AMD Radeon RX 5700 & 5700 XT Graphics Card Review

Power Consumption

AMD have always been a bit of an easy target for power consumption jokes, but laugh no longer. The 5700 and the 5700 XT pulled 274.1 and 304.3 Watt each. Given their performance closely aped that of the VEGA 64 and Radeon VII, which used 515 and 530 Watts, that’s a freaking GIANT leap in the right direction. It’s also, to little surprise, similar to the RTX 2070, and less than the RTX 2070. It seems then, AMD finally have their power usage in line with the competition. Even the VEGA 56 still uses nearly 450 Watts!

Temperatures

Temperatures are a little higher, but still within a reasonable limit. Remember blower cards exhaust heat at the back of the card, not into your chassis. So while the cards run warmer they exhaust the heat, thus not warming your system as much over time. There are pros and cons to both, but we saw no evidence of the cards throttling as a result. That being said, the RX 5700 was no hotter than the RTX 2070, and the XT was no hotter than a typical RTX 2080.

Acoustics

The downside of a blower design is the noise level, at least on our test bench. The higher frequency noise is easily muted in a decent PC case though, at least from my own experience. We test on open air benches though, so it was audible. That being said, I don’t think they were as harsh to listen to as the Radeon VII was, which sounded like a server card.