BIOS Updates: Boost It or Brick It? - AMD RX 5600 XT Beats NVIDIA RTX 2060

Patrick Norton (0:00)

Coming up on This Week in Computer Hardware, AMD Rx 5600 Xt beats Nvidia 2060 That's quite a firmware update, people. Sonos drops support for OTA products, and so much mayhem is gonna happen in phone voting. All that and more coming up next on Twitch. This Week in Computer Hardware is brought to you from LastPass Studios. Using the same password everywhere is a security nightmare waiting to happen. LastPass easily creates unique passwords for every site. Visit lastpass.com/twit.

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Sebastian Peak (0:34)

From people you trust. This is TWiT.

Patrick Norton (0:43)

This is TWiT, This Week in Computer Hardware, episode 550 recorded on January 23rd, 2020 BIOS updates, boost it or brick it. This episode of This Week in Computer Hardware is brought to you by Zapier. Zapier connects all your business software and handles the work for you so you can focus on what matters most. Right now, through the end of next month, go to zapier.com/twitch for your free 14 day trial.

Welcome to Twitch This Week in Computer Hardware, Twitch Weekly Show that aims to bring you all the hardware news, whether it's mobile, console, desktop or laptop. We are down and today we are going to be all over and down on the Internet of Things, specifically Sonos and there might be a little bit of carrier based rage. But first, ladies and gentlemen, we should introduce Mr. Sebastian Peak. I'm Patrick Norton. Sebastian, joining us from pcper.com, is not full of rage as I am, but is full of hot tips on the new 5600 series cards from AMD.

Sebastian Peak (1:40)

Yes, because this was, hey Patrick, it's good to be back with you here, as I awkwardly transition to the first story. We talked about this last week, I think, at CES, AMD. Their announcements were probably the most interesting thing in the PC hardware space because they had information about this new and crazy 64-core processor for $4,000. They also had, for the mainstream graphics segment, a new GPU announced, and not completely new. Essentially, this is a kind of a reduced version of the Rx 5700 So this is the 5600 Xt, and of course, graphics companies do this. They create different configurations, slightly cut down configurations. So this is the same Navi 10 GPU that we have seen in the 5700 series. It has actually the same streaming processor count as the 5700 So these are both, essentially, they take a 5700 and they down clock it. But in addition to the lower clocks, they announced that this would only have 6 GB of memory. And importantly, they were clocking the memory at a much lower speed, so it had a lower data rate. So we were only at a total of 12 Gbps of memory speed versus 14 with the 5700 series cards. So less and slower memory, much, much lower clocks. Like we're talking a game clock that would only boost an average of about 1,375 MHz versus 1,625 with the 5700

And a max boost clock of only 1,560 MHz versus 1,725.

Everything else the same, the same kind of like ROPs, texture units, a lot of the same capabilities, but.

Patrick Norton (3:31)

Those numbers are certainly, they sound kind of large, 10 to 15%. What's the actual impact on frames per second or the kind of the quality settings you can use on a GPU when you drop it down that much?

Sebastian Peak (3:43)

Well, you know, Patrick, I'm glad you asked that question because it would have been interesting to look at that difference except just before launch. AMD emailed to myself and all the other reviewers and they said, hey, we have a new BIOS update we need you to use, which literally invalidated any previous benchmarks that we had. So I was lucky enough to have been sampled directly by AMD with the Sapphire Pulse card and Sapphire was, I think, the first to get the new BIOS. So actually, a lot of the cards that will be out in the wild will already have this new BIOS. We'll get into that, the BIOS update, I'll just talk about it right now. It was huge because it took what felt like a combination of reduced hardware capabilities with the new card compared to a 5700 and intentional product segmentation, which is where they just, you know, they figure out, okay, what's the gap we need to have to keep the value proposition, but make it an attractive upgrade to move up to the next card? They kind of threw all that out the window in response to Nvidia and said, okay, well actually, hey, the hardware was capable of running a lot faster all along. Here's about a 200 megahertz upgrade in speed across the board, boost clocks, game clock, and faster memory data rate. So it turns out the memory that was on these boards from the very beginning was 14 gigabit per second memory, not 12, that was an artificial segmentation decision.