AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT review: XTra is the new Super
Man alive, I was a bit worried about AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 XT for a minute there. Not from a pricing point of view, you understand. Even before AMD did their unexpected Navi price cut on Friday, I was always semi-confident that this supposed RTX 2070 rival would be able to hold its own against Nvidia’s RTX Super competitor simply by virtue of already being a tiny bit cheaper. Then when AMD announced their new Navi GPU would suddenly cost $399 instead of $449, I was flabbergasted. What a triumph, I thought to myself. This will go down as the comeback to end all comebacks.
But then my PC started crashing part way through my benchmarks. At first I put it down to the ludicrous summer heat. It does, after all, get pretty toasty in my office. But then it kept crashing, and crashing again, and when I looked at MSI Afterburner’s temperature readings, my stomach did a terrible kind of flip-flop. 94 degrees, it said. No wonder it was throwing its hands up and turning itself off. My heart sank. Had AMD gone and shot themselves in the foot after all? What a terrible shame! Honestly, the subtitle of this review was almost going to be ‘Too hot to handle’. But then AMD released a new driver yesterday morning and everything was right with the world again. Phew! Talk about a last minute save.