I'm able to play most games at 1440p at 120fps+. It's giving me the framerates I need to play at high/max settings at 1440p, and a definite performance improvement over the GTX 980Ti I was using previously.
I bought this card as an upgrade from an aging nVidia GTX 980Ti. I have a ASUS ROG Strix X470-I Gaming ITX motherboard, 32GB of DDR3200 CL16 RAM, a AMD Ryzen R7 2700X, and a 1440p FreeSync display (LG 32GK650F).
I needed a card that would fit in my Fractal Design Node 304 case, and many other 5700XT cards were too long to fit into the case and would block back of the power supply. This card is taller than most cards, but it's not as long as the other 5700XTs on the market, so it's able to fit into the Node case better. The Node case has a built-in mesh cutout on the side of the cover next to the GPU slot and that lets the dual fans on this card get cool air.
Since I started using this 5700XT card, I had issues with the graphics driver crashing during long gaming sessions. AMD doesn't have the best reputation for their drivers so I thought it would eventually get fixed in a driver update. But as the weeks passed by and new drivers came out, it continued to randomly crash and I was regretting switching over to an AMD card. I starting to think about returning or selling this card.
I didn't think I'd be the only one with this issue, so I searched some forum posts on Reddit and the usual tech websites. I saw that AMD recommends a 700W power supply for these cards, 600W minimum ( https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/radeon-rx-5700-series-quick-start-guide-en.pdf ). My power supply is a 550W Seasonic Focus Gold+, which is just below AMD's minimum guidance. This suggested to me that the 12V pci-e cable was sagging in voltage and that maybe was what was contributing to making the card crash. On my previous card, the 980Ti, I just ran a single cable that had daisy chained 6 + 2 pci-e connectors and that supplied power to the two pci-e power connectors (one is 8 pin, the other is a 6 pin). The single cable was good enough for my old 980Ti, I thought would work with this new card.
I managed to dig up a second pci-e 8 pin power cable and I attached it in parallel with the other pci-e cable going to this 5700XT card. After I gave each pci-e power connector its own cable, the card has been rock solid despite being on a slightly undersized power supply. The extra cable is now allowing the card to get the power/voltage it needs. It's Ohm's law: as the amperage goes up, the voltage goes down. The load is now split across more wires and there's naturally less resistance and less of a voltage drop. I'll have to remember this for future builds.
| RAM | 8 GB |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 1650 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT |
| Chipset Brand | AMD |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 |
