Radeon RX 5700 XT – Setting Up
All external signs indicate that in working on the Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC, GIGABYTE engineers focused on the functional elements of the design and saved on secondary and optional ones. In this, the new video card has much in common with accelerators based on NVIDIA chips, which GIGABYTE released one after the other in the last year. The first thing that attracts attention in the appearance of the GAMING OC is a massive cooling system with impellers with a diameter of 77 mm. The company uses the triple fan unit, which pumps air into the GPU heatsink, with minimal modifications in a wide range of devices, starting with the GeForce GTX 1660 and ending with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The side impellers rotate counterclockwise, and the central impeller rotates clockwise in order to reduce turbulence in the air flow.
Otherwise, the exterior of the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC does not require a detailed description, because the board is devoid of any controls and additional connectors that can be useful when assembling and setting up the computer. There is not even a BIOS switch, which once was an integral feature of AMD-based video cards, although the main function that manufacturers usually assign to it – the quiet cooler mode – is active here initially: at low load the GPU cools passively, and the fans start only then. when the temperature exceeds 55 ° C.
Be that as it may, the Spartan design of the GAMING OC and the overall budget orientation of the video card did not stop equipping it with LED RGB lighting. And let only the company logo shine on the side of the case, its shade and pulsation mode can be set to your taste using the proprietary AORUS ENGINE utility (it is also used to configure other parameters – clock speeds, fan speeds, etc.).
The main thing that interests us in the design of the Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC is located inside the casing of the cooling system. GIGABYTE installed a massive heatsink with six heat pipes with a diameter of 6 mm on the GPU, similar to the heat of Navi 10. At the same time, the part was designed according to a simplified scheme when flattened segments of the heat pipes directly contact the crystal. It’s immediately clear that the GAMING OC is not destined to become the first video card of the original design, which will reveal the full overclocking potential of the Radeon RX 5700 XT. After all, the automation that controls the power and clock speeds of the GPU in the new AMD accelerators focuses on the temperature of the hottest zone of the chip, and the rough base from the heat pipes pressed together clearly does not contribute to absolutely uniform heat dissipation.
However, the real claim for the Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING OC device is related to the cooling of RAM. GDDR6 chips here also give heat to a common heatsink – this is welcome in itself, because a separate heatsink, which is preferred by designers of other video cards, must be massive enough to withstand the low airflow rate that is typical for large coolers with slow fans. And usually he doesn’t. The problem with the GIGABYTE accelerator is that the figured plate, which serves as a heat sink for RAM chips, is simply screwed to the base of the radiator and does not have full contact with heat pipes and fins. Fortunately, this flaw is compensated to some extent by a metal plate on the back of the PCB, covered with thermal pads in the area of RAM and voltage regulator.
