XFX RX 5700 XT THICC III ULTRA Review

XFX are back with an even larger variant of their THICC graphics card. The THICC III ULTRA arrives with a revamped cooler and promises to deliver even better performance.

Product on Review: 5700 XT THICC III ULTRA
Manufacturer: XFX
Street Price: USD $440 GBP £420 AUD 669

Two months on from the initial AMD 5700 XT launch sees the release of a new model under the XFX portfolio. It’s unclear whether XFX originally intended to bring to market a triple fan design, or whether the report of soaring temperatures from the Navi-based cards spurred this on, but nevertheless it’s intriguing to explore a revamped design today.

In our hands is the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC III ULTRA – a factory overclocked variant of the XT bearing a triple fan configuration. THICC III is broadly based on the THICC II with some notable differences, the most obvious being an upgrade from two fans to three fans, but that isn’t all. The heatsink has been extended and the VRAM now benefits from the use of the use of copper.

Can this cooling revamp mark XFX out as having one of the best coolers for the 5700 XT? Let’s find out!

XFX on their THICC III Ultra

Introducing the new XFX THICC III Ultra 5700 XT. Built with style and dynamic cooling power in mind to yield lower temperatures and heightened performance that adapt to the intensity of the moment.
Get the very best FPS the 5700 XT Series can deliver. Thanks to the 2 90mm fans and 100mm fan and copper GDDR Heatsink the THICC III Ultra stays cool and quiet, allowing you to achieve higher boost clocks.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding 5700 XT THICC III Ulltra supplied directly by XFX:

GPU
NAVI 10 XT
Stream Processor
2560
Video Memory
8GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
256-bit
Engine Clock
1870 MHz
Engine Clock Boost
2025MHz
Memory Clock
1750MHz – 14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
4x DisplayPort 1.4
2x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
650W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Triple Fan
Slot Size
2.7
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
310 x 56 x 115 mm

Closer Look Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review showing the physical design of this graphics card, highlighting its features and stripping it down by removing the thermal solution. You can watch the video below or click on this link to watch the 5700 XT THICC III Ultra.

Test Setup & Methodology

HOW WE TEST GRAPHICS CARDS

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

HARDWARE

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti
NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2080
ZOTAC NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER Twin Fan
NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2070
NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER
NVIDIA RTX 2060
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
AMD Radeon Vega 56
AMD Radeon RX 5700
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
ASUS STRIX RX 5700 XT
XFX RX 5700 XT THICC II ULTRA
MSI RX 5700 XT GAMING X
PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5700
ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi
XFX RX 5700 XT THICC III ULTRA

Special thanks go to Avermedia, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H150i Pro 360mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Avermedia Live Gamer Extreme 2

BENCHMARKS

If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

Fortnite
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Kingdom Come Deliverance
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools and FRAPS.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

3DMark Time Spy
3DMark FireStrike
Unigine: SuperPosition
Unigine: Heaven 4.0

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

TEMPERATURE

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

With the 5700 Series, we’ve also begun reporting on the max. VRAM temperature throughout our stress tests, the result is below.

ACOUSTICS

The THICC III ULTRA is remarkably quiet under full load – even in performance mode and it will not present any issues in regards to noise emission.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

Download your copy now

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Download your copy now

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is UL’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine SuperPosition

Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs. Top-notch visuals, support for VR-devices and an interactive mode with mini-games — the list of features built into Superposition could go on and on.

DX11: Fortnite

Fortnite Battle Royale is the FREE 100-player PvP mode in Fortnite. One giant map. A battle bus. Fortnite building skills and destructible environments combined with intense PvP combat. The last one standing wins.

DX11: Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It is the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

DX11: Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a story-driven open-world RPG that immerses you in an epic adventure in the Holy Roman Empire. Avenge your parents’ death as you battle invading forces, go on game-changing quests, and make influential choices.

DX12: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Eidos Montréal in conjunction with Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix. It continues the narrative from the 2013 game Tomb Raider and its sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider, and is the twelfth mainline entry in the Tomb Raider series.

DX11: F1 2018

F1 2018 is a racing video game and the tenth instalment in the Formula One video game franchise developed and published by Codemasters. The game is based on the 2018 Formula One World Championship and includes all twenty-one circuits from the calendar and all twenty drivers and ten teams competing in the season.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Please note: we’ve used GBP for currency but since this is relative – regardless of which currency you use, this will give you a good indication of value for money.

Conclusion

The first wave of 5700 XT graphics cards that hit the market received quite a bit of flak for soaring temperatures – especially when VRAM thermals are under consideration. While the THICC II didn’t present a severe weakness in this department there was still room for improvement and that’s where the THICC III comes in.

In the THICC III ULTRA, XFX has gone away and redesigned the entire cooler – including another cooling fan, extending the heatsink and including copper contact for the VRAM. All three of these elements combine to enhance the thermal solution for the 5700 XT, and this new variant is an excellent choice if cooling is a particular concern. There is very little to separate this classification of GPU on the performance front (as you can see from the preceding test results) and so it is the cooler which separates many of the different models.

Much like the styling on the THICC II, the THICC III incorporates a chrome effect which brings something fresh and unique to the market. Although the design of the card may not be to everyone’s taste, we appreciate its physical appearance and many will favour the omission of RGB. One thing which will need to be taken into account if you have a smaller chassis is the sheer size of this graphics card – it is big, and heavy!

Coming in at a cost of $440 USD / $669 AUD, THICC III ULTRA is an appealing option, based on its cooling strengths and the generous 3 years of warranty on offer.

We applaud XFX for revamping their cooling solution for the 5700 XT. The THICC III ULTRA improves on thermals and is definitely one to drop onto the shortlist if you fancy AMD Navi.

Pros
+ Unique styling/design
+ Idle fan stop technology
+ Side steps RGB
+ Includes dual-BIOS
+ Excellent performance
+ Solid cooling design
+ 3 years warranty

Cons
– Large and heavy
– High power consumption

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

Stay connected with the Vortez Social Media pages:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Join in with the discussions on Discord