When it comes to custom AMD graphics cards, XFX is one of the leading brands that manufacture Radeon GPUs at an affordable rate. We recently got a chance to review the older and popular XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU, and here are our thoughts about it.
Design
XFX has been following a similar design philosophy throughout all its graphics card generations and the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT is no exception here. The graphics card features a black matte shroud with dual-fans. There is also the XFX insignia that is placed horizontally on the right side of the shroud. The fans feature the XFX Zero DB Fan technology which ensures that the fans spin in an efficient manner to avoid the annoying sounds during gaming. The fans will start to spin and increase the speed depending on the load and the temperatures. They weren’t actually kidding though because when we were conducting benchmarks for the GPU, we had left the fans in their default state without manually setting the speeds. The fans remained still for quite a while until the heat started to build-up.
However, once the fans were quite noisy when it started spinning. That said, the Zero DB Fan also takes effect for all light loads and the blades just remain still no matter how long. There are also white rims around the fan blade portion and also the presence of XFX branding stickers on the middle of the fans. The card also features quite a large heatsink to help dissipate the heat from the GPU die. The heat sinks are exposed on both the top and bottom portion of the card. Another aspect to be noted is that this card uses an 8+4 power connection. XFX recommends a minimum of 600W PSU for this to work.
There is a large-sized air vent portion on the opposite end of the ports section. The air vents allow for air to circulate and dissipate the heat efficiently. The air vents feature silver grills and silver borders.
On the output section, the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT offers three Display Port 1.4 with HDR support and one HDMI 2.0 port. Once again you can find the XFX branding on the output section in the form of a cut-out.
Talk about overdoing but there is the XFX branding also located on the metal backplate of the graphics card. The XFX branding takes up most of the space on the rear side. The backplate has its own miniature air vents spread all over the rear side.
The overall graphics card takes up about 2.7 slots of space on the motherboard. The package of the product also includes an 8-pin to the 6-pin power cable, a 6-pin to the 4-pin power cable, an installation DVD disc, and the installation guide.
Specification
While Radeon RX 6000 series is the latest graphics card line-up from XFX, the new cards can be expensive for many gamers out there who have a modest budget. The Radeon RX 5700XT was initially launched around August 2019 and was good for its time. The card was the direct competitor of NVIDIA’s RTX 2070 GPU and featured a lower price tag that was compelling for many users who wanted to game at 2K resolutions. Now with the reduced prices, the card is quite a good choice for budget gamers.
The Radeon RX 5700XT is based on the first generation RDNA architecture and the GPU on the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT features a base clock speed of 1730 MHz, game clock speeds that go up to 1870 MHz, and the boost clocks topping up to 1980 MHz speeds. The RDNA GPU is based on the 7nm fabrication process that offers better power efficiency. The GPU packs up to 2560 stream processors. The card comes with 8GB GDDR6 memory paired with a 256-bit memory bus and the memory clocks tweaked up to 14 Gbps. The XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT also makes use of the PCI-E 4.0 slots.
Testbed and Benchmarks
We tested the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT on the same testbed that was used for our AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT review. The configuration of the testbed includes the processor that we mentioned, the Kingston 32GB 3200MHz Fury RAM/ GSkill 32GB 3600 MHz TridentZ RGB DDR4 RAM, the ASUS TUF X570 PLUS GAMING motherboard, the Kingston KC2500 NVMe SSD with Windows 10 installed, 2TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD to store most of the heavy games, Corsair iCUE H100i Pro XT RGB all-in-one cooler, XFX XTI 1000W PSU, and of course, the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU. The Kingston memory was used for some tests, while we used the faster GSkill RAM modules for game benchmarks. We tested the card with 3D Mark tests such as FireStrike and TimeSpy series. The games that we used include Rise of the Tomb Raider (DX11, DX12 modes), Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX11, DX12 modes), Metro Exodus (DX11, DX12 modes), and Ashes of Singularity: Escalation for both GPU and CPU (DX11, DX12, Vulkan modes). All the game titles were tested on 1080p and 2K video resolutions. We also tried the Unigine tests such as Heaven, Valley, and Superposition benchmarks.
Our benchmark tests for the FireStrike, FireStrike Extreme, and FireStrike Ultra delivered very similar scores when using the Kingston 3200MHz RAM and the GSkill 3600 MHz DDR4 RAM modules. However, the faster RAM does offer a considerable gain for the FireStrike Extreme test.
The same case goes for our TimeSpy and TimeSpy Extreme tests that focus on DX12 level API. Both the RAM speeds delivered similar scores when paired with the ASUS TUF X570 PLUS GAMING, the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU, and the AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT processor.
For our benchmarks related to game performance, we decided to use only the faster GSkill 3600MHz RAM with the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT. All games were tested on the highest settings at 1080p and 2K video resolutions. We did not enable any AMD or NVIDIA specific game effects on the presets. The games were tested on both DX11 and DX12 modes.
And here are the benchmark scores, min/max fps, and average framerates on the Unigine Valley, Heaven, and Superposition tests in both 1080p and 2K resolutions with the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT.
Verdict
While AMD is quite busy with the release of the RX 6000 series GPUs, the new RDNA 2 based graphics cards belong to the high-end category and are a bit expensive for the average user. When the Radeon RX 5700 XT was released a few years ago, it was marketed as a GPU that can handle 2K graphics and was considerably cheaper and better than the RTX 2070 GPU (except for the ray-tracing). And now with the release of the RX 6000 series cards, it’s an obvious fact that the previous generation would get cheaper and the same goes for the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU.
If you’re looking to build a decent gaming system and don’t wish to spend a lot, then the XFX THICC II Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT is a good choice to consider, regardless if it’s for 1080p or 2K gaming. The GPU performs quite well in demanding games at the highest resolutions and a bit of tweak will ensure a stable framerate performance. The card also offers a good number of output ports for multi-monitor setups and the device also features both Zero DB fan state and an efficient cooling solution.
