The Radeon RX 5600 XT Launch Has Been A Ja-mess

[Mark-x]

During AMD's CES 2020 Press Conference the company revealed the Radeon RX 5600 XT to the world. The RX 5600 XT boasted some fairly competent specs but downplayed enough to keep it far enough away from the existing RX 5700 Series so that it made sense in the market. It appeared to be well positioned with AMD showing wins over the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti so the asking price of $279 wasn't bad.

They announced the full specifications of the card, from Stream Processor count, core clocks, memory clocks, and TDP. Everything was shaping up nicely. After having it point out to them that the GTX 1660 SUPER offered a better value than the GTX 1660 Ti in the same market they even went back and updated with new slides showing how it compared to the SUPER variant. Later in the week, we got to see a new GeForce RTX 2060 KO model from EVGA that was set to be priced at $299 or less when it hit store shelves immediately following the event.  It wasn't long behind that when we got the announcement that the now one-year-old GeForce RTX 2060 was seeing an official drop to $299.

 

This put AMD in an interesting spot where we knew based on the preliminary numbers the RX 5600 XT should find itself close to the RTX 2060 but now was only finding itself within $20 of what it would ultimately compete with in regards to performance. Unlike the 5700 Series there is either not much room for price shifting or they simply refused to budge on margins, either are fine at that price point, but what AMD did do was go back to the drawing board with the clock speeds and power target.

Since AMD was not releasing a reference SKU of this card the decision to boost the clocks was a bit of an odd decision. Why? Because we knew these cards would be coming only from AIBs and they would more likely than not be overclocked already. But it seemed that AMD was working with board partners to boost the performance already according to the quote shared by ETEKNIX regarding the changes.

 

What makes the memory speed such an issue is that we are now seeing a mixture of cards that can be flash, and will later ship with, the faster memory mixed in with cards of the slower memory. The problem is with the lack of reviews, kudos to those who included preflash results, that showcase anything but the best-case scenario. If all future cards come with the faster memory, great, if not it's most certainly a buyer beware moment, as Brad Chacos of PC World so elegantly put it.

Thanks to a list compiled by Computer base we can get a snapshot of the market for RX 5600 XT models of which have a BIOS update available and which do not. According to the list, it appears that MSI is taking the safe approach with their Gaming and Mech models by not planning to allow for an update on those models. While Asus is still open the others on the list are allowing for an update to their cards. At this point, I would highly recommend going with a vendor whose warranty is best in your region. Another point of advice will be to find a review of the SPECIFIC card you're looking to purchase because there could be a 10% or better performance swing between RX 5600 XT models, and that's a big enough difference to be in a different performance class.