Conclusion
Finally, after 2 months since the announcement of the Radeon 5500 series GPUs AMD has launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT. We now know the specs and pricing on the Radeon RX 5500 XT. There will be two variants, a 4GB option, and an 8GB option. The 4GB option will be $169 MSRP and the 8GB option will be $199 MSRP. This is an add-in-board partner launch, so we will see many custom and factory overclocked models out there online and in retail with availability today.
At $169 the 4GB Radeon RX 5500 XT competes nicely with the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER and factory overclocked variants of that. However, at $199 the 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT actually competes on price to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1660 video cards. Those have an MSRP of $199 as well.
We haven’t yet tested an 8GB Radeon RX 5500 XT, but we do have one in our hands right now. Rest assured we are going to review it thoroughly, and we are going to include the right comparisons by price, as well as performance. We even plan to do a good ole fashioned 4GB versus 8GB shootout review since we have the exact same model video card in both 4GB and 8GB versions. Stay tuned for that.
SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4G OC
For this launch review, we reviewed the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB OC video card. This video card has 4GB of VRAM and a slight factory overclock. The factory overclock is very small, only 20MHz. However, we found that it can and does boost well over that anyway, giving it great performance out-of-the-box.
The SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4G OC has a factory overclock of 1737MHz game boost versus 1717MHz for the reference spec. It still has the reference 1845MHz overall boost spec. It has 4GB of GDDR6 at 14GHz. The video card sports a dual-UEFI BIOS and a physical switch on the video card. It ships in the default performance mode 1737MHz option. However, you can switch it to the secondary 1717MHz option, but we really found no need to do this. The fans are quiet and the video card performs great at the performance mode.
In our GPU frequency testing, we found that it boosts well over the 1737MHz mark. In fact, it’s upwards of 1800MHz while gaming. This means it doesn’t throttle while gaming and gives you better than expected GPU performance.
It also has overclocking potential. Even without raising the voltage we managed to increase the Power Target and raise the GPU frequency until we saw an average of 60MHz increase across the board. It was consistently higher and gave us even more GPU performance. We managed to boost the memory up to 14.8GHz versus 14GHz but unfortunately ran into limits imposed by AMD. Ultimately, the GPU has a physical setting limit as well. We reached out to AMD about this and AMD provided us an official answer on this that everyone should be aware of.
“Memory OC safety limits have been put in place to ensure board-to-board variations in electrical and thermal designs have been accounted for. As far as GPU OC headroom, this will vary die-to-die as well as across various AIB partner cards. While the 5500XT has been tuned specifically to scale performance across a wide variety of TDP points (lower power mobile to Gaming desktop), we have made available a few different options in Wattman to experiment with overclocking, including undervolting, Auto OC etc..”
With the overclock we achieved we still received improvements in performance that helped. The improvements depend on the game, some were small, but some were significant enough to notice in-game. It is just going to depend on your game.
This video card was also silent when running, even when overclocked as we left the fan on automatic.
Performance
When we look back at performance one thing jumps out at us, the leapfrogging that is taking place. Now keep in mind we are using a highly factory overclocked ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER O4G GAMING video card. In fact, this is the highest factory overclocked SKU ASUS has in its GTX 1650 SUPER lineup. Therefore, it represents a high level of GTX 1650 SUPER performance.
Still, in games, it just depends on the game. We find that in some games the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4G OC video card is faster, yet in other games the ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1650 SUPER video card is. Yet, when we overclock the SAPPHIRE video card it matches GTX 1650 SUPER performance. These two video cards really are close in performance. We can’t say that one-upped the other in a big way. You’d never be able to tell the difference in actual gameplay between the two, the performances are too close. Both video cards end up with the same highest playable settings in every game.
In regards to that, some games are more taxing than others. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 wouldn’t even hit 60 FPS at 1080p until we turned the game settings down to “Low.” Then there were other games like Gears 5 that played great at “Ultra” settings at 1080p. It really goes from one extreme to the other, and that just totally depends on the game and how taxing it is.
At the worse, you’ll have to lower settings to “Low” or “Medium” levels in taxing games to be playable at 1080p with the Radeon RX 5500 XT. However, in games that are less taxing like Call of Duty and Gears 5 and Wolfenstein you can raise the settings a bit higher to “High” levels. What is rarer though is running games at the highest “Ultra” levels, fewer games are going to actually be playable at those levels on these video cards.
The Unspoken Comparison
There is something we really need to discuss though, and that is the 8GB variant of the Radeon RX 5500 XT. The MSRP for this is set at $199, that’s a pretty big difference from the $169 pricing of the 4GB variant for just a simple VRAM capacity difference.
The problem is that the competition GeForce GTX 1660 is $199. Yet, in this review, it has been shown that Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU performs back-and-forth with GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, not GTX 1660, which should naturally be faster. That’s going to potentially present a problem for the Radeon RX 5500 XT.
Now, we haven’t actually tested the performance between the two yet, so this is just conjecture. But logically it makes sense. We will have to test this directly and see what happens, so stay tuned for that.
With the Radeon RX 5500 XT performing similar to the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, we do see a need for a Radeon “5600 XT.” There needs to be something to compete with and compare with the GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. A faster Radeon RX 5600 XT would make a lot of sense, and we definitely see the need for something like that to exist.
Final Points
SAPPHIRE has made an excellent Radeon RX 5500 XT based video card with the SAPPHIRE PULSE Radeon RX 5500 XT 4G OC. Even though it has a small factory overclock, it still boosts well over that to provide a high GPU frequency while gaming without throttling.
We don’t have any other comparisons at the moment to compare the GPU temperatures, but we can say the fans are super quiet while gaming. The video card will fit nicely in a small case and should pair up nicely with a budget or value gaming build. It provides performance that is generally faster than the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER and can even overclock a bit.
If you are looking for a good gaming experience at a low price point, you should have your eye on the Radeon RX 5500 XT.