Although I did encounter their RX 590 Phantom Gaming in one of their themed builds, I didn’t have a chance to check it out in detail, and this one is, of course, the new Navi based RX 5700 XT model. Plus, this one is coming as a part of their Taichi series, so that’s the ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi X OC model in particular and not a Phantom Gaming one, which also has it’s own line-up for current-gen Navi models, hopefully, I’ll get to check some of them soon too.
This card right away demands to be looked at, it’s definitely not your ordinary model. This is even more pronounced once you actually plug the card into the system, as this middle fan has its own little RGB light party going on. Yeah, kinda looks weird with only it and this LED strip around it glowing, like the rest of the two fans didn’t deserve that too, which makes it appear like something is wrong at first, not working, as it doesn’t look uniform, it feels a bit tacky I would say.
ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi X OC – Navi monster
Other than that, I do like this more opened style shroud on the RX 5700 XT Taichi X OC model, it looks pretty unique, they went for that industrial angled shapes with a clean-cut look. This part reminds of Cooler master’s Cosmos chassis and its top handles, I feel like taking this graphics card to a LAN party. What’s also unique is its metal back-plate which I really really like, it’s simple, yet still has a lot of going on, like these gears which have a 3D texture to it. I also like that they’ve put marking for their switches on the back, for example, you have a dedicated switch for turning on and of the RGB lighting, while this is a dual BIOS card, so it also has a switch for that, it has the normal OC BIOS and the other one Silent BIOS profile, so you know which one is which, unlike with the Sapphire cards for example.
Speaking of that, be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already, because I also have the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse model in-line, the final piece of the puzzle, as that’s the only one I haven’t tried from their Pulse series.
As you’ve noticed, the card itself is really big, measures 324 mm of length, although the PCB is actually a bit shorter than that, it’s two and a half slots tall, while its also a bit wider and weight in at just a tad above 1,2 kilograms. This is before all due to its big cooling solution. We have a two-part aluminum heatsink configuration connected with four nickel-plated copper heat pipes. Since this is a custom PCB design, with an upgrade 10+1 phase power design, ASRock decided to pull the GPU more to the front of the board, which looks a bit unusual at first, and above it, we have the smaller part of that two-part aluminum heatsink array making contact with it over the copper base plate together with the heat pipes just behind it. You can also notice a big cold plate going around the GPU and power delivery system, covering a large surface area, pulling the heat of the video memory, while the VRM and power design itself have direct contact with that bigger part of the aluminum heatsink on the back. All of that is topped off with outer two 85 mm fans and one middle 75 mm, which turns in the opposite direction of them, for better cooling efficiency, while they have 0 RPM 0 dB fan mode, in which case the GPU temperature during idle didn’t go over 50°C.
As for keeping the temperatures down under load, it did that to a decent degree, no pun intended, better than the reference model for sure, during gaming that was mostly between low to mid 70°C for the GPU, a bit higher junction temperature, above 90°C, while the memory and VRM temperature were OK. With this level of cooling performance overall, It put itself somewhere in the middle of the offering when it comes to aftermarket RX 5700 XT models, at least from what I’ve tried so far, but I was honestly expecting a bit lower GPU temperature having in mind the size of its cooling solution, especially considering that the fans were sipping pretty fast, around 2000 to 2100 RPM.
DIY around the RX 5700 XT Taichi
With that in mind, I started looking at the other reviews of this card and what I saw is that some reviewers had better temperature results with their sample, while some did have a similar or even worse experience than what I had, which got me thinking that it could be due to thermal paste or its application, it was possible that this card has been reassembled multiple times as it passed through hands of different reviewers, and this torn up seal on the screw indirectly backed my theory.
Lo and behold, after reassembling the card and putting a fresh layer of thermal paste, I took it for a spin, and would you know, both GPU temperatures were much much better. Now the GPU temperature was roaming around 70°C, while the hot spot temperature was mostly below 90°C. All in all great improvement which basically required no effort, just 10 minutes of your time, and that seems to be a pretty common go-to solution for this series of Navi cards nowadays, I see a lot of users doing the same.
I also noticed one thing, and that is that the RX 5700 XT Taichi GPU runs at 1,2V, which is really high compared to others, and the situation is actually fair similar to one that I had with the XFX RX 5700 XT RAW II model, feel free to check out my review of it, I will put it in the right top corner, which was running hot and which buyers also tend to repaste. I actually got a few of your comments on that video in regard to some of you doing that. With that said, I’ve managed to pull down the GPU voltage to below 1,1V, which obviously resulted in lower temperatures, way below even compared to the improved results as you can see it here while maintaining the same GPU clock speed. This will also enable you to make a custom fan curve since you have more headroom in terms of the GPU temperature, so you can make the fans run below 2000 RPM, while in this case, it did that inherently as the temperature went down, anywhere from 1500 to 1700 RPM. Here’s a short sound clip of the fans with the cards being under full load in those two scenarios, while also showing the sound meter for measurement comparison.
Before I jump over to the benchmarking results, let’s first take a look at some of my gameplay footage with this card, you can see the live performance figures of it in the left top corner of the screen. You can find my setup which I used here to test them in the description box down below, and if you have any questions about them, free feel to leave them in the comment section down below and I will try to help you out!
An expensive way to get an RX 5700 XT?
Looking at the benchmarking results, generally speaking, there are no surprises here for me and I’m guessing for you too as you’re also probably pretty familiar with the overall performance of this series, bottom line ideal for 1440p or 1080p high frame-rate high-refresh-rate monitor gaming, while 4K is also doable if you go easy on the settings. The results are more or less the same compared to another aftermarket RX 5700 XT’s out there, as the difference in clocks between them ends up delivering results that fall under a margin of error.
What’s interesting about this model is that its claimed factory overclock and boost clock is one of the highest I’ve seen, just a bit above 2 GHz mark, although, in reality, the working frequency was mostly below that, anywhere from 1970 to just below 2000 MHz for the most part, but rarely above that. But, what I’ve noticed is that its frequency overall didn’t fluctuate that much compared to others, it was mostly in that upper region, hanging onto it. Stretching its potential with my usual overclocking procedure, It managed to stay above 2050 MHz under load, while the video memory clocked to a tad below 1900 MHz, and all of those clock improvements, in the end, resulted in about 3-5% of performance gain.
The card pulled anywhere from 200-230W according to the GPU-z with everything being as it is out of the box, while the power meter indicated that’s more around 270-290W from the wall, when you subtract system idle power consumption from the total system power consumption under GPU only load, that being Furmark’s GPU stress test. Lowering down the GPU voltage to the levels I mentioned earlier the power consumption goes down about 30-60W across the range, which is a significant difference in terms of card power demand. Speaking of that, for it, we have not one, but two 8-pin PCI-express power connectors, so a non-standard power connector configuration, which is not a surprise considering the upgraded power delivery system. What’s also non-standard, by a mile, is the fact that we have a total of six video outputs, two HDMI and four DisplayPorts, which, yeah, rarely anyone will actually use, but it’s still nice to have it, why not, doesn’t hurt, especially for VR users.
Although it’s in a way weird to put ASRock and a graphics card in the same sentence, I’m really glad that they decided to enter this market with their own custom solutions of GPUs. The only thing that’s a bit questionable for this particular model is its pretty steep price tag. It’s definitely one of the priciest RX 5700 XT available, and even with its decent performance, overclocking potential and cooling capabilities, once you tweak it that is, I feel like everything should be basically next to perfect for this price point, even more so since it’s so close to Nvidia’s RTX 2070 Super series.
That’s it for this time, thanks for checking out my ASRock RX 5700 XT Taichi review and if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
