AMD launched the Radeon Navi cards earlier this month to tackle NVIDIA’s growing influence in the mid-range market. Although the initial prices were fixed at $399 and $449, the RTX Super announcement forced AMD to slash the MSRP at the very last minute. Whether it was a planned move or improvisation is debatable, but regardless, the upper-midrange GPU market is competitive all of a sudden.
The RTX 2060 is cheaper than ever, the Supers offer performance on par with the higher-end vanilla RTX cards and the Radeon 5700 lineup just adds further spice to the mix. We’ve already reviewed the RX 5700 XT and found it competing with the RTX 2070 Super at the price of the 2060 S, albeit lacking the fancy ray-tracing and DLSS features which are set to become more and more widespread in the coming months.
In this post, we have a look at its younger sibling, the Radeon RX 5700 and see how it stacks up against the competing GeForce RTX cards. We put the card through its paces in seven of the most intensive PC games at the moment and decide if it makes the cut. We’ll also be overclocking the card and analyze the acoustics and thermals in the process.
TestBench
- CPU: Intel Core i7-8700K
- Motherboard: Asus Maximus Hero X
- Memory: 16GB DDR4 HyperX RAM @ 3000MHz
- Storage: WD Black 4TB
- PSU: Corsair HX1000i
For an architectural debrief please go through our RX 5700 XT review. Here, we’ll be focusing on the gaming performance of the card at QHD and 4K, as this card is too high-spec for 1080p. Please note that the orange bar denotes the performance at QHD while the grey one represents 4K. Furthermore, all the games were tested at the highest in-game preset except Deus Ex for which the high preset was used.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 1440p Gaming Benchmarks
The Radeon RX 5700 is more or less on par with the RTX 2060 Super in most titles, with some minor wins and a few losses in GeForce titles. It edges past in Ashes, Deus Ex, while the 2060 Super is marginally faster in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro. As for the rest of the titles, the performance is tied with deltas as low as 1/2 a frame at 1440p.
Overclocking and Thermals
Overclocking the Navi cards is a major headache. For starters, they run hot (at least the reference cards do), and secondly Afterburner doesn’t work properly with the RX 5700 lineup. I also don’t understand what AMD’s design team has been doing all these years, since Vega the blower-style heatsink hasn’t changed one bit. Sure the 5700 XT has a bump on its back and looks like it’s made of denim but honestly, they look like cinder bricks compared to NVIDIA’s new Founders’ Edition dual-fan design.
Unlike the XT variant, the RX 5700 runs relatively cooler with the max GPU temperature rarely crossing the 82-83 degree mark. Despite that though, since Wattmann is the only supported tweaking tool we kept running into issues while OC’g. One time, the night mode seemingly turned on (it didn’t but it sure as hell looked like it), and then after a while the screen started blinking when we increased the power slider to 120%. Regardless, we were able to increase the core frequency by +75 and the memory by +50. Anything more than this, and the card kept resetting to the stock values.
The gains are within the margin of error and it doesn’t take long for the GPU to start throttling as the core begins to approach 100 degrees. I’d suggest sticking to the clock speeds if you are using the reference card or a blower-style heatsink as you won’t be getting any worthwhile benefits from overclocking.
Conclusion
For the global customer, the RX 5700 provides better value than the RTX 2060 Super but of course, you lose out on the Turing RTX goodies, namely ray-tracing and DLSS. However, if you consider the Indian consumer, the prices are skewed in NVIDIA’s favor. You can snag an RTX 2060 Super for as low as 34.5K INR while the Radeon RX 5700 retails for 32K INR approximately. That’s a delta of just 2 grand. You’re basically getting ray-tracing capability for just two thousand five-hundred rupees. Now, it’s your call what you want, but regardless, the RX 5700 marks AMD’s return to the midrange GPU segment.
- Product name: AMD Radeon RX 5700 Graphics Card
- Price: 31,999 INR
- Codename: Navi
- Architecture: 7nm RDNA
Pros:
- Great bang for your buck
- Efficient TDP thanks to the 7nm node
- Impressive 1440p performance
Cons:
- Only 2.5K cheaper than RTX 2060 Super
- No RTX support despite minor price gap
- Reference model runs hot
Further Reading:
Non super rtx 2060 is available as low as ₹26975.
₹5000 less from rx5700 & approx ₹8000 less from its super counterpart.
Should I go for non super variant of 2060 at this price point ?
Yeah that’s not a bad deal at all
I would say just go for non super rtx 2060 , super version is only like 10-15 % faster
If you don’t care about ray tracing, you can go for vega 56 ,same performance as rtx 2060 for 22,000 !
Shove that fake rtx up your ass
I feel like people put too much weight on ray tracing and RTX cards, which I feel is pointless, especially for the midranged cards. The current implementation fails to impress me and the performance of RTX cards below 2080 are rarely impressive. AMD’s Image Sharpening is a much more grounded and overlooked feature when it comes to entry mid-range hardware and i feel it deserves more scrutiny, especially against DLSS. Ray tracing, in itself, is awesome and it will be mainstream, that’s inevitable; but it will take at least 2 more years to grow out of infancy with optimal implementation, being supported and accepted as a staple tech by all game devs, etc etc. But by then, nVidia, AMD and even Intel will have better ray tracing capable gpus anyway. So, my take on this is that, if you’re gunning for mid-ranged hardware, the new AMD cards are great (I rate RIS over RTX & DLSS at this price and performance class) but wait for AiB cards to enter the market. If you want higher tier cards, obviously, it’s nVidia for now; there’s no competition. These are merely my opinions though.