AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT Revisit: 3 Years Later

[Steve]

We revisit the Radeon RX 5700 XT with a 33 game benchmark tested against its old nemesis, the GeForce RTX 2060 Super. We've also included the RTX 3060, which is also a $400 GPU this generation.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2508-radeon-5700-xt-revisit/

 

[Irata]

Thanks for the revisit Steven. The 5700 XT was definitely good value for money, often available for below msrp. The 6700XT seems like a regression here.

Being able to sell it for a great price due to its mining performance would have been a plus.

 

[Neutronman]

So true Steve. I did exactly what you recommended and sold my 5700XT with Bykski waterblock for $865 and managed to find a buyer flipping a new 6700X on Ebay who accepted $610..... Only issue I ever had with the 5700XT was the very loud HSF, thus the waterblock

 

[dirtyferret]

"In our opinion, the 5700 XT vs. RTX 2060 Super battle is a classic example of why you should almost always buy what offers you the most right value now, rather than bank on future proofing."

choke on your lies!!! The entire PC master race community is built on nugatory terms like "future proofing" and "bottlenecks" to justify constant upgrades and rebuilds while ridiculing anything we judge not up trifling standers! How can you take that away from us? How!

 

[MarcusNumb]

For me, the 5700xt was the best GPU for value when it came out. I was able to sell it after 1 year of using for 600 to buy a 3070ti for 900, only because I wanted to experience the Ray Tracing (I know, I was stupid!!!). Anw, for anyone who has a good 5700xt, I think you can hold on to it for the next 5 years with no problem.

 

[Inthenstus]

The 5700 XT was the worst card that I’ve over owed. After years of flickering and black screens I finally switched to team green. I don’t think I’ll ever go back, AMD just can’t seem to get a fix on their driver issues.

EDIT: When it worked though, it was quite the card. Lots of power for the price I paid.

 

[EdmondRC]

I had an RX 5700 (non XT), but, you could easily flash the bios for the XT bios. Of course this did not unlock the additional cut cores, but it did give you the ability to up the power to XT levels and overclock well beyond the stock 5700. This allowed you to get within spitting distance of the XTs stock performance. In most games I was only about 2% behind the XTs frames. It was a solid card and I bought it new for $220 on one of Newegg's Shell Shockers. Definitely the best value I ever got out of a GPU, save the fact that I bought an RTX 3080 for -$100 net when I sold my launch RTX 3070 that I bought after selling my 5700 for $400. A 3080 + $100 is a good deal haha.

 

[vvtunes]

I had an RX 5700 (non XT), but, you could easily flash the bios for the XT bios. Of course this did not unlock the additional cut cores, but it did give you the ability to up the power to XT levels and overclock well beyond the stock 5700. This allowed you to get within spitting distance of the XTs stock performance. In most games I was only about 2% behind the XTs frames. It was a solid card and I bought it new for $220 on one of Newegg's Shell Shockers. Definitely the best value I ever got out of a GPU, save the fact that I bought an RTX 3080 for -$100 net when I sold my launch RTX 3070 that I bought after selling my 5700 for $400. A 3080 + $100 is a good deal haha.

Yep, still have my flashed 5700 up and running since 2019, it was a great hack at the time.

 

[Gars]

Im working with (not so heavy loads) AE and Cinema4d
R270X still doing the job
im curious do I need upgrade or I need to wait if it dies?

 

[Steve]

The 5700 XT was the worst card that I’ve over owed. After years of flickering and black screens I finally switched to team green. I don’t think I’ll ever go back, AMD just can’t seem to get a fix on their driver issues.

EDIT: When it worked though, it was quite the card. Lots of power for the price I paid.

This might sound stupid but did you try a different display cable? I bought about 10 of these cards, all different models and gave most of them to friends. Of the 10 just 2 had any kind of issue, one was a black screen issue in Apex Legends, the other was intermittent flickering.

The Apex issue was solved by going from DisplayPort to HDMI, after that it never happened again.

The flickering issue was solved by using a higher quality DP cable, both issues were seen with cheaper models, MSI Mech and Gigabyte Gaming.

I myself, nor Tim, ever had an issue with a 5700 XT.

 

[Jackwoz]

The 5700 XT was the worst card that I’ve over owed. After years of flickering and black screens I finally switched to team green. I don’t think I’ll ever go back, AMD just can’t seem to get a fix on their driver issues.

EDIT: When it worked though, it was quite the card. Lots of power for the price I paid.

Im still rocking my 5700XT and have never had the issues you have described. I dont think it is a driver issue you were experiencing.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

What we learned was how crap an update the 3060 is over the 2060 Super. Very ordinary card for the money. 4060 will need to bring huge improvements.

