AMD Launches Radeon RX 5600 XT For 279 USD – Up To 20% Faster Than NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti

AMD has launched its NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti killer in the form of the RX 5600 XT. Boasting anywhere from 5% to 20% more performance (depending on the game in question) than the RTX 1660 Ti, the AMD Navi 10-equipped GPU is going to be retailing for USD 279 (roughly the same price as a 1660 Ti). Our review of the RX 5600 XT has been delayed a bit because of the frequent BIOS updates, but rest assured it will be going up soon!

AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT launched for USD 279

The story of the RX 5600 XT BIOS versions is really interesting as well. NVIDIA responded to the imminent launch of the RX 5600 XT by dropping the MSRP on its RTX 2060 (non-SUPER) by USD 50 and AMD responded with not one but two BIOS. In fact, we received a third BIOS for the RX 5600 XT just one day before the reviews were scheduled to go live (therefore the delay).

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The AMD RX 5600 XT features the Navi 10 XLE chip with 2304 cores. Clocked at 1560 MHz, this is the first card to feature 6GB of GDDR6 memory along with a 192-bit bus. The memory clock is 12 Gbps for many cards while some are shipping with overclocked memories as well. This means you are looking at a minimum bandwidth of 288 GB/s all the way up to 336 GB/s. The TBP is 150W (and up to 180W for the OC variants) and the MSRP of 279 USD puts it dead center of NVIDIA's bread and butter budget-level lineup.

Coming to the memory design, this is where we start seeing major differences between the Radeon RX 5700 and the Radeon RX 5600 XT. While the Radeon RX 5700 rocks an 8 GB GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit wide bus interface, the Radeon RX 5600 XT would rock a 6 GB GDDR6 memory with a 192-bit bus interface. The Radeon RX 5700 also delivers a higher 448 GB/s bandwidth, utilizing the 14 Gbps DRAM dies while the Radeon RX 5600 XT will offer 288 GB/s bandwidth, utilizing slower 12 Gbps DRAM dies. The card will require a single 8-pin power connector and display outputs include a single HDMI 2.0b and triple DisplayPort 1.4 ports.

Full performance benchmarks of the RX 5600 XT (vanilla) are given below:

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The new BIOS that AMD released not only increases the clock speeds of the graphics cards but also increases the TBP. In some cases, the memory clock speed is also increased. This means that the performance levels you are seeing below are actually "conservative" and actual performance should be even higher. NVIDIA is going to be facing a lot of heat with the launch of the new RX 5600 XT and this is something that results from the fact that the company is still stuck on the 16/14 node while AMD GPUs are manufactured on the 7nm node.

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In terms of performance, the card outpaces the GTX 1660 TI which costs the same at $279 and the GTX 1660 SUPER which is very similar to the GTX 1660 Ti in performance at a price of $229 US. Some early performance tests show that the card doesn't have enough power to rival the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 which makes things for it a little hard as EVGA has since released their new RTX 2060 KO edition cards which start at $279 US, the same price as the RX 5600 XT without even factoring in the custom model premium. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, on the other hand, is up to 20% faster than the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER while offering added features such as RTX, DLSS, etc.

Review roundup of the RX 5600 XT:

• Wccftech RX 5600 XT Review (Delayed)
• Igor's Lab RX 5600 XT Review
• Anandtech RX 5600 XT Review
• Gamer's Nexus RX 5600 XT Review
• Hexus RX 5600 XT Review
• Hot Hardware RX 5600 XT Review
• KitGuru RX 5600 XT Review
• Tom's Hardware RX 5600 XT Review