Should I buy an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU?

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Perhaps the best value 1440p GPU on the market.

PowerColor RX 5600 XT Red Dragon
(Image credit: PowerColor)

While AMD’s RX 6000 series might be the talk of the town, the humble RX 5600 XT is not to be ignored. When Nvidia’s RTX 2060 was left in the dust by the arrival of the Super GPUs, this Radeon graphics card was there to pick up the slack, offering near-identical performance at a decidedly lower premium.

Gaming at 4K with ultra settings enabled is only an option here if you’re willing to live with framerates around 30fps, but the 5600 XT is extremely capable at both 1080p and 1440p ultra, and should be able to clear 60fps at those settings in most games.

Factory-overclocked RX 5600 XT cards are available for a range of prices surrounding the three-hundred-dollar mark, with some going as cheap as $270. That’s just the ASRock Challenger D model, though; $280-$290 is a more common asking price, with cards available from the likes of MSI, Gigabyte, and PowerColor.

What is the RX 5600 XT? 

RX 5600 XT

GPU Cores: 2304
ROPs: 64
Game Clock: 1375MHz
Boost Clock: 1560MHz
Memory Clock: 12Gbps GDDR6
Memory Bus: 192-bit
VRAM: 6GB
TDP: 150W
Release Date: 21/01/2020
Release RRP: $279

A powerful mainstream entry into the GPU stakes, it’s a reliable but sensibly priced graphics card that shares the same Navi 10 architecture seen in the pricier RX 5700 and 5700 XT. 

A healthy 6GB of VRAM will be enough for most games. And while it lacks ray-tracing, that’s still a niche feature which isn’t worth the performance trade-off on the cheaper GPUs that do support it. Note that the specs listed here are for the ‘baseline’ RX 5600 XT, but only third-party factory-overclocked models are available, which will offer higher core and memory clock speeds. 

What are the alternatives to the RX 5600 XT? 

The most immediate comparison to the RX 5600 XT is always the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, which it performs more or less on par with (if we’re being really picky, the 2060 actually outperforms the 5600 XT by about 2 percent on average). RTX 2060 stock has been more heavily depleted this year, though—a digital trip to Amazon or Best Buy will show you remarkably few models still for sale anywhere close to its $299 RRP. 

Some opportunists on Newegg are even trying to sell old 2060 models for upwards of $600! 

Should I buy the RX 5600 XT and at what price? 

If you’re looking for a good 1440p GPU, whether you want rich visuals or high framerates in esports titles, the RX 5600 XT is definitely still worth a look. Unless we see a major sales push to clear RTX 2060 stock this Black Friday weekend, the 5600 XT will almost certainly be the superior option. 

Any sale price below the $280 RRP is a reasonable proposition, but the current healthy stock counts means we may even see prices slashed as far as $260 or below. If that is the case, we heartily recommend that you snap one of these GPUs up.