To Pay For 8GB Or Not Is The Question
As you have obviously poured over Sebastian’s review already and hopefully lambasted him for neglecting to count the total number of screws holding the card together, you are familiar with the basics of the new AMD RX 5500 XT. It consumes 100W less power than an RX 590 and it’s performance occasionally comes within a few frames of that older card; more importantly it outperforms NVIDIA’s GT 1650 Super and costs $10 less. The 5500 XT does slurp 30W more power than the 1650 Super, by the way. When you overclock it like The FPS Review did, cranking the Power Limit up to +20%, boosting the GPU up to 1950MHz from 1845MHz and pushing the memory to the hard limit of 14.8GHz from 14GHz the results are even better.
However, there is a different question which you might be asking, is the price delta between the $169 4GB model and the $199 price tag of the 8GB model worth paying for? At $199 the question many have wondered, which is if NVIDIA will drop the price of the GT 1650 Super by $10 to match the price of the 5500 XT becomes moot as that price point is already occupied by the GTX 1660.
Kitguru tested the ASRock RX 5500 XT Challenger which is an 8GB card against the same 4GB Sapphire card The FPS Review used, as well as a slew of other models to see if the extra money is worth it. As is revealed in the data they collected during the review, the answer is a solid maybe. Check out why that is here.
The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT is the video card being launched today. There will be two variants, those with 4GB of VRAM and those with 8GB. The 4GB model has an MSRP of $169. The 8GB model has an MSRP of $199. Let’s go over the specs below.
More Tech News From Around The Web
- MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT GamingX 8GB @ Guru of 3D
- MSI Radeon RX 5500 XT Gaming X 8 GB @ TechPowerUp
- ASUS Dual Radeon RX 5500 XT EVO 8GB @ Guru of 3D
- PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5500 XT 8GB vs. the Sapphire RX 5500 XT 4GB Pulse with 46 Games @ BabelTechReviews
- PowerColor Radeon 5500 XT Red Dragon 8GB @ Guru of 3D
- Sapphire Pulse RX 5500 XT 4GB Benchmarked with 46 games @ BabelTechReviews
- Sapphire Radeon RX 5500 XT Pulse 4 GB @ TechPowerUp
- Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 5500 XT 4GB @ Guru of 3D
- Sapphire RX 5500 XT Pulse 4GB @ Kitguru
- Gigabyte Radeon RX 5500 XT @ Modders-Inc
- Gigabyte Radeon 5500 XT Gaming 8GB @ Guru of 3D
- AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux Performance @ Phoronix
- ASRock Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi X 8G OC+ @ OCInside
- ASUS GeForce GTX 1650 Super STRIX OC @ TechPowerUp
- Zotac Gaming GTX 1650 Super @ Zotac
Price wars? What price wars?
This is probably the first AMD card that doesn’t try to offer a much better value than the Nvidia equivalent model.
Either AMD needs to keep selling Polaris cards – at least 570s if not also 580s, because they still have to honor whatever agreement they have with GF about wafers,
or there are still too many Polaris cards to be sold in the market
or it tries to see if it’s brand is strong enough today, thanks to Ryzen success, so it doesn’t need to keep selling at lower prices compared to Nvidia.
That 5500 XT pricing, it’s not “price wars”, it’s “price matching”, at best.
So, it begins. a less than 200$ card can go toe to toe with my $500 (when it was new) card. And now it’s that classic time while I see my settings get lower and lower in new games, with weird unexpected stutters, until I’ve drop the $1000 or so for upgrades, cuz the 6 year old gpu and ddr3 will just be a bottle neck at this point. It’s not the money, I just love the look of this build, red leds shining of 4 blue mem dims, black as night MB, perfect cables, slick as fuck cooler with video card so slick that looks like it was poured into place, it’s just so soooooo sexxyyyyy I never wana change a thing.
Sighhhhhh.
Soon come.
……. Upgrades, cuz the 6 year old GPU and…….. that should be CPU, the CPU is ….. wow no it’s actualy 7, my CPU is 7 years old. Shit that’s kinda scarry when I say it out loud. I remember a time when in 7 years you could go from 40 MHz to 1 GHz in diffrences, not it’s just a shift in framerate. But yea, my CPU is 7, GPU is last gen.
> So, it begins. a less than 200$ card can go toe to toe with my $500 (when it was new) card.
What else did you expect? That a performance like that of your old hunk of iron would still command a similar price as 5 years ago? Hmm, looking at the CPU market from a few years ago, i better retract my rhetorical question… d-;
Naw Gandorff , you missunder stood. It’s not a surprise, it’s a repeat, a constant blip in the cycle that started the first time I moved the memory chips from my XT system to my new embedded 286 board, constant upgrades. I’ve always loved it, it’s why we are all here, but I super love this build’s look. I dont want to change it. Oh well