Touted as ASUS ROG’s fastest RX 5600 XT, the Strix RX 5600 XT Top Edition (ROG-STRIX-RX5600XT-T6G-GAMING) bears factory overclocks to the GPU and memory and the renowned Max Contact Cooler. Is this the best RX 5600 XT graphics card money can buy?
Product on Review: ROG STRIX 5600 XT Top Edition
Manufacturer: ASUS Republic of Gamers
Street Price: USD $340 – AUD $629 – GBP £370
Of late we’ve been moving our way through the new AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards from the various GPU partners and next up, it is the turn of ASUS with their ROG division. Currently, ASUS has three options available under the 5600 XT banner – TUF, STRIX OC and STRIX Top Edition. Today, we’ll be exploring the latter!
Positioned as the fastest RX 5600 XT in ASUS’ portfolio, the Top Edition brings a factory overclock to both the GPU boost and memory – taking the GPU boost to 1770MHz and the memory to 1750MHz. While this isn’t the fastest of its kind under the 5600 XT banner, it still has a lot to offer. Moreover, being a STRIX GPU we also have the added benefit of the Max Contact Cooler which has earnt its place as one of the strongest thermal solutions on both sides of the GPU arena.
ASUS ROG on their 5600 XT
The ROG Strix Radeon™ RX 5600 XT is armed to dominate 1080p gaming. Components on the surface of the PCB are precisely soldered with Auto-Extreme Technology and the GPU chip is cooled using MaxContact and a beefy heatsink. On top, three fans leverage our new Axial-tech design, which surpasses our own industry-leading fans from the last generation. In-between those layers are a myriad of additional features like 0dB mode, a reinforced frame, Super Alloy Power II components, and more.
Technical Specifications
Below are the technical specifications surrounding RX 5600 XT supplied directly by ASUS ROG:
GPU
Navi 14 XLE
Stream Processor
2304
Video Memory
6GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
192-bit
Engine Clock Boost
1770MHz
Memory Clock
14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Dual-Fan
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
308 x 55 x 119 mm
Navi 14 XLE
Stream Processor
2304
Video Memory
6GB GDDR6
Memory Bus
192-bit
Engine Clock Boost
1770MHz
Memory Clock
14000MHz Effective
PCI Express
4.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0b
Recommended Power Supply
500W
DirectX
12 API feature level 12_1
OpenGL
4.6
Cooling
Dual-Fan
Slot Size
2
Supported OS
Windows 10
Card Length
308 x 55 x 119 mm
Closer Look Video Review
For this review we’ve produced a video of ASUS ROG STRIX 5600 XT Top Edition against the XFX RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra. In this video we go into great detail about this graphics card, walking you through all of the features and detaching the cooler for a look at the thermal solution and innards. View the video here or watch below:
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:
ZOTAC GTX 1660 SUPER Twin Fan
INNO3D GTX 1660 SUPER Twin X2
ASUS GTX 1660 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1070
NVIDIA GTX 1060
NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1050
ASUS ROG Strix RX 5600 XT TOP
XFX RX 5600 XT THICC III Ultra
Sapphire Pulse RX 5600 XT 6GB
Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT 4GB
AMD RX 590
AMD RX 580
AMD RX 570
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
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
Apex Legends
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018
Battlefield V
Middle Earth: Shadow of War
Apex Legends
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
F1 2018
Battlefield V
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:
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.ACOUSTICS
We found this graphics card would hover around 1500 RPM in most instances under load within the performance profile – even at this fan speed, the noise emitted from this GPU isn’t all that noticeable and it can be considered a quiet solution!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: Apex Legends
Apex Legends is a free-to-play battle royale game developed by Respawn Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts. Set in the same universe as Titanfall, the game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on February 4, 2019.
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.
DX11: Battlefield V
Battlefield V is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA DICE and published by Electronic Arts. Battlefield V is the sixteenth installment in the Battlefield series.
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
This is the third RX 5600 XT that we’ve had the pleasure of taking a look at and we’ve been mightily impressed by what the ROG team has presented in this STRIX Top Edition.
While the slight nudge in clock speeds will only push in-game performance up by marginal figures, the Top Edition still comes out as the fastest option we’ve had on the test bench. This will therefore be the best competition that NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 has yet seen – this Top Edition can in some cases topple NVIDIA’s offering. So, it’s a superb graphics card for gamers who use 1080p resolution, want to crank up the detail preset to maximum and want the best possible frame-rates.
It’s easy to confuse any of the STRIX graphics cards because they all look pretty much identical in their appearance, but that isn’t a negative, these models all look stunning from a styling point of view. There is the added benefit of being able to fully customise the lighting via Aura Sync and even switch off the lighting altogether using a physical switch on the back of the card. ROG also include the extras we’ve seen before such as Fan Connect 2 headers and RGB headers at the end of the card to maximise on cooling and lighting.
The thermal design of the Max Contact cooler is worthy of high praise. The results in our thermal benchmark is testament to the prowess of this solution. It emits low-noise under load and offers some of the lowest temperatures possible thanks to the monstrous heatsink, thermal plate and triple cooling fans… but be warned, this graphics card is heavy and may need extra support if it is being mounted in the traditional method.
It’s no surprise that STRIX cards are often marked as notably more expensive than other graphics cards in the same series – they are almost always far from the base MSRP and the same can be said for this RX 5600 XT. It is priced at: USD $340 – AUD $629 – GBP £370. This is in the same price-range as some of the cheaper 5700 XTs and is in our opinion, too expensive. ASUS should consider re-thinking the price-tag on this Top Edition.
The STRIX RX 5600 XT Top Edition is a superb partner card. It delivers outstanding in-game and thermal performance – the price is just difficult to justify!
Pros
+ Refined, sleek aesthetic
+ Low-noise cooling solution
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Dual-Bios switch for lower noise
+ Excellent 1080p performance
+ Matches the RTX 2060 in performance
Cons
– Power efficiency could be better
– Heavy
– Same price as some 5700 XTs
+ Refined, sleek aesthetic
+ Low-noise cooling solution
+ Decent thermal performance
+ Dual-Bios switch for lower noise
+ Excellent 1080p performance
+ Matches the RTX 2060 in performance
Cons
– Power efficiency could be better
– Heavy
– Same price as some 5700 XTs
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