ASRock RX 5600 XT Phantom Gaming D3 Review

The ASRock RX 5600 XT Phantom Gaming D3 ships in a black box, with the large ‘PG' (Phantom Gaming) logo highly visible. There's no image of the card itself on the box.

Inside, there is a very limited accessory bundle, consisting of a humble quick start guide.

As for the graphics card itself, this is the first Phantom Gaming card we have seen from ASRock and, just like the motherboards, there is a red and black colour scheme used here – the shroud is mostly black plastic, but you can see some red stripes above and below the fans. There are also two brushed metal plates screwed onto the plastic at either end of the card.

Being the D3, this card uses a triple-fan cooler, where each fan measures 80mm. There is also a fan-stop mode, so the fans do stop spinning once the card is idling or in low-load situations.

In terms of the card's overall size, it's certainly not small, measuring in at 290.6 x 126.5 x 53.1 mm. This does mean the MSI Gaming X model is slightly larger, but at almost 30cm long you will still want to double check that the Phantom Gaming will fit in your case.

The front side of the card is mostly bare, except for the small Phantom Gaming logo which acts as the card's sole RGB zone, with support for ASRock's Polychrome Sync.

As for the backplate, the first thing you'll really notice is that it only covers the length of the PCB, which itself is quite short – meaning there's almost three inches of heatsink left uncovered. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but personally I think it would look neater if the backplate extended the full length of the card; then again, that might adversely affect thermal performance due to restricted airflow through the heatsink.

The backplate is made out of metal, though, and is mostly black with some red and silver accents. I'm not too keen on the fact that ASRock has printed the words ‘FAST / MYSTERIOUS / UNBEATABLE' on the backplate, however, as it feels a little immature in my view, but each to their own.

Elsewhere, we can see the Phantom Gaming D3 requires just a single 8-pin PCIe power connector, while we get the standard allocation of video outputs with 3x DisplayPort and 1x HDMI.

Opening up the card to get a look at the PCB, aside from the fact it measures less than 19cm long, we can see ASRock has opted for a 6-phase VRM for the GPU and a single-phase VRM for the memory. Said memory is more of Micron's D9WCW 14Gbps modules, which with the new L12 BIOS update released this week, does now run at 14Gbps.

The cooler is comprised of two aluminium fin stacks, connected by three 6mm copper heatpipes. These don't make direct contact with the GPU die, however, as ASRock has fitted a separate plate for the GPU and VRAM, while there is another plate for the VRM as well.

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