At first, we would like to thank PowerColor for offering a sample of their Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 video card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About PowerColor:

 

Outstanding performance & innovative technology

To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, great products need to be complimented by speed-to-market, cost and service. PowerColor strives to the very best of our ability to fulfill our responsibilities, both to our customers and to society, thereby making a brighter future for tomorrow.

 

Unleash the Gaming Power

PowerColor is the platform of choice for avid PC gamers and video prosumers looking to get the best possible performance out of the latest graphics processors from AMD.

 

Stunning Performance

PowerColor graphics cards deliver every-last-drop of super-charged performance from AMDs most advanced visual processing units (VPU). Running a PowerColor graphics card, todays gamers are able to unleash the 3D graphics performance of their favorite game playing it the way it was meant to be played.

 

Reputable Product

PowerColor graphics cards won at least 10 awards every month in 2004 from the worlds most respected IT media and organizations. Furthermore, several PowerColor products also received 2005 Taiwan Symbol of Excellence Award from the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the R.O.C. according to the following criteria: Design and Innovation, Quality System, Market, and Brand Awareness. This award represents some of the most revolutionary, high tech, high quality, and high value products in the market.

 

Market-Oriented Innovation

The right products, the right time, and the best quality is the basic of our product strategy. To put our products one step ahead of the rest, we analyze the trends of the industry, and study the requirement of the market. Meeting the markets requirement is the core of our branding strategy and our customers opinions are always the most important part of this process.

 

Extensive Service

 

To keep abreast of the global market and offer our customers the best service, speediest product delivery, as well as sales and technical support, PowerColor has established subsidiaries in mainland China, Taiwan, the U.S.A., and the Netherlands, to strive for best value in the marketing and sales of PowerColor Products.

 

AMD Eyefinty Technology

Run multiple displays from a single graphics board and expand your gaming field of view across all displays.

 

GDDR6 Memory

Equipped with 8GB of advanced GDDR6 memory to provide high bandwidth of up to 448 GB/s, enabling 1440p performance for today’s most demanding games.

 

HDMI

Integrated high speed HDMI output with 1080p 120Hz 3D Stereoscopic support, and 4K resolution display support.

 

Microsoft DirextX® 12

Get intense gaming performance and unrivalled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting and lifelike imagery.

 

PCIe® 4.0 Support

Radeon RX 5700 XT features PCI Express 4.0 support, with a throughput of 16 GT/s and enables two times the bandwidth compared to PCI Express 3.0. Get ready for the next generation of PC gaming.

 

Radeon FreeSync™ 2 HDR

Radeon FreeSync™ 2 HDR pushes the boundaries further, combining fluid gameplay and plug-and-play HDR gaming at low latency, with-out needing to tweak your settings. No stuttering, no tearing, just gaming.

 

Radeon™ VR Ready Premium

Escape into lifelike realms of virtual reality experiences with Radeon VR Ready Premium solutions.

 

Vulkan™

Next-generation API support for high-performance real-time graphics. Taking the best and brightest parts of Mantle to serve as its foundation, Vulkan™ is going to be one new and uniquely powerful graphics API.

 

 

After looking at a factory-overclocked Radeon RX 5700 XT video card from XFX, that did also feature a TGP of 210W, it is now the time to explore the mainstream segment even more with the PowerColor RX 5700 Red Dragon, with a dual-fan cooling solution and a total TGP in OC mode of 170W. As the XT version, the card is equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory, while the 7nm NAVI GPU features RDNA architecture and PCIe Express 4.0 hardware compatibility. The Radeon RX 5700 GPU does feature 2304 active shader processors, a Base operating Clock of 1565MHz, a Game Clock of 1720MHz, while the Boost value is mentioned as up to 1750MHz.

 

The Game Clock term is described as the expected run frequency when running typical gaming applications, set to typical TGP (Total Graphics Power).

 

As we have seen with the XFX RX 5700 XT 8GB RAW II Ultra card, the PowerColor RX 5700 Red Dragon runs with the memory at stock settings (14 Gbps), which renders a total bandwidth of 448GB/s.

