PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil review: Outstanding for 1080p gaming

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:

Performance in games and benchmarks

We tested PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card using a desktop computer with the following hardware and software:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• CPU Cooler: ASUS ROG RYUO 120
• Motherboard: ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (WI-FI)
• Memory: HyperX Predator DDR4 RGB (2 x 8GB, 3600MHz)
• Storage: ADATA XPG Gammix S11 Pro SSD
• Power Supply Unit: ASUS ROG Thor 850W Platinum
• Operating System: Windows 10 Pro x64 with May 2020 Update

To get a clearer idea of how fast PowerColor's Radeon RX 5600 XT is, we also compared its performance to ASUS' ROG STRIX GTX 1660 Ti GAMING OC. Both video cards have similar prices, and both of them target high-end 1080p gaming. We started by testing the graphics card with World War Z. Using Vulkan API and Ultra graphics quality settings, on the 2560 x 1440 resolution, we obtained a minimum of 117 frames per second (fps), an average fps of 135, and a maximum fps of 187. In 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution, the minimum fps was 116, the average 162, and the maximum 235. As you can see, the RX 5600 XT can render over 100 fps easily, both in 1080p and 1440p, which is an outstanding result and much better than what we got with the NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti! In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with DirectX 12 and Ultra video settings, when playing at a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels, we had a minimum fps of 25, an average of 56, and a maximum fps of 87. In 1920 x 1080 resolution, we saw a minimum fps value of 27, an average of 71, and a maximum of 116fps. Although the minimum fps can drop below 30, the average number of frames is close to 60 in 1440p and above in 1080p. It's generally better than the 1660 Ti and an excellent result considering how demanding this game is. In Battlefield V, which is a popular game and very demanding in terms of hardware resources, we used the DirectX 12 API and the Ultra quality settings. When we ran the game in 1440p, we had a minimum fps of 60, an average of 71, and a maximum of 97. When we switched to 1080p, the minimum fps was 60, the average 96, and the maximum 123. In 1440p, the Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil was clearly better than the 1660 Ti. In 1080p, it managed better average fps and maximum fps, but, oddly, a lesser minimum fps. Overall, excellent results from both cards! Shadow of the Tomb Raider looks fantastic but demands a lot of power from the graphics card. Using the 2560 x 1440 pixels resolution, we had a minimum fps of 47, an average of 58, and a maximum of 83. In 1080p, the minimum was 68 fps, the average fps was 88, and the maximum 134. The performance offered by the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil was excellent and very similar to the NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti. In Tom Clancy's The Division 2, using DirectX 12 and the Ultra graphics quality preset, we had an average fps of 52 fps in 1440p and 80 fps in 1080p. It's an outstanding level of performance, and it's more than what we got from the NVIDIA counterpart! Next, we moved on to Metro Exodus, an incredibly demanding game when it comes to graphics power. Using DirectX 12, the Ultra video preset, and a 1440p resolution, we managed to get a minimum of 24 fps, an average of 42 fps, and a maximum of 60 frames per second. On 1080p, the minimum was 28 fps, the average fps was 53, and the maximum 82. Yet again, the RX 5600 XT was better than the GTX 1660 Ti on all levels. We also tested Fortnite using its Epic graphics preset and DirectX 12. In 1440p, the minimum fps was 48, the average 60, and the maximum was 66. In 1080p, Fortnite ran with a minimum of 83 fps, an average of 104 fps, and a maximum of 120 fps. The performance of the RX 5600 XT was excellent and better than the GTX 1660 Ti in 1080p. Still, in 1440p, it looks like it's the opposite, as the NVIDIA counterpart does a bit better. In Apex Legends, using the highest graphics quality, the graphics card rendered a minimum of 62 fps, an average of 82 fps, and a maximum of 99 fps in 1440p. In 1920 x 1080 resolution, we had 78 fps minimum, 114 fps on average, and 131 fps maximum. Here, the performance is top-notch in either resolution, but it looks like the NVIDIA 1660 Ti does better in 1080p. Maybe the game is better optimized for NVIDIA? Finally, we also benchmarked the graphics card using the 3DMark Time Spy tests, which runs on DirectX 12 and in 2560 x 1440 pixels resolution. Here, we had a score of 6464 points with the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil, and 6938 with the ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1660 Ti GAMING OC. It's a bit odd considering our previous results where the AMD RX 5600 XT did better in most tests, but that's what we got. The power consumed by the video card is also important. According to our measurements, the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card draws up to 140 Watts. It's not extraordinarily much, and it confirms the fact that a 500 Watts power supply unit should be more than enough to power this card even in the most demanding games and workloads. As for the heat produced by this graphics card, Open Hardware Monitor told us that the GPU Hot Spot can get to a maximum temperature of 86 degrees Celsius. The AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card offers high-end performance in 1080p gaming and does a decent job in 1440p too. As far as we've seen, it's definitely better than the similarly priced NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti, so choosing the former over the latter is a no-brainer, in our opinion.

Bundled software

The only software that PowerColor offers for the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil graphics card is an app called PowerColor DevilZone. It lets you adjust the RGB lighting on the graphics card using a bunch of predefined effects and any colors you want. Unfortunately, it doesn't also apply to the red LEDs found on the ports, which are always on and cannot change their colors. Although PowerColor bundles only one app with their 5600 XT premium graphics card, it works well and does its job as it should.

What's your opinion about the PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil?

Now you know what our opinion about the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT Red Devil is, and you know that we like it a lot. Do you agree with us? Did you already buy one? What's your impression of it? Comment below, and let's discuss it.