Radeon RX 5500 XT is revealed in the picture

On July 7, 2019, AMD made a big splash and launched both the Ryzen 3000 and the graphics cards Radeon RX 5700 and the XT sibling belonging to the Navi family. The product families are both manufactured using TSMC’s shrunken 7-nanometer technology, but new architectures apply to the entire board. On the processor front, it is thus about Zen 2 and for the graphics cards Radeon DNA (RDNA).

Arch-rival Nvidia offers Turing-based graphics cards all the way from the top-end performance to the entry-level segment, but the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT compete only against the more powerful mid-range models. In lower price ranges, AMD has the aging Polaris and RX 500 series, but sometime in December, an RX 590 replacement will land on store shelves.

The card in question is Radeon RX 5500 and was unveiled already in October, but so far it has only taken up space in a few pre-built computers. Under the hood is the Navi 14 circuit in a slightly scaled-down design, which indicates that a full-scale XT model is lurking in the shadows. Videocardz is now publishing pictures of a trio of RX 5500 XT cards.

The pictures show two models from Gigabyte, where the cards belong to the company’s OC and Gaming OC series, respectively. The big difference is the radiator and in the latter case the cooling flange is accompanied by aluminum and heat conduction pipes by a trio of fans. The sibling is instead a shorter card and is equipped with double fans.

The graphics cards occupy both expansion slots and come with four image outputs, three of which are Displayport and one is HDMI. Videocardz writes that the turbo frequency for the Radeon RX 5500 XT is 1,717 MHz and Gaming OC and OC, respectively, are said to have a minimal factory overclocking to 1,737 and 1,733 MHz.

The Asrock’s Challenger variant of the Radeon RX 5500 XT has also posed in front of the camera and also comes in a modest factory overclocked version, up 20 MHz from the reference level to 1,737 MHz. The heat sink is accompanied by double fans and the entire radiator solution is slightly longer than the circuit board.

Like the Gigabyte duo, the Asrock’s variant occupies two expansion slots and the four picture connections again consist of a single HDMI and Displayport trio. Asrock’s color scheme involves a cover in black, yellow and silver, where the latter color dominates the cover plate on the back. With the Gigabyte cards, all parts are in gray and black.

Like the Radeon RX 5500, the XT variant will be sold in versions with 8 or 4 GB of GDDR6 memory. All packaging on the published images shows the higher capacity, but memory frequencies and other specifications are not revealed. On the other hand, the pictures show that power supply in all cases takes place via an extra 8-pin PCI Express connector.

It is currently unclear when the more competent Radeon RX 5500 XT will make its debut and it remains to be seen whether the XT-free sibling will actually be released on December 12. What the price tags end up with is also unclear, but technology sites that performed early RX 5500 tests believe that the card should end up well below SEK 2,000.

Read tests of the Radeon RX 5700 XT: