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Expanding the scope to include the RTX 2060, the Asus RX ROG Strix 5600 XT is almost 3% slower versus the Sapphire card that ran a few percent faster than the Nvidia card. Again, this is mostly due to the Asus card running slower memory. Seeing these performance numbers, the this Strix card could do with a price drop.
Across 10 of 11 games, the Asus ROG Strix RX 5600 XT O6G averaged 60 fps or higher at 1080p. The only title the card did not stay above that level is in Metro: Exodus, where it averaged 54 fps. Five titles (Strange Brigade, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XIV, Forza Horizon 4, and Battlefield V) all ran over 100 fps. Metro aside, the rest are in the 70s and 80s. As you can see, the Asus card is quite capable at 1080p when using the in-game canned ultra settings.
If we look at head-to-head results between our review card and the Sapphire RX 5600 XT Pulse OC, the latter was over 5% faster. The kicker here is that the Sapphire card costs less and still puts out more fps. Why the difference? Look at the memory speeds. While the difference in core clocks are small, the memory on the Asus card runs at 12 Gbps versus the Sapphire at 14 Gbps. The net bandwidth gap (288 GBps vs 336 GBps) is a big difference here.
Our previous testing between original BIOS’ and the updated versions with increased clocks yielded around 10% performance gain. In the end, you have two choices, either overclock the memory on the O6G card and hope it can reach those speeds, or buy the Top version (T6G) that runs 14 Gbps out of the box. We’d imagine the Top version to fetch a small premium over the O6G, though it wasn’t available when we wrote this review.
Moral of the story, don't pay for the Asus tax. They think their name adds value, which it does not. Sapphire is the best, followed by power color, when it comes to AMD cards. I see 0 reason to spend that kind of money, on a 5600xt, when you can get a faster card, for a similar cost, or less. $339 is RX 5700 territory.
