Sometimes the best graphics card isn’t the fastest or newest model — it’s the lowest priced card you can find that’s still relatively recent. Such is the case with the ASRock RX 5600 currently listed on Newegg for $109.99. Don’t be fooled by the listing showing up in February 2024, this is a GPU that originally launched back in January 2020. You can check our Radeon RX 5600 XT review for the details at the time, but if you’re after a cheap GPU, you’re probably more interested in how the card stacks up today.
Let’s start by saying that there are some potential question marks. The Newegg page says this is an RX 5600, but then the specs on that same page show RX 5600 XT figures. The RX 5600 was an OEM-only part, so it makes more sense for this to be an RX 5600 XT, and at least the listing says it has 2304 shader cores and 14Gbps GDDR6 memory — the vanilla RX 5600 would have 2048 shaders and 12Gbps memory, so it would be about 10~15 percent slower. Also, ASRock doesn’t even make an RX 5600, so this is undoubtedly the RX 5600 XT Challenger D OC.
You should also keep in mind what you’re not getting with an AMD GPU series that originally debuted in mid-2019. The RDNA architecture may have been a big step forward from the previous Vega and Polaris GPUs, but it’s missing some modern features. There’s no ray tracing support, nor are there any dedicated AI acceleration features. Video codec support is limited to HEVC H.265 or AVC H.264, meaning there’s no AV1 encoding support. Power use will also be significantly higher than equivalent performance current-gen cards.
But damn is it cheap! And for an ostensibly new card, so you don’t have to worry whether it was crunching away on Ethereum mining for a few years. So let’s look at how the card stacks up to a few modern GPUs, using data from our GPU benchmarks hierarchy.
We’ve got the similarly priced Arc A380 and the more expensive Arc A580. From AMD, we have the newer but more expensive RX 6400 and RX 6500 XT, plus the step-up RX 6600 that basically replaced the 5600 XT. From Nvidia… well, there’s nothing really directly comparable in pricing, but let’s toss in the GTX 1650 and GTX 1650 Super, GTX 1660 Super, and the RTX 2060 — the latter being the direct competitor for the RX 5600 XT back in the day.
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Honestly, performance isn’t bad at all — quite the contrary. The RX 5600 XT isn’t going to handle the latest releases at maxed out settings and high resolutions, but for medium/high settings at 1080p it competes quite favorably against the newer budget offerings. Specifically, it’s about double the performance of the GTX 1650, RX 6400, and Arc A380, with a price that’s currently less than any of those.
Of course, average power use while gaming will be about double that of the RX 6400 and Arc A380 as well. If you’re worried about electricity costs adding up, keep in mind that 75W of extra power for four hours per day works out to around 9 kWh per month. Depending on how much you pay for electricity, that may or may not be a serious worry — and four hours per day would be quite a lot for most households.
There are newer and faster GPUs for sure, but even with the lack of ray tracing support — it’s not like you’re going to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 with all the bells and whistles on anything priced below $300 anyway — the RX 5600 XT still holds up decently well. It’s absolutely a budget offering now, but if you’re just looking for a cheap card to tide you over at 1080p medium until the next generation cards arrive in 2025, you could do far worse.
