The floodgates have somewhat opened on AMD's new Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 GPUs, so if you've decided that either model is the best graphics card for your setup, you can purchase one right now. That is, unless you're waiting on a custom variant by one of AMD's hardware partners. Those will come, eventually—Asus said it will have custom Navi cards in September.
"Our initial Navi offerings will use AMD's reference cooler design and clock speeds, but we'll be tweaking, tuning, and powering up these new Radeons with coolers of our own design soon. Stay tuned for more details in September," Asus wrote in an EdgeUp article.
AMD stuck with a blower-style cooler this round. Blower coolers have the advantage of escorting hot air out of the case, but custom designs by third-parties often yield lower temps and sometimes quieter operation. Those factors are dependent on the specific model and your own airflow scheme, of course, but generally hold true.
It remains to be seen what kind of custom designs Asus will concoct. The image at the top of this article is of an Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 590. I suspect Asus will offer something similar for the new RX 5700 XT and 5700 cards—that is to say three cooling fans is likely on some top-tier models, just perhaps the style of the shroud might be different.
Also of interest is how far Asus and others decide to push Navi, for their overclocked offerings. Reference specs break down like this:
- Radeon RX 5700 XT: 1,605MHz base, 1,905MHz boost, 1,755MHz game frequency
- Radeon RX 5700: 1,465MHz base, 1,725MHz boost, 1,625MHz game frequency
Both cards also feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory at 14Gbps and could see a factory overclock.
While Asus is waiting until September, AMD's Scott Herkelman recently revealed in a Reddit post that custom designs "will be hitting the market ~mid-August." That's a bummer if you were hoping to score one for a discount during Amazon's Prime Day event next week, though it remains to be seen if AMD's newest hardware will see any discounts at such an early stage.
