ASRock Challenger D Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB OC Graphics Card Review

Performance Comparisons and Overclocking

Overclocking isn’t for everyone, and while I am decent at it, I don’t like to do it everyday.  The reason behind overclocking is simple, you wan’t to squeeze every penny out of your investment and you want all of the performance that might be hidden. There are some of us that do it just for fun though.  No worries, I got you covered here.

Here is the comparison from stock clocks to the overclock.

You can see there is a 7.19% increase in the Pixel Fillrate, a 7.01% increase in the Texture Fillrate, a 5.43% increase bandwidth and some action over here on the GPU, Memory and Boost clocks.  The GPU Clock reading being lowered, that is GPU-Z reading it incorrectly since the clock does go all the way down to 0 at idle.  Let’s jump into the benchmarks and see what this increase has done for performance, temps, power consumption and more.

Since I did play with the fan curve and voltages, the temperatures and power consumption here are basically irrelevant but still good to note.  The main performance indicator here that most pay attention to is the overall 3DMark score.  We can see at stock, originally we came in at 12,477 but at the overclock, we came in a 12,991, almost 13K from a simple overclock, we gained overall a 4.04% improvement.  Let’s see how this works in TimeSpy.

On TimeSpy, breaking it down again to the main score, we can see at stock we received 5,185 3DMarks and on the overclock, we jumped up to 5,438.  While not a huge gain, it was slightly higher than FireStrikes, we gained 4.76% performance here on the overclock.

In FireStrike and TimeSpy, we did not focus on the other scores, though they are relevant and important and they are still listed here if you are curious.  Let’s see if we see any similar results in the remaining tests.

In the interest of time and this being a 1080P card, we will stick to 1080P results in the overclocking portion.

At 1920×1080 on average, we can see there was a 5.58% improvement in performance going from 38.32 frames per second to 40.52 FPS.  This benchmark crushes even the top video cards, so it is impressive that a budget card can do this much.

Still not perfectly playable, at ultra settings this card is doing pretty decent.  So let’s see how Tomb Raider does.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider treated us well at stock at 1920×1080 but it gave us a little more here providing a 4.44% improvement in performance from 66 frames per second to 69.

At the highest settings, this game is 100% playable with or without FreeSync and that’s a great thing.  Let’s see how Assassin’s Creed Odyssey handles this overclock.

On the brutal Assassin’s Creed Odyssey we get a little bit of a leg up here, breaking what seems to be a trend.  If you noticed before, there has been a +4% trend but here we can see a 6.31% increase in frames per second at 46 to 49FPS.  The closer to 60FPS the better and a 6.31% improvement helps tons.  What more can you do with your overclocks?  Will FarCry further break that +4% increase in performance?

FarCry5 was already playable at 1920×1080, here we can see a 4.82% improvement.  Again, not a bad thing, just back to our +4% limitation.  Let’s see if Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands does better.

At 1920×1080 we can see in Wildands a 4.67% increase in performance over it’s stock counter part at 40.57 overclocked to 42.51 frames per second.

With anywhere between a 5 and 7% increase in the overclock, we can see between 4 and 7% increase in performance.  This performance will also come from your overall system, not just graphics, so a slight bump in CPU and Memory performance will help here as well.

With all this, let’s jump to the final chapter in this review, my Final Thoughts and Conclusion.

Continue To: Final Thoughts and Conclusion