 

The product is shipped inside a medium-sized cardboard enclosure, with the Red Dragon logo on the frontal area, but also some of the product highlights:

 

 

 

The product main features are explained in little more detail on the back, and here we will also learn of the minimum system requirements:

 

 

 

If we do remove the top packaging layer, we will end up with a plain, cardboard enclosure:

 

 

 

This one opens really easy, revealing an internal foam protective layer:

 

 

 

First, we will notice the supplied documentation leaflet, along with the driver disk:

 

 

 

 

Besides the initial foam, the card is also protected by an anti-static bag:

 

 

 

The manufacturer does also mention on the sealing sticker that we must not forget connecting extra power from the PSU, before powering up the system:

 

 

 

The PowerColor RX 5700 Red Dragon card is pretty compact, since it only uses two slots inside our case; its dimensions are 240mm*132mm*41mm and should fit with ease in most midi-tower enclosures:

 

 

 

As we have seen with the XFX card, the PowerColor model employs dual 100 fans that provide more coverage, efficiency at lower running speeds; the cooling fans are equipped with two-ball bearings, for increasing longevity four times over a regular model. On the left fan we are also noticing the Red Dragon logo:

 

 

 

The right fan is pretty much identical, only now we are dealing with a PowerColor subtle dark grey logo:

 

 

 

The top shroud is made entirely of plastic and manages to hide the underneath heatsink well:

 

 

 

A look on the back side does show the heatsink, a small spacer but also the heatpipe terminations:

 

 

 

The opposite side does reveal a larger, white PowerColor logo, the BIOS switch (silent/OC) but also two PCIe power connectors (6-pin + 8+pin, same as with the XT card from XFX):

 

 

 

The card PCB is well reinforced thanks to the massive brushed aluminum backplate; it does have a height of 1.5mm and is secured with multiple screws to the board:

 

 

 

The top cooling system is secured by six screws, four being around the GPU and the rest of two do secure the VRM area:

 

 

 

In the lower right corner, we will also spot a nice Red Dragon logo:

 

 

 

The BIOS switch is easily accessible and the positions are well documented; the card defaults to OC mode, that also features Zero RPM for the fans:

 

 

 

In terms of video outputs, we have three DisplayPort 1.4 ports but also one HDMI 2.0b; a ventilation grill is also present on the I/O for removing some of the heat outside the case:

 

 

 

PowerColor RX 5700 Red Dragon seems to re-use the Red Devil PCB, since the arrangement is the same, minus a few components:

 

 

 

On this card we do have a two-phase design for the memory VRM, controlled by the NCP81022 IC:

 

 

 

The VRM components in charge of the GPU are driven by the NCP302155 IC from ON Semiconductor:

 

 

 

The NCP81022 also drives the smaller NCP302045 dual-MOSFET controller:

 

 

 

The GDDR6 memory ICs are manufactured by Micron and carry the D9WCW code; from the factory, these are designed to run at the stock frequency of 1750MHz (14Gbps effective rate):

 

 

 

Here are some additional close-ups of the components, on both sides of the NAVI GPU:

 

 

 

 

In the top right corner, we do have the PCIe power connectors:

 

 

 

Further down, we do have a single 4-pin header that powers both fans:

 

 

 

A correct amount of thermal compound was pre-applied on the GPU die:

 

 

 

The Red Dragon version of the card does employ no less than five 6mm copper heat pipes that drive out the heat from the GPU/GDDR6 area; the increased number of heatsink fins do allow heat to be evacuated even faster:

 

 

 

While the GPU makes direct contact to the inner copper plate (with thermal compound as the thermal interface), the memory uses some additional thermal pads:

 

 

 

Here are some additional heatsink views as well, that highlight the copper pipes, but also the fin design:

 

 

 

 

 

After installing the card in our test system, we can appreciate again its compactness:

 

 

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 9700K Retail

CPU Cooler: Deepcool Captain 240 EX RGB AIO

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming

RAM: Patriot Memory Viper RGB Series DDR4

Video: currently tested VGA card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OSilicon Power P34A80 PCIe 3x4 M.2 2280 1TB

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

With the help of the GPU-Z utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

 

 

To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

 

 

 

Temperature tests:

For monitoring the temperatures while in load with GPU-Z, we did enable logging and started a complete run of Time Spy Extreme. With this run, we have seen GPU core not exceeding 67 degrees Celsius, while the memory has also remained at very safe values of 72 degrees Celsius. The VRM temperature remains at low levels as well, maxing out at 57 degrees.

 

 

For getting the temperature averages during multiple runs, we have used the HWINFO64 utility and enabled the Time Spy Extreme stress testing (5 runs). During very stressful tools such as this one, more heat can accumulate inside the case and at the same time we can see ASIC power spikes up to 173W. A maximum boost clock can be also observed as being 1765Mhz. During the runs, the ambient temperature was 26.6 degrees Celsius:

 

 

 

Noise measurements

Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.6 dBA (with everything turned off).

At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.

The GPU fan was controlled by the AMD Wattman utility:

 

 

Besides building a new test bench in order to avoid platform limitations, we have also modified the software suite and it now includes updated games, but also synthetic benchmarks.

