 That looks promising. That looks very promising. To be clear, I'm scoping out the FPS numbers, not the protagonist. I play this game for the gameplay. Compared to old school Lara Croft, this does look a lot more promising. New year, new GPU. According to the latest Steam hardware survey, the most popular graphics card on the platform is still the venerable, if a little aging, GTX 1060. And that's what we've got set up in our rig right here. And 90% of you are running at 1080p, which means that you're actually getting a pretty decent experience out of that card. But maybe you could use a higher frame rate, right? You know, treat yourself. The problem is that there hasn't been anything worth upgrading to from this thing, because the RTX 2060 came in at a much higher price. That is to say, until today. Meet the Radeon 5600 XT, what could very well be the new budget champ, or will it? We'll find out after I tell you about our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the accounting software that's built for how you wanna work. Are you a small business owner or a freelancer? Well, go get it. Go get it! The link's down below. It's always there. It's always there. The first thing I wanna do is acknowledge that this is gonna be a little bit different from our traditional GPU reviews, where we say, okay, there's this one and there's all these other ones, and here's some bar graphs and all that kind of good stuff. There will still be bar graphs, and we do still have this GPU and other ones. But because so many of you out there are running this exact graphics card, we wanted to take more of a practical, real-world upgrade approach to it. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take our GPU test bench, which is running a Ryzen 3950X, which has pretty honestly pretty similar gaming performance to any Intel high-end CPU from the last two or three years. And then we're gonna start with our 1066 gig in here. We're gonna upgrade to our 5600 XT, and we're gonna see how it goes. So Anthony, actually, do you wanna jump in and get our sweet rollin' on this thing? One of the reasons that we have a fully built-up system for GPU testing is that we don't wanna give an unfair advantage to open-style coolers like this one and this one and this one compared to blower coolers. We're making these ones suck in their own recirculated hot air, just like they would in your system at home. Are you using 1080 Max settings on everything? Yes. Okay, that makes perfect sense, because much to the disappointment of a lot of the enthusiast community, the 5600 XT is not really targeting your 1440p gamer. And there's a couple of reasons for this. Number one is that 1080p is still by far the most popular gaming resolution, probably in no small part, thanks to the fact that high refresh rate displays, like the really high refresh rate competitive ones, are all still 1080. And also, because, well, if we're being honest, AMD has had a heck of a time building anything other than a 1080p gaming graphics card over the last few years. With that said, this is using the same underlying tech as the 5700 XT, so this is a full fat Navi 10 GPU. The main disadvantage here is what, just clock speed then? Clock speed, power target, and it has a 192-bit memory bus and six gigabytes of memory versus 256 and eight gigabytes for the 5700. So that's where you're saving some money and that's where you're improving your yields on the GPUs. But of course, compared to the 5700, which was really a mid-range 1440p gaming card, this is a high-end 1080, low-end 1440. Like if you're playing last gen titles, 1440p is gonna be fine, but we're gonna do all of our testing at 1080 with a nice, fast CPU to see what kind of experience we can have here. I'm actually really excited to see the numbers from this because honestly, one of the best indications of how good an upcoming card is gonna be is what the competitors do to react to it. Before you ever even get a chance to benchmark the thing. And Nvidia already sent out proactive, just so you know, there's some great pricing on, what was it, 1660 Ti? Yeah, I think it was the Ti because we're probably gonna get rid of it soon. But like AMD did that same thing with Vega 56. Nvidia's email was this one board partner card, an EVGA KO, which honestly, the first time I remember them using KO was back when Nvidia was trying to get rid of a whack ton of like 7,800 GPUs or something like that. It was the first time I saw an EVGA KO. And it was basically the last hurrah for that GPU and then it was gone. So that maybe gives us some idea of what the exit strategy there is, but it also gives us some idea of how good we're expecting this thing to be. Nvidia had to react, so that's a great sign. Because the reality of it is, the order of operations is, the first ones with access to the hardware are the manufacturers. The next ones are usually their competitors. Somehow they always have this information. And then it comes to us. So usually the 4D chess is already happening before we even get to plug it into a system. One thing to note is that we're going from a single six pin connector to a single eight pin connector. So that might tell us something about the power consumption we can expect from the 5600 XT. I mean, we already