 

[b3rdm4n]

Not quite sure I can wholeheartedly agree with parts of this conclusion.

As for which one of these GPUs gamers should have bought back in 2019, the answer is now obvious.

I'd argue t's not obvious for all users, perhaps for an average gamer? but it's evident that many titles in this tested list (which obviously isn't an all inclusive list for all users based on what they play, but it's reasonably broad) have DLSS which, depending on user preference, could catapult the RTX cards above the 5700XT, people may actually want to play the latest visual games with RT on etc where the full DX12U feature set is genuinely desirable, or at least even check it out which cannot be done on the 5700XT. It's also more efficient. Lets not even touch on the driver/stability hell a lot of users also went though with RDNA1.

I can appreciate for Steve that this is your conclusion on your content, and I like the content, but it's not one size fits all and many users for many reasons chose the slightly slower card that has the richer feature set, lower power use etc.

Not only has the Radeon 5700 XT stood the test of time, but with hindsight we know now it was the right play... because no gamer should still own one today.

That is a little unfair too, it's not like this was easy as pie for everyone everywhere that owned a 5700XT to trade up for free to the 6700XT, it was still for many a very risky thing to undertake.

 

[mrvco]

My 5700 XT is still going strong. Great no gimmicks card for 1440p gaming.

 

[yesnt]

Thanks for the revisit Steven. The 5700 XT was definitely good value for money, often available for below msrp. The 6700XT seems like a regression here.

Being able to sell it for a great price due to its mining performance would have been a plus.

Heh, I used mine for mining too ("150€ profit a month using something I already have? Deal!") and more than made up the difference I'd now have to pay going to a 6700XT.

Considered selling it when the prices were around a grand but decided not to because availability of *everything* was bad.

 

[Sypower]

I'm still running my 5700 XT and I'm still experiencing intermittent crashes. It's great to see the card is still a strong performer, but it's not worth it when the card randomly dies for no reason.

Without getting into too much detail, I've tried a lot of things to make it stop. I'll have to give Steve's suggestion of a new DP cable a try. In all my troubleshooting I've never seen that suggestion and it would be weird if it helped... but still cheaper than a new GPU.

 

[Steve]

I'm still running my 5700 XT and I'm still experiencing intermittent crashes. It's great to see the card is still a strong performer, but it's not worth it when the card randomly dies for no reason.

Without getting into too much detail, I've tried a lot of things to make it stop. I'll have to give Steve's suggestion of a new DP cable a try. In all my troubleshooting I've never seen that suggestion and it would be weird if it helped... but still cheaper than a new GPU.

What sort of crashing are we talking about here and which model? It's also worth trying HDMI and seeing if that solves the issue. Ideally you should have palmed if off to a miner 6 months ago for top dollar

 

[ShadowDeath]

I'm still running my 5700 XT and I'm still experiencing intermittent crashes. It's great to see the card is still a strong performer, but it's not worth it when the card randomly dies for no reason.

Without getting into too much detail, I've tried a lot of things to make it stop. I'll have to give Steve's suggestion of a new DP cable a try. In all my troubleshooting I've never seen that suggestion and it would be weird if it helped... but still cheaper than a new GPU.

Still getting driver crashes? I fixed mine by undervolting to 1000mV and restricting the top GPU clock speed to 1815MHz. At first I used the stock Radeon software to do it but I noticed it would randomly reset things. So I started doing it through MSI Afterburner. That solved most issues. The rest were solved by running DDU, then in the Radeon driver installer I selected the option to do a clean install. I know it should be redundant because I used DDU but for some reason it seems to help. Then I installed the driver only. No software at all. I've not seen a driver crash in half a year. From what I've seen it seems to be RDNA 1 and something in the Radeon Software.

 

[poltevo]

DLSS can’t be ignored. It should be included in the benchmarks at quality setting when the implementation is good. That way people can understand the real world performance in each game benchmarked. Techspot/HWU need to do image quality analysis to help us consumers make better decisions. Without this analysis, these GPU comparisons are pointless IMO. I don’t care about “native” performance: I care about performance and image quality as should most people.

 

[Avro Arrow]

"Moreover, if you require ray tracing support, that kind of makes or breaks the decision a lot earlier and you could simply pick up the GeForce graphics card."
I don't think that anyone requires ray-tracing support, especially at that performance level.
"As we understand it, VRS does little to nothing to improve performance in Hitman 3, which will no doubt disappoint those who 3 years ago claimed the 5700 XT was a terrible investment due to its lack of VRS and DX12 Ultimate features."
Anyone who claimed the RX 5700 XT was a terrible investment 3 years ago was either an nVidia fanboy, an nVidia shill or was one of these "know-nothing know-it-alls" who hadn't a clue what they were talking about.

