Triple the fan, triple the cooling!
When it comes to Radeon series of cards, there’s a lot to be chosen from, gamers and enthusiasts will always go to the price to performance value with great FPS balance on the system. Today we will look at the Gigabyte RX 5500 XT 8GB OC, which is slightly beefier than the reference specification, but definitely fits most budgets on users, especially those who wanted a good 1080P gaming experience.
Specifications (Compared to reference unit and RX580)
| RX 5500 XT reference | Gigabyte RX 5500 XT Gaming 8GB OC | RX 580 8GB | |
| PCIe Interface | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 |
| Compute Units | 22 | 22 | 36 |
| Memory size | 4GB or 8GB | 8GB | 8GB |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR5 |
| Stream processors | 2304 | 2304 | 1408 |
| Power Connector | 1 X 8 Pin | 1 X 8 Pin | 1 X 8 Pin |
| Bus Width | 128bit | 128bit | 256bit |
| Memory Clock | 14Gbps | 14Gbps | 8Gbps |
| Base Clock | 1607Mhz | 1685Mhz | 1257Mhz |
| Game Clock | 1717Mhz | 1737Mhz | 1340Mhz |
Unboxing & Contents
The Card detail specifications and features
- WINDFORCE 3X Cooling System with alternate spinning fans
- RGB Fusion 2.0 – 16.7M colors synchronize with other AORUS devices
- Protection Back Plate
Generally all RX 5500 XT cards are based on the NAVI 14 RDNA architecture built on a 7nm structure, and the product is meant to replace the Polaris base cards in the Radeon lineup, which is the RX470, 480, 570 and 580 series of cards. Another new highlight feature is the PCI-E 4.0 interface, which gives better transfer speeds, whether it is for gaming, editing, or some basic content creation.
Test Setup
We will be using the below as a test setup for the Gigabyte RX 5500 XT 8GB and RX580 as comparison
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 1700X |
| Motherboard | MSI B450M PRO2-M2 |
| System Memory | ADATA XPG D41 3200MHz 8GB X 2 |
| Primary Drive | PNY NVME SSD 256GB |
| Secondary Drive | Seagate 1TB HDD 7200RPM |
| PSU | Thermaltake 600w PSU |
| Operating System | Windows 10 64bit Professional |
Benchmark Scores
Verdict & thoughts
With its retail price of RM1,189, we can recommend this card as a good start for 1080p or even 1440p gaming with performance exceeding over 75FPS on most games. Esports titles like CS:GO, Rocket League, DOTA 2, Call Of Duty : Warzone, League of Legends will run perfectly fine and work well if you pair it up till 144hz monitor . It is also a good choice if you wish to buy and use it for editing on Photoshop, Illustrator, even light editing on Premiere Pro with 16GB of system RAM. Overall we are happy with the performance of this card despite the synthetic benchmark side is quite close on scores, but those are just synthetic benchmarks. If you wish to buy this card for VR gameplay and applications, rest assured your Beat Saber and SuperHot VR will run great on it.
Pros
- Reasonable power requirement
- 8GB of VRAM
- 3 Cooling Fans !!!
- A capable 1080p/1440p card on High/Very High settings
- A good card for VR gameplay
Cons
- Card weight is a little bit heavy and long, may not fix on certain PC case
- Price is slightly on the higher side
Special thanks to AMD & Gigabyte for loaning the review unit