 

3DMark

 

3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by UL, (formerly Futuremark), to determine the performance of a computer's 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. Running 3DMark produces a 3DMark score, with higher numbers indicating better performance. The 3DMark measurement unit is intended to give a normalized mean for comparing different PC hardware configurations (mostly graphics processing units and central processing units), which proponents such as gamers and overclocking enthusiasts assert is indicative of end-user performance capabilities.

 

Time Spy

Time Spy Extreme

Port Royal

Fire Strike Ultra

Fire Strike Extreme

Fire Strike

Unigine Superposition

 

Superposition benchmark continues the line of GPU benchmarks by UNIGINE used by tens of millions of people around the world. Superposition is a new-generation benchmark tailored for testing reliability and performance of the latest GPUs.

 

 

Gears of War 4

Details: Ultra

 

Gears of War 4. Gears of War 4 is a third-person shooter video game developed by The Coalition and published by Microsoft Studios for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One. It is the fifth main installment in the Gears of War series, and the first mainline entry not to be developed by Epic Games.

 

Forza Horizon 4

Details: Ultra

 

Forza Horizon 4 is an open world racing video game developed by Playground Games and published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on 2 October 2018 on Xbox One and Microsoft Windows after being announced at Xbox's E3 2018 conference. The game is set in a fictionalised representation of the United Kingdom.

 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Details: Ultra

 

Mankind Divided is set in 2029, two years after Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The Deus Ex series is set in a cyberpunk future rife with secret organizations and conspiracies, including the Illuminati.

 

Strange Brigade

Details: Ultra

 

Strange Brigade is a third-person shooter with a huge emphasis on cooperative gameplay. In the game, the player assumes the role of an adventurer in the 1930s and can team up with three other players to fight against different mythological enemies like mummies, giant scorpions and minotaurs.

 

Hitman 2

Details: Ultra

 

Sniper Assassin mode brings a co-op experience to the Hitman series for the first time, allowing two players to work together online to take down their targets as Stone And Knight. ... Ghost Mode is a brand new game mode for HITMAN 2 that introduces competitive multiplayer for the first time ever in the franchise!

 

FarCry New Dawn

Details: Ultra

 

Similar to its predecessors, Far Cry New Dawn is an action-adventure first-person shooter set in an open world environment which the player can explore freely on foot or via various vehicles. The game is set in the fictional Hope County, Montana and uses a reimagined version of Far Cry 5's map.

 

 

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Details: Ultra High

 

The game is set in 431 BC, four hundred years before the events of Assassin's Creed Origins. It recounts a secret fictional history set during the Peloponnesian War, which was fought between the city-states of Greece.

 

Metro Exodus

Details: Ultra

 

Metro Exodus is a first-person shooter game with survival horror and stealth elements. ... The game features a mixture of linear levels and sandbox environments. It also includes a dynamic weather system, a day-night cycle, and environments that change along with the seasons as the story progresses.

 

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Details: Very High

 

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game in which players control Lara Croft, who is on a quest to discover the legendary city of Kitezh.

 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Details: Highest

 

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara must master a deadly jungle, overcome terrifying tombs, and persevere through her darkest hour. As she races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, Lara will ultimately be forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.

 

Final Fantasy XIV ShadowBringers

Details: Maximum

 

Explore breathtaking new environments, encounter exotic new races, master exciting new jobs, and fight alongside prominent characters with the new Trust system as you embark on a new journey as the Warrior of Darkness! With over 16 million adventurers worldwide, join the next chapter and become what you must.

 

For Honor

Details: Extreme

 

For Honor is an action fighting game set during a medieval, fantasy setting. Players can play as a character from three different factions, namely the Iron Legion (Knights), the Warborn (Vikings), and the Dawn Empire (Samurai).

 

 

The RX 5700 Red Dragon card implementation from PowerColor does feature a less complex cooling system versus the Red Devil, but manages to keep a more compact form factor. If pushed in intensive benchmarks, we have noticed that the fans start to spin up after the GPU reaches 45 degrees Celsius at very low speeds, maxing out at about 2000RPM at very acceptable noise levels (about 38 dBA). For keeping manufacturing costs low, there is no LED lighting available, but you can always compensate this aspect by using your own RGB setup inside the computer case.

 

PowerColor is known for their fair pricing of their cards, and the Red Dragon makes no exception; you can find online this model for about 379 Euros, going head-to-head with the Pulse model from Sapphire.

 

Even if we are dealing with only 2304 stream processors and lower operating clocks versus the XT models, the card does not disappoint at all when running at 1440P. You will be surely able to run most titles at high to ultra-details while getting 60+ framerates on OC mode and if you do aim on playing titles that require little resources such as e-sports games, you can surely boot on the Silent BIOS via the easily available switch.

PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 Video Card is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank again to PowerColor for making this review possible!