PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 is available now from most major retailers. We found it on Amazon for just £349.99 in the UK. However, there’s also the RX 5700 XT version out now too, which is £504.98, albeit we haven’t benchmarked that one ourselves. It’s available in the US too, with an MSRP of $409.99.

Overview

We’ve been eager to test a custom AMD Radeon RX 5700 for a while now. Sure, the stock blower card version of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 still delivered fantastic performance and a great price. However, the PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 blazes a trail all of its own. The performance from their new cooler and overclocks puts this card into a completely different league than its stock variant.

Red Dragon

The name Red Dragon gives you images of a big and powerful creature, and that’s a good image for this card. The performance is way higher than I expected here. The card runs incredibly cool at full load thanks to those gorgeous fans. Of course, the thick radiator, heat pipes, and power delivery hardware likely have a big hand in that too. Lower temperatures means the card can maintain its boost clocks for a lot longer, resulting in big gaming performance. Put it this way, in most tests, this card was beating out the stock RX 5700 XT! Now, that’s pretty damn impressive.

Gaming Performance

For 1080p gaming, you’ll be well taken care of. For 144 Hz displays, FreeSync, etc, it’ll more than get the job done. Even at 1440p, you can still expect FPS figures way North of 60 with ease. What was surprising is just how playable it was with 4K. We were seeing 50-60+ easily enough using high settings. Dial back a setting or two, turn on FreeSync, and enjoy your 4K gaming. Whatever you choose, it’s got more punch than you would think, and certainly gave the Nvidia rivals a bloody good run for their (more) money. At 1440p, it’s keeping up with the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super cards easily enough, give or take a few FPS.

Should I Buy One?

AMD is back on form with their new cards. However, that blower card did perform quite well, but clearly was holding back the full potential of the RX 5700 chipset. The PowerColor Red Dragon Radeon RX 5700 soon sorted that out. A great price and delivering great performance. The cherry on top has to be just how slick this card looks too. Highly recommended.