At first, we would like to thank XFX for sending out a sample of their Radeon RX 5700 DD Ultra 8GB GDDR6 video card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About XFX:

 

“XFX dares to go where the competition would like to but can’t.

 

That’s because, at XFX, we don’t just create great digital video components—we build all-out, mind-blowing, performance-crushing, competition-obliterating video cards, power supplies, and computer accessories.

 

And, not only are they amazing, you don’t have to live on dry noodles and peanut butter to afford them. XFX is a division of PINE Technology Holdings Limited, a leading manufacturer and marketer of innovative solutions for the worldwide gaming technologies market.

 

Founded in 1989, PINE designs, develops, manufactures and distributes high-performance video graphics technology and computer peripherals. The company’s dedicated research and development team are continually pushing the limits to meet the demands of the ever-growing and performance-driven community.

 

Headquartered in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR), PINE has more than 1,000 employees worldwide with 16 offices around the globe. PINE also maintains four state-of-the-art research and development facilities in the Asia Pacific region and two factories in Mainland China.”

 

Power when you need it and quiet when you don't.

XFX fans are equipped to run at the highest possible performance, while our Zero DB Fan System will also keep your fans running at efficient RPM in order to minimize annoying fan noise by lowering RPM all the way down to Zero RPM. When the heat is on during intense gaming, our fans will speed up as needed.

Fidelity FX

FidelityFX is a collection of high-quality post-process effects that automatically collapse multiple effects into fewer shader passes to reduce overhead and free up your GPU for the visceral experience you demand

Ultra HD Support

The XFX RX 5700 is built for high-performance and high resolution gameplay. Experience smooth gameplay performance at 1440p and 4k.With support for 8k you are ready for Next-Gen displays. See everything in mind blowing detail without sacrificing performance.

Radeon Freesync

Radeon Freesync 1 and FreeSync 2 HDR2 take full advantage ofRadeon RX 5700 series, bringing gamers the best stutter and tear-free gamingexperience with higher refresh rates, lower latency, and 10-bit HDR, availableon over 700 monitors

Gaming RDNA Architecture

RDNA architecture is engineered for the next generation ofhigh-performance gaming. It’s the DNA that powers your games, the DNA thatbrings your games to life, the DNA that keeps evolving, the DNA that bringsyour games to life.

Intuitive Gaming Features

AMD Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition gives you more control over your gaming experiences. The software's intuitive interface enables players to stream, share and tweak graphics settings in real-time without missing a second of the action or compromising in-game performance.

Seize your gaming victories with easy streaming capabilities of Radeon™ ReLive

Work smarter and cooler with Radeon™ Chill — dynamically helping save power while gaming

Tailor your gameplay with custom profiles and enhance your PC performance with Radeon™ Wattman

Tailor preferences without having to leave your game with Radeon™ Overlay

Get Day-0 driver support and more

For extraordinary virtual reality experiences.

Experience the new generation of compelling Virtual Reality content with the Radeon™ graphics card paired with the leading VR headsets. The Radeon™ card coupled with AMD LiquidVR™ technology delivers a virtually stutter-free, low latency experience, essential for remarkable Virtual Reality environments. Industry leading innovation and powerful performance enables the Radeon™ to deliver premium experiences on high-end VR games, entertainment, and applications.

Multidisplay technology for gaming, productivity and entertainment.

Expand your territory and customize your field of vision. Connect up to six displays on a single GPU for dynamic, panoramic multi-screen gaming. You’ll get an expansive experience that’s truly out of sight. (additional displays may require the use of MST hub).

Ready for the latest displays

Radeon™ GPUs with the Radeon architecture support HDMI® 2.0b and DisplayPort™ 1.4 w/ DSC for compatibility with a new generation of monitors that would make any gamer excited: • 1080p @ 240Hz

• 1440p @ 240Hz

• 4K @ 120Hz

• 1440p ultra-wide @ 190Hz

• 8k @ 60Hz

XFX 3 Year Warranty

Giving you the performance you have come to expect from XFX.

Even though we trust that our high quality products will continue working at peak performance well beyond your use of it, we want to put our word behind that promise. That is why we offer our 3 Year Warranty with this series of graphics cards. This means that your product is protected by a 3 year limited hardware warranty on manufacturing defects of anything on the card.

 

 

The XFX DD Ultra implementation of the RX 5700 has recently arrived in our labs, which features a massive cooling solution; will the card be able to surpass the Red Dragon RX 5700 or we’ll get other kinds of surprises? Let’s dig in and see what we’ve got!

The DD Ultra card implementation does feature dual 100mm fans, 8GB of GDDR6 memory and the same Radeon RX 5700 GPU with 2304 active shader processors. This model packs a base clock of 1565Mhz, a Game Clock of 1720MHz, while the Boost is set at 1750MHz. As all the cards tested before, the RAM runs at stock speed (14 Gbps), which renders a total bandwidth of 448GB/s.

