The market is full of great graphics cards these days, both for high-end gaming and lesser uses. Although every gamer desires the best GPU he or she can get, many of us have budgets that limit our buying choices to mid-range or affordable solutions. If your budget lets you opt for a mid-range graphics card, and what you're looking for is something that can handle top-notch 1080p gaming, then PowerColor has something for you: the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil. This is their premium 1080p gaming GPU or what you might call "the high-end of mid-range." We've had it in testing, and we used it both for playing games and benchmarking. Read this review, and see how well it works:
PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil: Who is it good for?
The PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card is an excellent choice for those who:
- Want to play games at maxed graphics settings in 1080p Full HD resolutions
- Are looking for excellent performance, but don't want to spend lots of money for higher-end graphics cards
- Want a graphics card with a cooling system that's both powerful and silent
- Like RGB lighting inside their computer case
Pros and cons
There are many good things about the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil:
- The performance is excellent, and so is its price/value ratio
- It can run any game at ultra graphics settings in 1080p resolutions
- Comes with a cooling system that's huge and powerful, but also silent
- It has two BIOS modes: one that allows for maximum performance and one that's designed for keeping the card silent
- There's RGB lighting on it, and it looks great
- Its metal backplate is solid and prevents any bending, although the card is heavy
There are also a few negatives to consider:
- Like any AMD Radeon graphics card, this one doesn't offer hardware support for ray tracing
- There are no games bundled with it
Verdict
The PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil is an excellent graphics card if you're looking for something that can handle any game in 1080p resolutions, no matter how demanding it might be. Unless what you're aiming for is top-notch 1440p gaming, this card is one of the best choices available on the market right now. It's solidly built, it looks beautiful, and has RGB lights for spectacular PC builds. Also, its specs and performance are better than the similarly priced NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660 Ti. We recommend it to anyone who wants to build a PC for 1080p gaming.
Unboxing the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil
The PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card arrives in a large and quite beautiful package. In line with what its name suggests, the box uses red as the accent color and features a devilish Red Devil icon on its front side.
On the front, but mostly on the back of the box, the manufacturer printed information about the graphics card's main features and specs, including details about the GPU's build and cooling system.
Inside the box, you find the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card, a Red Devil sticker, and a couple of leaflets: the quick installation guide and an invitation to the PowerColor Devil Club.
Unboxing the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil is a pleasant experience. The box looks great, and the graphics card is well protected from shocks and static electricity.
Hardware specifications and design
AMD's RX 5600 XT graphics cards are designed to deliver top-notch performance in 1080p gaming. The GPU is built using AMD's latest 7 nm RDNA architecture and comes with all its goodies: Radeon Image Sharpening, FidelityFX, AMD FreeSync, Radeon Anti-Lag, and so on.
The specifications of the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil place it at the top of the ladder of the RX 5600 XT lineup. Furthermore, the default specs of these GPUs are almost identical to the ones of the upper-level AMD RX 5700. To get an idea, both RX 5600 XT and RX 5700 have the same number of shaders (2304) and the same VRAM speed (14 Gbps). The meaningful differences are in the amount of RAM memory available (6 GB vs. 8 GB) and bus width (192-bit vs. 256-bit). That makes the RX 5700 slightly faster than the RX 5600 XT, as well as better suited for 1440p gaming. However, there is little difference between the two GPUs when it comes to 1080p gaming, where the RX 5600 XT really shines.
The PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil uses the PCI Express 4.0 interface and it comes with 6 GB of GDDR6 RAM running at 14.0 Gbps, on a bus width of 192-bit. Its engine clock has a default Game speed of 1660 MHz and can accelerate up to 1750 MHz in Boost mode.
PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil supports a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels over DisplayPort and HDMI. Speaking of which, the GPU comes with three DisplayPort (1.4b) ports and one HDMI (2.0) port, and all of them are backlit by red LEDs so you can easily identify them.
To cool off, the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil uses a massive cooler that does an outstanding job, but also makes the card very thick, covering no less than three PCI slots. Although the giant cooler makes the graphics card a heavyweight player, the metal plate found on the back of the GPU is strong enough to prevent any bending. It's also useful for protection as well as for dissipating some of the heat generated by the card.
The fans on the cooler use two-ball bearings, and that should increase their life up to four times, according to PowerColor. Also, they can automatically turn themselves off when the GPU temperature is below 60 degrees, which is great for reducing power consumption, and if you like silent gaming.
Furthermore, the 0db "Mute Fan Technology" works regardless of whether you set the graphics card BIOS mode to OC or Silent.
On the backplate and also on the visible side of the video card, PowerColor placed two RGB lighting zones. By default, they light up in red to match the Red Devil identity of the card. However, if you prefer other colors and/or lighting effects, you can change them as you wish, using the bundled RGB software: PowerColor Red Devil.
The graphics card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin connector to get electrical power from the power supply unit. PowerColor says that the minimum system power requirement is 500 Watts, which is not much at all.
If you're interested in exact physical dimensions, you should know that the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil is 240 x 118 x 52 mm in length x width x height (9.45 x 4.65 x 2.05 inches). For all the details about the card's hardware specs and features, visit PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil.
AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil is a beautiful and solid graphics card that aims to deliver outstanding performance in 1080p gaming. On the next page of this review, let's see whether all the excellent specs of this GPU confirm our suppositions:
