Low-End AMD RX 6300 Surfaces on Second-Hand Marketplace

AMD hasn't officially announced the Radeon RX 6300, but the card has appeared on Goofish (via HXL), a second-hand Chinese marketplace. The low-profile Navi 24 (codename Beige Goby) graphics card reportedly sells for less than $60 and could be an excellent entry-level competitor to rival the best graphics cards.

The first traces of the Radeon RX 6300 surfaced in May last year in the Linux kernel. However, the rumor mill had stopped spinning until recently, when the Radeon graphics card popped up on Goofish. It's uncertain if AMD will release the Radeon RX 6300 to the retail market. Instead, it could be an OEM-exclusive SKU. HP has listed the Radeon RX 6300 as a graphics option for the company's Elite Series 800 G9 desktop PCs.

The Radeon RX 6300 utilizes Navi 24 silicon, similar to AMD's other RDNA 2 offerings, including the Radeon RX 6400 and Radeon RX 6500 XT. Navi 24, a die that measures 107 mm² and comes out of TSMC's 6nm process node, is also a prominent option for discrete mobile options, such as the Radeon RX 6500M and Radeon RX 6550S. The Radeon RX 6300 utilizes a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. Given its tiny die size, Navi 24 only houses 16 compute units (CUs). The Radeon RX 6300's die comes with 12 enabled CUs, amounting to 768 streaming processors (SPs) and 12 Ray Tracing accelerators.

AMD uses the same recipe for baking the Radeon RX 6400, but the Radeon RX 6300 is slower than the Radeon RX 6400. HP lists the former with a 1,512 MHz game clock, while the Radeon RX 6400 features a 2,039 MHz base clock, around 35% higher than the Radeon RX 6300. The lower clock speeds are the product of a lower TGP. The Radeon RX 6400 is rated for 53W, whereas the Radeon RX 6300 adheres to 32W, a 40% decrease. At least that means you won't have to fiddle with PCIe power connectors. Both Radeon graphics cards draw their necessary power from a standard expansion slot.

Radeon RX 6300 Specifications

AMD didn't just hobble the clock speeds and TGP on the Radeon RX 6300. The graphics card shows a substantial compromise to the memory subsystem. It only has 2GB of GDDR6 memory, half of the Radeon RX 6400. Although the memory chips run at 16 Gbps on both graphics cards, the Radeon RX 6300 only has a 32-bit memory interface compared to the Radeon RX 6400's 64-bit bus. Therefore, the Radeon RX 6300 can only deliver 64 GBps of memory bandwidth, 50% less than the Radeon RX 6400.

The Radeon RX 6300 could be a viable option for small form factor (SFF) systems that lack integrated graphics. The Navi 24-based graphics card comes with two HDMI 2.1 ports, after all. However, we can't see it as useful for a whole lot more than that. The Navi 24 lacks video encoding capabilities, so it's useless in an HTPC. It's far from a gaming graphics card, but you could get away with the occasional title at 1080p (1920x1080) if the image fidelity is dialed down far enough.

The Chinese merchant put the Radeon RX 6300 up for 399 yuan or $58.28. However, that's evidently not the official price since the seller probably pulled the graphics card from an OEM system and flipped it on Goofish. There aren't many options under $60. The only graphics cards available near that price are the older GeForce GT 710 or Radeon RD 5450 models, around the $50 mark.