Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700 GPU Clock Speeds
The new Radeon RX 5700 series has a three-tier clock system. There is the Boost Clock, the Game Clock and the Base Clock. Naturally we have to test each video card and find out how the clock speed really ends up in real-world game testing. Below is the Radeon RX 5700 XT in Kingdom Come: Deliverance. We are testing the clock speed over time and reporting the minimum, maximum and average.
Remember, on the Radeon RX 5700 XT the Boost Clock is 1905MHz, the Game Clock 1755MHz and the Base Clock 1605MHz. In our testing we found that the minimum frequency hit 1500MHz at the worse, but this was sporadic and not often, only very occasionally. Otherwise the minimum frequency was above the base clock most of the time. The maximum clock speed actually hit 1945MHz, above the Boost Clock, but only briefly, and not sustained.
The average clock speed turned out to be around 1854MHz on average while gaming. At 1854MHz this is actually much higher than the quoted 1755MHz Game Clock! It’s about 100MHz faster on average on the game clock compared to the quoted specs. Therefore, it is actually operating above the game clock, and definitely not underperforming in terms of clock speed. This is similar to NVIDIA GPU Boost which can run the clocks higher than the boost speed. This is positive news for the clock speed then on the Radeon RX 5700 XT. It’s not underperforming. This gives us hope for custom cards with better cooling to perhaps run faster. It also gives us concern there might not be a lot of room for overclocking.
The AMD Radeon RX 5700 has a Boost Clock of 1725MHz and a Game Clock of 1625MHz and a Base Clock of 1465MHz. In our testing the minimum hit 1562MHz, which is above the Base Clock. The maximum was 1699MHz, which is shy of the Boost Clock potential of 1725MHz. The average clock speed though was 1685MHz which is boosting above the Game Clock of 1625MHz. Therefore, this video card is also not underperforming. It is able to run faster than the Game Clock while gaming, about 60MHz faster, providing performance above its rated Game Clock. This is again positive for custom cards with better cooling, but we do wonder how much headroom is left for overclocking.