66 PCWorld AUGUST 2019REVIEWS AMD RADEON RX 5700 AND 5700 XT
capabilities, you’ll need to buy a Ryzen 3000
series processor and an X570 motherboard,
both of which are also launching now. AMD’s
hardware barrage marks the debut of PCIe
4.0 in PCs, while Nvidia and Intel’s hardware
still uses PCIe 3.0. If you don’t have a Ryzen
3000 CPU, fear not, as PCIe 4.0 hardware is
backward-compatible with PCIe 3.0. The
Radeon RX 5700 GPUs will work in any PC.
Both the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT
return to blower-style cooler designs, even
as Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards shift to
dual-axial fans. Herkelman says it was a
conscious decision: Blower-style coolers
expel hot air out of the rear of your system,
while dual-axial fans dump it back into your
rig, requiring your PC to have adequate air
flow from case fans. Sticking to a blower-style
design eliminates potential user error from the
cooling equation and provides a more
universal baseline experience.
The decision makes sense on paper, butanyone who suffered
through a reference
Vega 64 roaring hot fire
next to them might be
cringing right now. It
was unpleasant. The
new cooler isn’t.
Herkelman claims AMD
invested a lot of time
and effort into improving
the Radeon RX 5700
series reference coolers,
and those tweaks manifest in practice. These
coolers still aren’t quiet, but neither have they
crossed the line in being noisy or distracting.
While the reference Navi GPUs run at higher
temperatures than Nvidia’s rival Founders
Edition models, the heat doesn’t affect
performance or usability. (More on that in the
benchmarking sections.)
AMD’s new GPUs feature different shroud
designs. The Radeon RX 5700 looks like a
sturdier, cleaner upgrade to the stark red-on-
black design ethos introduced with AMD’s
Radeon RX 400-series, while the Radeon RX
5700 XT changes things up with a series of
closely spaced lines that run the length of the
black shroud, and a red band that intersects
with the illuminated Radeon logo on the side
of the card. It also packs an intriguing wave-
like deformation on the edge of the card. It’ll
probably prove divisive, but I don’t mind it.
Both cards require 6-pin and 8-pin power
connectors, with the Radeon RX 5700