Report: AMD Radeon RX 5500 to Rival Nvidia GTX 1660

The mid-range graphics card market is about to get a new competitor. According to VideoCardz, AMD will launch its Radeon RX 5500 gaming graphics card on October 7.

(Image credit: AMD)

The report claims that AMD will release the Radeon RX 5500 in for desktops as well as laptops. The mobile variant is rumored to be known as the Radeon RX 5500M, with  the "M" standing for mobile. In both instances, the Radeon RX 5500 will likely compete against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 and GTX 1660.

Specs

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Row 0 - Cell 0 AMD Radeon RX 5500*Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650
Architecture (GPU)RDNA (Navi 14)Turing (TU116)Turing  (TU117)
Shading Units1,4081,408896
Single-Precision Performance?5.027 TFLOPS2.984 TFLOPS
Texture Units?8856
Base Clock Rate?1,530 MHz1,485 MHz
GPU Boost Rate?1,785 MHz1,665 MHz
Memory Capacity4GB/8GB GDDR66GB GDDR54GB GDDR5
Memory Clock?8 Gbps8 Gbps
Memory Bus128-bit192-bit128-bit
Memory Bandwidth?192 GBps128 GBps
ROPs?4832
L2 Cache?1.5MB1MB
TDP?120W75W
Transistor Count?6.6 billion4.7 billion
Die Size?284 mm²200 mm²
Price?$219$149

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

Rumor has it that the Radeon RX 5500 will use AMD's Navi 14 silicon. The chipmaker's new mid-range offering rocks 22 Compute Units (CUs), which results in a total of 1,408 Stream Processors (SPs). If the shader count is accurate, the Radeon RX 5500 will be on par with Nvidia's GTX 1660.

The Radeon RX 5500 will allegedly arrive with GDDR6 memory. AMD could offer 4GB and 8GB variants of the graphics card. However, it appears that the Radeon RX 5500 will be restricted to a 128-bit memory interface, therefore, the increase in memory bandwidth is probably a result of the higher memory clock rather than a widened memory bus.

(Image credit: EEC)

As spotted by hardware leaker momomo_us, Gigabyte has already presented some Radeon RX 5500 XT SKUs to the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) office. The EEC listing reveals six different Gigabyte Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics cards, and their model names point to the Radeon RX 5500 XT featuring 8GB of memory.

  • GV-R55XTGAMING OC-8GD
  • GV-R55XTWF2OC-8GD
  • GV-R55XTOC-8GD
  • GV-R55XTGAMING-8GD
  • GV-R55XTWF2-8GD
  • GV-R55XTD6-8GD

According to VideoCardz's report, the Radeon RX 5500 was compared to the extinct AMD Radeon RX 480 during AMD's press call. However, the publication didn't specify if the chipmaker was referring to performance or pricing. 

Pricing wasn't revealed, but since the graphics card is set to contend in the mid-range segment, we expect to to come with a sub-$200 price tag.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • sykozis
    Did anyone proofread this article? The title mentions to the RX5500 however, the last 3 paragraphs talk about the RX5700.....
    Reply