AMD’s Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 have dominated performance in the lower end of the enthusiast graphics card market for a while now, so the announcement of a successor in the form of RX 5500 earlier this year drew a lot of interest. The RX 5500 has since made its debut as an option for pre-built desktops from vendors like Acer and HP but the promised standalone cards never materialised. That changes today as custom designs from a range of AMD partners debut under a new name: the Radeon RX 5500 XT.
So what differences exist between the RX 5500 and 5500 XT? Looking at the reference specifications, there’s only a couple of changes – a slightly higher power target of 130W for the XT compared to 110W for the vanilla model, alongside tweaks for clock speeds. However, the custom boards produced by the likes of PowerColor, MSI and Sapphire are free to made their own modifications and both of the cards we were sent by AMD to review are overclocked models with beefy cooling solutions and higher TDPs.
Like the RX 570 and RX 580 before them, both 4GB and 8GB variants are available, priced at £159/$169 and £179/$199 respectively. AMD supplied one of each to test: our 4GB model is the Sapphire Pulse overclocked to 1815MHz, while the 8GB model is a PowerColor Red Dragon running at 1830MHz. One of the biggest questions we want to answer with this review is whether the 8GB model is worth the extra cost as the 4GB option is otherwise just as powerful as its bigger brother. Through testing a range of games at different resolutions, we can show just how important that extra VRAM is – plus where it doesn’t make any difference at all.
The reference RX 5500 graphics card used by OEMs is a two-slot 18cm design with a single fan, two DisplayPort 1.4a outputs and HDMI 2.0b, but custom RX 5500 XT designs are free to deviate from this significantly – and generally do. The Sapphire Pulse 4GB model is also a two-slotter, but it’s substantially longer at 24cm, providing room for two fans plus more ports: three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. Meanwhile, the PowerColor Red Dragon 8GB card is closer to 23cm with two fans and one each of the three most popular ports: DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI-D. Both of these custom designs also include a backplate, which isn’t present on the reference RX 5500, and an eight-pin auxiliary power input, which is.
1 of 6 Caption Attribution A look around the Sapphire Pulse 4GB and PowerColor Red Dragon 8GB versions of the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT.
In terms of the competitive landscape, the RX 5500 XT faces a tough challenge. First of all, it seems to be a replacement product to the Polaris 10 line-up of GCN graphics cards from AMD but using the advantages of the 7nm production node to radically reduce the size of the die, presumably making for a cheaper, more flexible product. The Navi 14 chip used by the 5500 line is just 158mm2 in size, up against the 232mm2 found in the 14nm/12nm Polaris products. There’s also a substantial reduction in TDP, the 7nm process’ significant efficiency improvements bringing out a cooler, more efficient offering that can work in the smaller form factors that Polaris 10 never could.