After checking out Gigabyte’s more mainstream model and expanding my RX 5700 XT graphics card reviewslist, the one coming from their Gaming series, I’ll put a link to that review in the right top corner of this, today I will be taking a look at its beefed-up brother which took a bit longer to come out, the Aorus RX 5700 XT.
So, what’s exactly different compared to their RX 5700 XT Gaming OC model which I tried recently. Well, in terms of how it looks, not that much. The color scheme is a little bit darker, we have less silver accents around the card, with the Aorus logo on one of the fans, in the middle of it all, but it still kinda looks skinny on a count of the pretty shallow shroud, that slightly covers only the top part of it, and some of the sides, although practically speaking that’s a good thing, the warm air can easily escape. Overall, I do like its design, even more like this compared to the Gaming series, it looks stealthier, Batman-like. With this model you will get even more RGB LED lighting around the card, some are now arranged around the fans, while we still have an RGB LED-lit logo on the side of the card, Aorus sign instead of Gigabyte, and another small and very subtle display like fan stop sign on the back end of the card.
Turning it onto the other side, we have a very clean and simple looking back-plate, with some engraved lines and Aorus logo, that covers the whole back surface of the PCB, and serves as a heat-spreader as behind it we have thermal pads which pull the heat off the components. Back here you can also notice that we have this little sign, and it actually points out to the BIOS switch right next to it, and the fact that this model carries two BIOS profiles, one with the Silent and the other with the OC BIOS profile, that being the default one so to speak. For this purpose, I will only be using the default one, as there’s no real reason for me to use the other one as the card is pretty quiet to begin with.
Aorus RX 5700 XT – Their ultimate version
The video output layout carries a non-standard number of ports, you’ll get a total of six of them, three HDMI and three DisplayPorts, and yes, you can utilize all of them at the same time for up to six displays. Looking the card like that from the side, it’s definitely one of the thicker cards that I’ve tried, taking up well above two slots in height. Ironically, despite that it’s weight is not that high, as it’s around 200 grams lighter than the RX 5700 XT Gaming X model from MSI.
The cooling solution which it carries beneath that plastic shroud is a bit beefier, we have a two-part aluminum heatsink, through which travel six six milliliter heat pipes, and a part of them is formed in a way that they make a direct contact plate for the GPU. Around that, you will find a couple of cold plates that also carry thermal pads solution, and they are here to pull off the heat from the GDDR6 video memory and the 7-phase power design. All of that is cooled off with an 80 mm triple-fan solution, where the middle one is spinning in the opposite direction than the other two, in order to get a better airflow between the fans, before all reducing the turbulence.
The fans, of course, do not spin when the graphics card is not under load, which is why we have that fan stop sign that I’ve mentioned earlier and like that the cooling solution is able to cool off the GPU in this passive state to about 54°C on an open testbed, which is pretty on par with their Gaming series. Putting the card under load, the GPU temperature was mostly roaming around 70°C, I saw it stretching at 73°C at most, but usually around 71 or 72°C, it stayed put no matter the load, and the reason why is that is because the fans are constantly moving in RPM in order to maintain that preset value. The GPU junction hot spot temperature and the video memory temperature were pretty in much sync, around the 90°C mark, for the most part, moving few degrees up or down, which is for the video memory a bit on the higher side for what I saw with RX 5700 XT series, while the VRM temperature was mostly below the 80°C mark.
Having a three fan setup, Gigabyte Aorus RX 5700 XT is expected to be a bit louder than others, but it actually wasn’t that bad, it was a bit quieter than the Gaming OC model, usually spinning between 1100 and 1800 RPM. And that’s sort of my problem with her, it has a pretty wide range of fans speeds at which it operates, and in this case, it also moves around a lot, frantically might I add as you can see by this fan speed log, sometimes it would spike to well over 2000 RPM for a brief moment, or it would unnecessarily start with 1800 RPM from the get-go, and then slowly taper off. I hope that Gigabyte will with the future firmware updates of this model make its default fan speed curve a bit more forgiving, with a focus on finding an RPM sweet spot. Here’s a short sound clip of the card under stock load, while also showing the sound meter for measurement comparison.
This Gigabyte’s RX 5700 XT starts off higher
As for the setup which I used here to test out this particular GP, the core components are pretty standard – Intel’s six-core Core i5 – 8600K CPU overclocked to 5,1 GHz and paired with 2 x 8GB of 3000 MHz DDR4 RAM. If you have any question or other concerns about this card, feel free to leave me a comment down below, I will do my best to help you out!
Jumping over to the results, there were no surprises here as everyone is pretty familiar with the general performance output of the RX 5700 XT series, it handles gaming at 1080p and 1440p resolution without any problems, so I won’t go too deep into it as you can take a look at all the figures in these tables. Since I got a new 4K monitor, I’ve also added a third set of gaming results based on the testing at 4K resolution. Despite basically maxing all the graphics settings in each game, the Aorus RX 5700 XT was still able to push through the 4K resolution, of course depending on the game, you would get from 30 FPS onward, which is playable.
Its stock GPU core clock frequency was roaming anywhere from 1950-2040 MHz for the most part, depending on the game and benchmark, which is pretty high, and the main reason why is that is because this one comes with a pretty hefty factory overclock on the GPU core clock, which is Aorus series know for. Taking it a bit further with some manual overclocking, I’ve managed to push it just a tad more, which resulted in 2050-2100 MHz of GPU core clock frequency, so not that much higher compared to the stock, but I did max out the video memory speed, and also lowered down the GPU voltage since I didn’t see any benefits with pushing it higher or keeping it at the stock levels. With that, the temperatures drop down by a bit, while the fans were having a little bit calmer temper. The performance jump, in that case, was pretty modest, I was seeing around 3-5% gain in numbers.
Coming down to the power consumption of the card, Gigabyte once again showed that it likes to pull a little bit more than others, where I now saw around 290W of power consumption difference between the system idling and a load of only the graphics card using the Furmark GPU stress test. They actually put a second 8-pin, because with having a 6-pin they would be right on the edge of what it can provide, but this way, besides having more power on your disposal, you also have somewhere to plug that dangling 2-pins.
Choosing the Gigabyte Aorus RX 5700 XT or saving some?
As for their utility, well, they really need to work on it if you ask me, they were going in a good direction at one point and they decided to do things like separate the RGB Led control, so you have to use an another application, RGB Fusion a, in order to get control for the lighting effects and colors on the card. Besides that, the Aorus engine was not that useful to me in terms of the overclocking, it misses out on some settings so I had to reach out for my usual go-to choice when it comes to that – MSI’s Afterburner. Please Gigabyte, make just one software utility, possibly for all of your hardware that needs or can be controlled, even products like peripherals, some kind of a universal central hub, which would have all of the things and settings at one place and would get regular updates.
The Aorus version of the RX 5700 XT from Gigabyte is an overall even better product in comparison to their Gaming series, but truth to be told, it should be, as that’s to be expected since it would be a bare minimum considering the price premium that it has over it. It’s definitely one of the top contender out there, although I’m personally still leaning more towards the Gaming X series just because it’s a bit quieter than it, and I’m all about the noise, or better yet, the lack of it, but other than that, you can’t go wrong with choosing the Aorus model.
That’s it for this time, I hope this Gigabyte Aorus RX 5700 XT review will help you decide which Navi card to buy, 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!
