Thoughts on RX 5700 XT?

heywood on 30/3/2020 at 22:54

I've been setting up two little home office areas for my wife and I. Along with all the other computer stuff we've been buying, I'd like to get a new graphics card. My GTX 1060 hasn't been cutting it ever since I upgraded to an ultrawide monitor. The worse this virus gets, the more likely I'm going to end up staying at home needing some gaming time to remain sane.

It looks like the RX 5700 XT is now the leader in the midrange sweet spot. Any qualms with this choice?

I plan to use it with one of the following monitors:
- LG 38" 3840x1600
- Dell 32" 3840x2160

I'll take one and my wife will take the other. I'm leaning towards keeping the ultrawide, so the card doesn't have to master 4K, but close to it. I'm not a hardcore gamer anymore so I don't need super high frame rates.

Also, my power supply is a Corsair CX600M. The 5700 XT I'm looking at pulls about 250W, whereas my current card pulls only 135W. I'm still running an old i5-4670K, which is 84W, so I don't think the power supply will be overtaxed with the new card.

Starker on 31/3/2020 at 05:05

Unless you want to wait for 2nd gen RDNA GPUs, I think you're good to go. And if you shop around a little, AMD offers some pretty good deals where they drop a new game or two on top of the package.

heywood on 31/3/2020 at 11:47

These are the ones I'm looking at:

(https://www.microcenter.com/product/610552/sapphire-technology-radeon-rx-5700-xt-pulse-overclocked-dual-fan-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-video-card)
(https://www.microcenter.com/product/616173/msi-radeon-rx-5700-xt-gaming-x-dual-fan-8gb-gddr6-pcie-40-video-card)

I have to risk going in store for a KVM that's sold out online, and I need an RG45 crimper, so I'll just get a card there. AMD is offering a nice game bundle, but I've already got a little backlog to get through. For me, there's no sense in waiting for a better deal, I don't normally get chunks of free time for gaming. Right now, I still have to commute in for work a few days a week, but I expect that to change soon.

howeird on 31/3/2020 at 22:30

I watch Gamers Nexus and a few other channels. Their biggest complaint about those cards is AMD drivers need some work. You'll want to watch your fans to make sure they are both spinning.

If you are a electrical engineer you may be interested in this explanation of the Sapphire Card. Buildzoid (on Gamer Nexus) does a explanation on the electrical components of the card.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDs70eJ0kS4)

Starker on 31/3/2020 at 22:41

Either of them should be good, very little difference, so I'd say go for the cheaper Sapphire one.

heywood on 1/4/2020 at 19:50

As it turns out, I am an electrical engineer by education, but my career has taken me in different directions. So I will check out that link.

I've had two MSI "Gaming" cards before, including my current GTX 1060, and their coolers are among the best. But I'm going to buy the Sapphire as it's a little bit smaller and draws a little less power because of the lower factory overclock.

I heard about driver issues and DOA cards last year when the first non-reference 5700 and XT cards hit the market. I'm hoping the driver issues are behind them. I want to give AMD my business this time, now that they've finally produced a competitive midrange GPU. NVidia was able to dictate the market for so long.

Thanks for the suggestions. Off to buy.

Starker on 1/4/2020 at 22:01

Last I heard, they got most of the issues fixed with this particular card. And at least they say they're going to focus more on testing and stability and faster bugfixing from now on. We'll see.

I haven't had an AMD card in quite a while, but I definitely welcome the competition.

Dahenjo on 29/4/2020 at 21:32

Last December I bought a Sapphire RX 5700 Pulse (not XT) to replace a still very decent XFX RX 580, and had frequent black screen crashes playing Thief (only game I play really) to the point that I had to put the old card back in. Looking into it more I found numerous such 5700/5700 XT reports, with "I can't play any games with this card" being a typical complaint.

The prognosis was deemed pretty bleak until adequate drivers could fix things, so with every new driver release I'd put the Pulse back in (always using DDU to fully wipe things) only to find that it wouldn't solve it. But with the latest 20.4.2 release last week the card seems functional/reliable for the first time, it's only been a few days but zero crashes so I think they finally got it working for most folks from the feedback I'm seeing. I was verging on creating a big stink with Amazon for a refund despite it being past the return window, claiming that I waited for decent drivers that never came, but it looks like I won't need to now & can begin enjoying the better graphics it affords.

Bikerdude on 30/4/2020 at 10:45

Quote Posted by heywood

It looks like the RX 5700 XT is now the leader in the midrange sweet spot. Any qualms with this choice?

I plan to use it with one of the following monitors:
- LG 38" 3840x1600
- Dell 32" 3840x2160

I'll take one and my wife will take the other, I'm leaning towards keeping the ultrawide.

Also, my power supply is a Corsair CX600M. The 5700 XT I'm looking at pulls about 250W, whereas my current card pulls only 135W. I'm still running an old i5-4670K, which is 84W, so I don't think the power supply will be overtaxed with the new card.

I run a Samsung CF79J34 (3440*1440, freesync, 100Hz) on a GTX 1080Ti and I can play most AAA games at 100fps once I tweak the settings (played Wolfenstein, Tombraider, Doom Eternal at that refresh just fine). The reason I mention all that is the 5700XT is a very good 1080p (game settings on high, high refresh) card and is faster than the non-ti GTX 1080, but will loose perf as you go up resolutions, eg. 1440p and definetly 1600p at anything above 60hz. So in a nutshell if the wife dosen't game that much give her the Dell. 2.5k versus 4k.

How old is the CX600M? if its a few years old it will be worth upgrading and keeping the Corsair as a backup PSU. I say this because the power efficiency will certainly have dropped - check (https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator) to gauge where you load usage is on the efficiency curve.

And lastly if you dead set on a 5700XT, get a good one - see HardwareUnboxed -

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK_Ue4d9CpE)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45Q8TVmzHI8)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zlgRJewqLM)

Whats the model of the LG..?

heywood on 4/5/2020 at 22:22

The LG is a 38UC99. It's more of a productivity monitor than a gaming monitor. It does support FreeSync, but tops out at 75 Hz. The Dell is a U3219Q. It doesn't support FreeSync or G-Sync, but it does at least offer HDR400. I ended up taking the LG because of the picture-by-picture feature.

I did buy the 5700XT. However, the Sapphire Pulse card briefly went out of stock, so I paid the extra $15 and got the MSI Gaming X card instead. I did consider the RTX 2070 Super, and I like the fact that it's more power efficient, but I wanted to give AMD my business this time because NVidia has controlled the market for so long.

So far, I've mostly played Prey, but I also tried a handful of old favorites and some games that gave my previous card trouble e.g. DX:MD, FC5. I seem to be maxing out my monitor's refresh rate nearly all of the time on ultra settings, so I've got no complaints with performance. No crashes either. And I like how quiet it runs. The only issue I've had so far is some screen flicker when displaying the Windows desktop and productivity apps at half-screen resolution using my monitor's PBP feature. It doesn't happen full-screen, and it doesn't happen often enough in PBP to be a problem, so it's just a minor annoyance.

The power supply is about 6.5 years old. The CPU is the same age, so I expected worse performance than I'm getting. I will upgrade both of them at the same time, but not until I need to.

Anyway, thanks to all for the feedback. Now I just wish I could spend more time enjoying it.