ASROCK 5700 XT TAICHI

There’s a new contender in town.

Back when we reviewed the reference AMD RX 5700 XT, we felt it was a competent GPU let down a little by its sub-par cooler and inflated price. The Asrock RX 5700 XT Taichi we’re reviewing here doesn’t do anything to address the latter, but it does wonders for the former. The Taichi’s big, bold and beautiful cooler does a much better job at taming the hot Navi GPU. Does it translate into better performance too? And is the rather hefty asking price worth it?

The Asrock 5700 XT Taichi shares its branding and theme with the company’s Taichi line of motherboards. It really looks great with its artistic cog design and its high end feature set. While Taichi motherboards might be more mid-tier products (though up a step from there in recent times), the 5700 XT is very much a flagship design, and is built and priced to compete with the likes of the Asus Strix and MSI Gaming cards.

The card is a triple fan 2.5 slot design, with a backplate and a fantastic looking RGB central fan. It demands to be shown off in a windowed case. If RGB isn’t your thing, you can turn it off with a switch, avoiding the need to install yet another piece of software. It’s a terrific idea. The PCB is a custom design, with a 10 Phase PWM and twin 8-pin power connectors capable of delivering a lot of power if required.

Interestingly, the Taichi comes with display stream compression enabled Display Ports, which mean the card can output resolutions as high as 8K at 60Hz. With four DP 1.4 and a pair of HDMI 2.0b connectors, The Taichi is as well-equipped as it gets at this point in time.

With its factory overclock, we’d expect the 5700 XT to outperform the reference model, and it did, but probably not by as much as we’d expect. Its real strength is its quieter noise levels. Where the reference 5700 XT is quite noisy when it is forced to speed up, the Taichi stayed (almost) silent throughout all of our testing, though it’s not truly silent like we tend to see with some flagship models. Those extra couple of decibels are offset by cool running, with a peak recorded temperature of 71 degrees. It’s at about 70 degrees that the full boost clock starts to drop away, so it was nice to see the Taichi holding its clocks above 2,000 MHz throughout almost all of our testing. This puts it very close to the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Founders Edition, though at the cost of higher power consumption.

Asrock’s RX 5700 XT Taichi is very much a premium card, but it has some tough competition from established premium GPU players. The Taichi needs to excel at acoustics/temperatures, value or performance to go head to head with the big boys. While it’s a clear step up from the average reference 5700 XT, it probably doesn’t quite do enough to be considered a class leader. There’s nothing bad about it at all, and it looks fantastic, but we feel Asrock probably needs another generation to really hit its stride. Asrock is definitely a GPU brand to keep an eye on.