AMD’s blockbuster CES keynote doesn’t happen until next week, but it appears we already know one of the products ready to be announced: The Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card. On Friday, Videocardz found a staging page for the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT Thicc II Pro on XFX’s webpage, following an earlier leak of the ASRock RX 5600 XT Challenger over the holiday break.
The XFX page is still live as of this writing, and well, it doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination, listing out specs, features, and everything else you’d expect on a fully fleshed-out product page.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT looks like a slower version of the $350 Radeon RX 5700. While the pricier RX 5700 utilizes a wide 256-bit interface with 8GB of GDDR6 RAM, XFX says the Radeon RX 5600 XT reduces that to 6GB of GDDR6 over a 192-bit interface. It’ll have much less memory bandwidth overall but should probably still be more than adequate for killer 1080p and solid 1440p gaming.
XFX
Screenshot of the unannounced Radeon RX 5600 XT on XFX’s website.
It looks like AMD equipped the Radeon RX 5600 XT with the same number of stream processors as the 5700—2,304—but clocked them much lower. The Radeon RX 5700’s reference specs call for a Game Clock speed of up to 1625MHz and a Boost Clock of 1725; XFX’s listing for the Radeon RX 5600 XT puts the Game Clock at 1460MHz and Boost Clock 1620MHz. Given how hard XFX put the overclocking pedal to the metal in the more potent Radeon RX 5700 XT versions of the Thicc II Ultra (pictured at top) and Thicc III Ultra, XFX’s stated Game Clock speed for the Radeon RX 5600 XT likely falls above AMD’s factory spec.
Of course, the Radeon RX 5600 XT comes with the full assortment of Navi GPU features, such as PCIe 4.0 support and a cutting-edge display engine.
As far as the XFX design itself, the Radeon RX 5600 XT Thicc II Pro looks very similar to the RX 5700 XT Thicc II Ultra, but with copper accents instead of chrome. Underlying cooling improvements introduced in the later Thicc III Ultra made it one of the best custom coolers around, so hopefully the thicker heatsink and better memory cooling—features lacking in the original 5700 XT Thicc II Ultra—transfer over to this latest Thicc II variant, too. The listing highlights a “newly enhanced open-air design,” so fingers crossed.
Brad Chacos/IDG
The reference Radeon RX 5700.
Add it all up and it looks like AMD’s taking aim at Nvidia’s $230 GeForce GTX 1660 Super and $280 GTX 1660 Ti next—though the Super already rendered the Ti mostly obsolete. And that’s the biggest question left about the Radeon RX 5600 XT: price.
The Radeon RX 5700 series delivers a killer price-to-performance proposition that make them the 1440p graphics cards to beat, but the recently released Radeon RX 5500 XT is priced too high versus Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1650 Super. And with the 8GB version of the RX 5500 XT priced at $200-plus, it’s hard to see this card competing with the $230 GeForce GTX 1660 Super’s cost. But if the Radeon RX 5600 XT manages to wallop the GTX 1660 Ti—remember, it packs the same 2,304 stream processors as the Radeon RX 5700, just clocked slower—then it could justify a higher price tag.
Expect to learn more the Radeon RX 5600 XT at AMD’s CES keynote, which will be livestreamed to the company’s YouTube channel at 5 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Pacific on Monday, January 6. Given how many leaks are springing already, don’t be surprised if the Radeon RX 5600 XT hits the streets sooner rather than later after it’s revealed.