know something because it is based on the same GPU as the 5700 series. Wait, you guys were just waiting for me? You didn't run any benchmarks? Well, they're all done. Oh, oh right. Okay, right. So that's the whole shtick here. So Anthony already ran the stock numbers for the 5600 XT, but AMD hinted that there might be quite a bit of overclocking headroom in this card. So let's go ahead and see what we can do. What utility do you use for AMD? I just use Radeon Control, so it's Radeon software. This is their new software, Performance. There we go. And Tuning. Advanced Control? Yeah, that gives you control over the frequency and voltage curve. Oh, cool. Okay, so where do we want it then? So we just want to expand it out as far as it'll go, I guess. Maybe, yeah. So they've got a much better looking interface than Nvidia, but it's effectively the same thing. You got one button. You press the button. Well, yeah, there's also the power tuning, which is the more impressive of V2. Well, not really impressive, but useful. All right, sure. That looks pretty good, whatever. Okay, so where's the power control? Here we go. Power tuning, power limit. Okay, yeah, so this is basically Nvidia overclocking. Yeah, and we also can do the VRAM as well. Max frequency, okay. About 110 megahertz. Sure, why not? Okay, cool. So let's apply that and see what happens. We can also, if you go to the fan as well, right now I think the max is 39%. Okay, let's give it 80. It's not gonna instantly set it to 80. It's just the maximum that it'll be able to request. Play. Let's see if it just immediately crashes. And that was a very haphazard overclock. It's about as much as I did when I was preparing for this. So we'll see how this works. Of course, you don't know what the stock numbers look like. Oh yeah, no, I don't. Okay, so I just get to be that much more impressed. Wow. What's the pricing of this card? It's, this particular card is 289. 289, that is a big upgrade. So all of a sudden you're going from 60 FPS to, yeah, you can comfortably justify the investment in a 120 hertz display. And you're really gonna be getting the most out of it, especially with how affordable it is to get a FreeSync capable display these days. Yeah, and the fact that most of them that say G-Sync now are also FreeSync. Of course, it's easy to look good against your competitors last gen product. So let's go ahead and level the playing field by bringing in the GTX 1660 Super and the 1660 Ti. Now this one is priced a little bit lower, but comes in a little bit lower also performance wise, whereas the 1660 Ti is clearly the head to head competitor here. This one is priced exactly the same, has a little bit less raw performance. But if you care about some of Nvidia's, well, Nvidia specific features, not RTX mind you, this is a GTX, but things like Nvidia's Turing and Venk encoder, which does offer better quality, even if AMD does have some sort of counter punches like the fact that there's support 16 streams. Yeah, it's a little bit strange considering they're otherwise very focused on gamers and gaming performance, which I mean, to me a higher quality encoder would make more sense than faster encoder, but. Okay, oh, hold on guys. Literally the day after we shot this video, Nvidia dropped the RTX 2060's price to 299, completely invalidating our comparison against the GTX 1660 Ti. That's a good thing for you guys, but it did mean more work for us. Here's how the RTX 2060 looks next to the RX 5600 XT. As you can see, AMD is still in the lead here, but Nvidia is now within striking distance. With a price difference of just $20, AMD is slightly undercutting Nvidia with better performance, but if you're like me, you might consider paying the extra $20 and overclocking the RTX yourself to get that RTX support and the new Nvenk encoder. Regardless, that's great news for everyone because not only is there a new card on the block, but at least it's competitive in this price range, bringing other more expensive hardware down in price. So yeah, that's great. Just too bad it couldn't have got here sooner. See ya. That's just me. Not everyone cares about the encoder that's built into their GPU anyway though. Not everybody streams on Twitch TV, for example. So when it comes time to choose your next upgrade, the only thing we really know for sure here is that you probably shouldn't pick up a GTX 1060 at $289, but either Team Red or Team Green has a legitimate offering, especially once you factor in the generous headroom for overclocking on the 5600 XT. Another interesting point is that we don't actually know that that's the limit for these things. That was the end of the slider, and Anthony was trying to use a soft power play table in order to increase it, but that seems to be locked down. Now, AMD has hinted that they might unlock more capabilities in the future. Yeah, they didn't say anything substantial about it. They just said that we'll look at it when we know more about the reliability figures. We just don't want boards to go up in smoke. So. That makes sense. It does make sense. Speaking of going up in smoke, my attempts to pretend that I care about the quality of my segues. This video is brought to you by privacy.com. 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