Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC Review: RGB Custom Navi Power

Custom Radeon RX 5700 series boards have been arriving at a steady clip over the last few weeks. Some of the most commonly voiced concerns regarding AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 reference designs were the noise output and relatively high junction temperatures offered by the stock, blower-style cooler. Partner boards promised quieter, more robust cooling solutions, however, designed to address exactly those concerns. We took a look at the PowerColor Red Devil RX 5700 XT a couple of weeks back, and save for its wider footprint and slightly higher price, we found it to be an across-the-board upgrade over the reference design. Today, we bring you the second, all-custom Radeon RX 5700 XT to hit the lab, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G.

Like the PowerColor card, the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G sports a custom PCB and cooling solution, along with a few additional bells and whistles like customizable RGB lighting and higher than reference frequencies, as evidenced by that subtle “OC” in the branding. Take a look at the actual specifications for the card below and then we’ll dig in a little deeper, and see how it performs and overlcocks on the pages ahead...

Gigabyte RX 5700 XT GAMING OC 8G Specifications & Features

Graphics Processing	Radeon RX 5700 XT
Core Clock	Boost Clock: Up to 1905 MHz, Game Clock: 1795 MHz, Base Clock: 1650 MHz
Stream Processors	2560
Process Technology	7nm
Memory Clock	14000 MHz
Memory Size	8 GB
Memory Type	GDDR6
Memory Bus	256 bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	448 GB/s
Card Bus	PCI-E 4.0 x 16
Digital max resolution	7680x4320@60Hz
Multi-view	4
Card size	L=279.85 W=114.35 H=49.55 mm
Recommended PSU	600W
Power Connectors	8-Pin x 1, 6-Pin x 1
Output	DisplayPort 1.4 x 3, HDMI 2.0b x 1

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At first glance, it’s obvious that the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G has a completely different design than AMD’s own Radeon RX 5700 XT, but underneath the beefy heatsink and angular shroud, Gigabyte made some more subtle changes as well. For one, the base and game clocks are different on this card. The boost clock, however, is similar to AMD’s design.

AMD’s reference card has a base clock of 1,605MHz, whereas the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G’s is 1,650MHz. The game clock on the Gigabyte card, which is in-line with what users should expect while gaming, is 1,795MHz – AMD’s is 1,755. Both the reference design and the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G have a max boost clock of 1,905MHz.

What those tweaks to the frequencies mean is that the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G should offer slightly better performance in some scenarios, but not necessarily all because real-world frequencies under load on Radeon RX 5700 XT’s typically land somewhere in between the game and max boost clocks, assuming thermals and power are in check.

Additional features on the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G include a couple of additional power phase, and customizable RGB lighting, which can be controlled via Gigabyte’s RGB Fusion tool. Over and above tweaking the color, the lighting on the card can be set to a number of different modes – like blinking, cycling, solid, etc. There are a couple of LEDs tucked away near the power connectors on the card, to indicate whether power from the PSU is connected and functioning properly as well.

Gigabyte’s Windforce 3X cooler is the star of the show here, though. The Windforce 3X features three 80mm fans, with ribbed fan blades to add rigidity and reduce noise. And those fans spin in alternate directions to minimize turbulence and maximize air-flow through the heatsink fins. Speaking of the heatsink, there is a heat-plate under the assembly that makes contact with the card’s VRM and 8GB of GDDR6 memory (clocked at 14GHz, like AMD’s spec), along with a larger array of thin-fins, linked together via 5-composite heat pipes and a copper heat plate, which make direct contact with the GPU. The overall design is 2.5-slots wide, which is wider than the blower on AMD’s reference design, but as you’ll see a little later, the Windforce 3X cooler affords significantly lower temperatures and it is much quieter too.
Outputs on the Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT Gaming OC 8G consist of a trio of full-sized DisplayPorts (v1.4) in addition to an HDMI port (2.0b).

And now, let's see how this thing performs...