AMD's Radeon RX 570 and RX 580 have dominated performance in the lower end of the enthusiast graphics card market for a while now, so the announcement of a successor in the form of RX 5500 earlier this year drew a lot of interest. The RX 5500 has since made its debut as an option for pre-built desktops from vendors like Acer and HP but the promised standalone cards never materialised. That changes today as custom designs from a range of AMD partners debut under a new name: the Radeon RX 5500 XT.
So what differences exist between the RX 5500 and 5500 XT? Looking at the reference specifications, there's only a couple of changes - a slightly higher power target of 130W for the XT compared to 110W for the vanilla model, alongside tweaks for clock speeds. However, the custom boards produced by the likes of PowerColor, MSI and Sapphire are free to made their own modifications and both of the cards we were sent by AMD to review are overclocked models with beefy cooling solutions and higher TDPs.
Like the RX 570 and RX 580 before them, both 4GB and 8GB variants are available, priced at £159/$169 and £179/$199 respectively. AMD supplied one of each to test: our 4GB model is the Sapphire Pulse overclocked to 1815MHz, while the 8GB model is a PowerColor Red Dragon running at 1830MHz. One of the biggest questions we want to answer with this review is whether the 8GB model is worth the extra cost as the 4GB option is otherwise just as powerful as its bigger brother. Through testing a range of games at different resolutions, we can show just how important that extra VRAM is - plus where it doesn't make any difference at all.
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