 

The card is shipped inside a medium-sized cardboard box, with the now-familiar XFX box art; right from the top area we will get to see a photo of the card cooling system, along with some of the main highlights:

 

 

 

In order to avoid confusion, the Game Clock term is explained on the box:

 

 

 

On one of the box sides, we will get to see the minimum system requirements, but also the list of box contents:

 

 

 

The Ultra series term is also explained for the user:

 

 

 

The back area of the box does show the RDNA architecture in more details, along with some other features that enhance the gaming experience:

 

 

 

After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a plain box that houses a subtle XFX logo in the middle:

 

 

 

The top box layer contains the bundle and is organized as an envelope:

 

 

 

Under it we will get to see the installation guide, warranty card but also a notice that drivers are not included in the packaging:

 

 

 

Two power cable adapters are supplied, in case your PSU does not have the necessary connectors:

 

 

 

The installation guide does describe the card interfaces in more detail, but also shows the actual installation procedure inside the computer case:

 

 

 

Besides the actual box, the card is also wrapped inside an anti-static bag:

 

 

 

This is not all: the manufacturer has also used a thin transparent film as protection on the top plastic shroud, along with the backplate in order to avoid creation of scratches during transit:

 

 

 

The XFX RX 5700 DD Ultra does not have any fancy chrome finishes, but features a stealthier design:

 

 

 

The dual 100mm fans are used for moving air on a larger area, while staying at lower RPMs; in the middle, an XFX logo can be observed as well:

 

 

 

On the right of the second fan, we will be able to spot a subtle XFX logo:

 

 

 

When looked from the side, we can see that the card cooling system is clearly over two slots (XFX describes this as 2.7 slots), while the heatsinks are surrounded by the black plastic shroud:

 

 

 

 

In the back, the card does feature an opening that exposes the heatpipe terminations:

 

 

 

As we have seen with the other XFX card, the I/O interfaces are the same (three DisplayPort 1.4 ports but also one HDMI 2.0b):

 

 

 

A large backplate is present on the bottom, with the XFX logo in the middle:

 

 

 

Besides the PCI-E slot, this card does also need extra power from a 8-pin and a 6-pin connector:

 

 

 

As the XT before it, this card is equipped with a Dual BIOS system, that can be selected via a switch; the default position is the Performance BIOS, which we will feature in our tests:

 

 

 

The cooling system can be lifted by removing the four spring-loaded screws around the GPU, two screws that hold the VRM cooling in place but also two smaller screws near the end of the PCB that keep the heatsink securely in place. The layout is similar to what we have seen with the RAW II Ultra, minus a power phase:

 

 

 

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):

 

 

 

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 ICs from ON Semiconductor:

 

 

 

 

Here are some additional shots of the VRM components on this board:

 

 

 

 

The NAVI GPU sits in the middle:

 

 

 

Moving further to the right, we will get to see the power connectors, but also two other headers, that are not populated:

 

 

 

Both 100mm fans get power from the same black header:

 

 

 

The cooling system shares similarities in design with the RAW II Ultra, but the heatpipe arrangement is different near the frontal area of the card:

 

 

 

The GPU plate is cooled by four individual heatpipes, while the memory is cooled via an aluminum interposer and thermal pads:

 

 

 

The aluminum heatsink component for the VRM does use another, larger thermal pad as an interface:

 

 

 

Here are some additional shots of the cooling system, in more detail:

 

 

 

 

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: Silicon 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 68 degrees Celsius, while the memory has also remained at very safe values of 78 degrees Celsius. The VRM temperature remains at low levels as well, maxing out at 62 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 206W. A maximum boost clock can be also observed as being 1934Mhz. During the runs, the ambient temperature was 25.6 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).

 

 

With the DD Ultra we are seeing a notable performance increase over the previously tested PowerColor Red Dragon RX 5700 and at the same time the power limits have been upped from 173W to about 206W (maximum recorded ASIC Power consumption). This modification did also imply higher Boost clocks, up to 1934MHz (much higher than the advertised speed) so with the XFX RX 5700 DD Ultra we did experience quite a performance jump. XFX also made sure to include a beefy cooling system to go with it so the card will function under optimal conditions even with a raised TGP.

 

The card performs really well in gaming when running at resolutions up to 2560x1440, at medium to high detail levels. The large fans and tuned BIOS do help avoiding sudden speed ramp-ups in full load, so you can enjoy a nice balance between performance and quietness. To make things even more interesting, the card can be picked up online for just about 369 Euros, about 10 Euros less than the PowerColor Red Dragon.

XFX Radeon RX 5700 DD Ultra 8GB GDDR6 Video Card is Recommended for:

 

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