AORUS RX 5700 XT 8G Review
PCB & Cooling
Under the stylish heatsink and fan assembly, the Aorus RX 5700 XT seems to use the standard power or PWM configuration as the reference model. That is seven phases for the vcore and two phases for the memory. Starting with the memory, it is Micron GDDR6 14Gbps ICs, which we’ve seen before on the competition’s products as well. The memory overclocks as well as you’d expect which is to say you can’t quite reach 16Gbps (2GHz), but you can get fairly close at anything between 1900 and 1950MHz.
On the core side of things we have the IR35257 seven phase controller which to my knowledge there aren’t any readily available XOC tools for (nor is there an XOC BIOS for that matter). This again is the same controller as on the AMD reference model. As this is a card that’s in no way designed for XOC or even any sort of advanced OC, this isn’t of much importance actually. Since AMD has capped the GPU and memory operating frequency, there won’t be much you can use this controller for outside of lowering the operating voltage perhaps to reduce heat and/or power consumption.
When we flip over the card we see a back-plate that serves to cool the rear components on the PCB. Underneath it we find several thick thermal pads with obvious indents where they make contact with the heat generating components. This back-plate can get quite hot under high loads. I would certainly recommend some air over this as well.
The main heatsink is quite beefy in appearance but not as heavy as you’d imagine. The GPU is cooled via direct contact with six heatpipes which run through a series of fin stacks as per usual. A simplistic cooling solution but one that works incredibly well as this card runs surprisingly cool, or at least the GPU core does.
