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

Radeon RX 6300
Radeon RX 6300 (Image credit: Goofish)

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

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Graphics CardRadeon RX 6300Radeon RX 6400
ArchitectureNavi 24Navi 24
Process TechnologyTSMC 6NTSMC 6N
Transistors (Billion)5.45.4
Die size (mm²)107107
CUs1212
GPU Cores768768
RT Cores1212
Base Clock (MHz)?1,923
Game Clock (MHz)1,5122,039
Boost Clock (MHz)?2,321
VRAM Speed (Gbps)1616
VRAM2GB GDDR64GB GDDR6
VRAM Bus Width3264
ROPs3232
TMUs4848
TFLOPs FP32 (Boost)?3.6
Bandwidth (GBps)64128
TGP (watts)3253

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.

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.

  • The Radeon RX 6300's die comes with 12 enabled CUs, amounting to 768 streaming processors (SPs) and 12 Ray Tracing accelerators.

    I doubt this entry-level card will sport full 12 CUs enabled on the die. While the exact core count is not yet confirmed, it is very likely that the AMD Radeon RX 6300 boasts either 640 or 512 stream processors, so that's within 10 or 8 Compute Units.

    Since the RX 6400 is already having 768 streaming processors, the RX 6300 should sport a lower SP number, IMO.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    2GB VRAM.
    In 2023.
    Seriously ?!

    You're seriously going to try to haggle old chips to users AMD?

    If you have old chips, give them away to a school for charity, don't scam unknowing buyers with this.

    If AMD releases this crap, I will just call them scammers from now on.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Metal Messiah. said:
    Since the RX 6400 is already having 768 streaming processors, the RX 6300 should sport a lower SP number, IMO.
    With half the memory size, half the memory bandwidth and half the clock frequency to afford almost not having a heatsink or VRM, the RX6300 is not even a remote threat to the RX6400 for anything beyond basic 2D output, no need to lobotomize it any further. This is basically a modern-day GT710.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    I actually really like this idea. For years I lamented AMD not having a true successor to the HD 6400 for PCs which don't have decent (or any) integrated graphics yet need a GPU with some relative grunt for office tasks and even Google Earth, as well as something cheap someone can have on hand for an emergency card. My HD 5400, for example, served me well during a couple of RMA periods. After that AMD abandoned this market I thought they'd never return, but perhaps they are.

    The problem is that it needs to be limited to about $60, and with it being pulled so quickly I doubt AMD would want it sold at that price.
    Reply
  • DSzymborski
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    2GB VRAM.
    In 2023.
    Seriously ?!

    You're seriously going to try to haggle old chips to users AMD?

    If you have old chips, give them away to a school for charity, don't scam unknowing buyers with this.

    If AMD releases this crap, I will just call them scammers from now on.

    How is this a scam? Not everyone on a Zen 3 platform needs a gaming GPU. This is a solution to substitute integrated graphics for someone who needs a 5900X or 5950X, has no interest in gaming, and wants something with modern driver support rather than hunting down a GT 710 or a Radeon 530. Having a lot of VRAM on a GPU like this is dumb. Who are you to decide that people who don't want to spend $150 on a budget gaming GPU shouldn't be able to get something cheaply because such a low-end product offends your sensibilities?
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    2GB VRAM.
    In 2023.
    Seriously ?!

    You're seriously going to try to haggle old chips to users AMD?

    If you have old chips, give them away to a school for charity, don't scam unknowing buyers with this.

    If AMD releases this crap, I will just call them scammers from now on.
    As said elsewhere....

    "Not everyone is a gamer."
    Reply
  • DSzymborski
    DSzymborski said:
    How is this a scam? Not everyone on a Zen 3 platform needs a gaming GPU. This is a solution to substitute integrated graphics for someone who needs a 5900X or 5950X, has no interest in gaming, and wants something with modern driver support rather than hunting down a GT 710 or a Radeon 530. Having a lot of VRAM on a GPU like this is dumb. Who are you to decide that people who don't want to spend $150 on a budget gaming GPU shouldn't be able to get something cheaply because such a low-end product offends your sensibilities?

    If anything, they've churned out too few cheap, low-end, crappy GPUs. There's a reason that the GT 710 and 730 have been a consistent sellers for nearly a decade now. People have a use for basic GPUs that don't cost much.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    Not everyone is a gamer, barely uses the computer. Trying to run baldurs gate :)
    Reply
  • RedBear87
    Metal Messiah. said:
    I doubt this entry-level card will sport full 12 CUs enabled on the die. While the exact core count is not yet confirmed, it is very likely that the AMD Radeon RX 6300 boasts either 640 or 512 stream processors, so that's within 10 or 8 Compute Units.

    Since the RX 6400 is already having 768 streaming processors, the RX 6300 should sport a lower SP number, IMO.
    Not necessarily, the mobile RX 6300M has the same CUs and SPs configuration of the RX 6400 and RX 6450M. It's just the memory configuration and TGPs that change.
    Reply
  • usertests
    The missing H.264/H.265 encode and AV1 decode matter more than the low VRAM and performance, which are to be expected if new 6400/6500 are selling for 2-3x as much. Even with missing features someone might find this useful at $50-60. It's not necessarily useless for HTPC since you can use it for playback of already encoded content.

    If we see an RDNA 3/4 follow-up to Navi 24, I hope it will have the full decode/encode capabilities and 6 GB of VRAM default for the top model.
    Reply