None of this is a huge surprise to me because I know just how much Steve LOVED his Powercolor RX 5700 XT Red Devil and I won't forget just how much I love my XFX RX 5700 XT THICC-III. The value in video cards has dropped dramatically in recent years so it makes sense that a card that costs the same as the previous model wouldn't be as good. That's why I was a bit taken aback by the criticism of the RX 6600 XT. Unchecked inflation has made prices no longer comparable to prices from only three years ago.

Ain't Neo-Liberalism grand? I really want Keynesian Economics back.

 

[Steve]

DLSS can’t be ignored. It should be included in the benchmarks at quality setting when the implementation is good. That way people can understand the real world performance in each game benchmarked. Techspot/HWU need to do image quality analysis to help us consumers make better decisions. Without this analysis, these GPU comparisons are pointless IMO. I don’t care about “native” performance: I care about performance and image quality as should most people.

So what about FSR? Can that be ignored? If it gets to a point where every game is being tested with various upscaling methods how do you objectively select an apples to apples comparison? You obviously can't, it becomes highly subjective testing which is why what you're suggesting is wrong. Native is king.

 

[b3rdm4n]

Techspot/HWU need to do image quality analysis to help us consumers make better decisions.

Just go to Digital Foundry for those, it's their bread and butter and they do very in depth analysis, pretty much the only ones to actually cover all the types of artefacts and areas of strength and weakness.

I do agree however that the only fair way to test is at native, and the buyers of these cards are or should be made aware of things like DLSS and FSR as extra selling points.

 

[MaxSmarties]

Im working with (not so heavy loads) AE and Cinema4d
R270X still doing the job
im curious do I need upgrade or I need to wait if it dies?

That depends on your workload, actually.
You will save time on newer hardware, but how much time depends on how big are your projects.

For professional applications I still prefer Nvidia solutions, by the way. Their Studio drivers are better optimized.

 

[MaxSmarties]

DLSS can’t be ignored. It should be included in the benchmarks at quality setting when the implementation is good. That way people can understand the real world performance in each game benchmarked. Techspot/HWU need to do image quality analysis to help us consumers make better decisions. Without this analysis, these GPU comparisons are pointless IMO. I don’t care about “native” performance: I care about performance and image quality as should most people.

Maybe the should include a couple of games supporting both FSR and DLSS, for a better analysis

 

[Avro Arrow]

I'm still running my 5700 XT and I'm still experiencing intermittent crashes. It's great to see the card is still a strong performer, but it's not worth it when the card randomly dies for no reason.

Without getting into too much detail, I've tried a lot of things to make it stop. I'll have to give Steve's suggestion of a new DP cable a try. In all my troubleshooting I've never seen that suggestion and it would be weird if it helped... but still cheaper than a new GPU.

Which model do you have? Some of the lower-end models have an electrical connector that is insufficient for the power needs of the RX 5700 XT. My XFX RX 5700 XT Triple Dissipation crashed the entire system quite often. I sent it to XFX for RMA and they sent me back a THICC-III. The THICC-III never had that problem but I noticed an interesting difference between them. I believe that this is the difference that caused the system crashes because a driver crash can't cause a system reboot, only a hardware issue can do that, usually something to do with power distribution.

I'll illustrate:

Here's the XFX RX 5700 XT Triple Dissipation:

And here's the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC-III:

Now, if you look at the power connectors, you'll see that the Triple Dissipation uses an 8+6 plug configuration while the THICC-III uses an 8+8 plug configuration. I believe that the 8+6 is insufficient for the power needs of the Navi 10 GPU and causes the system to crash when the card tries to draw more power than the 8+6 can deliver. This causes the card to stop functioning and so the whole system crashes violently. OTOH, the THICC-III with its full 8+8 power connectors never had a problem. This is exactly how cards would react to a lack of needed power.

Another aspect of this situation that makes me think this is likely is the fact that reviewers NEVER experienced this problem. When an AIB sends a card to a reviewer, they ALWAYS send their top-line model. Steve's Powercolor Red Devil is a good example of this. The top-line models would ALL have the same 8+8 connector like the THICC-III, one of XFX's upper-tier models. As a result, those cards would never experience that same inability to deliver enough electricity to the GPU and so the reviewers would never experience those violent crashes. At the same time however, the general public tends to buy the lower-tier models because they're less expensive and deliver almost the same performance (like maybe 1-2% slower). Therefore, the general public would be experiencing these crashes all the time with reviewers having no idea why.

I think that Steve Walton himself would call my theory sound.