20 series getting cheaper especially in a second-handed value. This means, you can actually compare your own requirement on buying a graphics card that suits your gaming style. With this, I end up the review by saying, the PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700 XT is highly recommended.