AMD Reportedly Disables Overclocking on the Radeon RX 6400

Radeon RX 6400 Aero ITX 4G
Radeon RX 6400 Aero ITX 4G (Image credit: MSI)

AMD silently gave the Radeon RX 6400 a retail launch last week. However, TechPowerUp's review of the Radeon RX 6400 purportedly revealed that it lacks overclocking support, meaning there's no way for owners to boost the Navi 24-based graphics card's performance.

The Radeon RX 6400 initially targeted OEMs, but AMD eventually decided to unleash it for the retail market. The graphics card apparently performs like Nvidia's three-year-old GeForce GTX 1650 from the Turing days. According to TechPowerUp's results, even the Radeon RX 570, which debuted in 2017, is faster than the Radeon RX 6400. The publication recorded performance margins up to 17% in 1080p and 24% in 1440p in favor of the venerable Polaris graphics card. It's no wonder AMD didn't make a big deal out of the Radeon RX 6400 launch.

The Navi 24 silicon has some drawbacks. There's a limitation on the bandwidth, for starters, with a 64-bit memory interface and only four lanes of (up to) PCIe 4.0 connectivity. AMD has also trimmed down the media encoding capabilities. As a result, Navi 24 lacks support for 4K H.264/H.265 encoding and AV1 decoding. In addition, certain AMD technologies, such as ReLive, aren't available on the Radeon RX 6400, where the same feature is accessible to old geezers like the Radeon RX 480. Finally, it would appear zero overclocking support is part of the Radeon RX 6400's shortcomings.

TechPowerUp claims that AMD has locked down the Radeon RX 6400 completely. While the OC settings panel is reachable in AMD's Radeon WattMan utility, the custom setting doesn't provide sliders to adjust the clock speeds. Nonetheless, it's too soon to determine whether AMD has purposefully disabled overclocking on the Radeon RX 6400 based on a single sample. It could just be an oversight with the drivers on AMD's part, and other utilities like MSI Afterburner might also work. Perhaps the chipmaker simply hasn't explicitly enabled overclocking on the Radeon RX 6400 yet. It will be interesting to see whether third-party utilities can overclock the Radeon RX 6400, and we'll likely hear more in the coming days.

Of course, the Radeon RX 6400 is far from being one of the best graphics cards on the market right now. Even with a $159 starting price, the Navi 24-based graphics card seems underpowered, but perhaps it can find some success in the current state of the graphics card market, especially with custom GeForce GTX 1650 models starting at $210. Considering the far more capable RTX 3050 starts at $250, however, we'd try for that rather than pinching pennies to end up with a weak sauce card.

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.

  • tennis2
    Here's why.
    Still seems odd they wont even let you undervolt though.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    If by "overclocking" this means the card doesn't boost, then boo on them. But if it just means adjusting the slider which means raising the boost cap, then... I don't see this as a major loss since you probably can't get very far with it anyway.

    EDIT: Or it's power limited like what was shown
    Reply
  • slash3
    tennis2 said:
    Here's why.
    Still seems odd they wont even let you undervolt though.

    Yep, lack of an external PCI-E power connector means that it must adhere to the 75W PCI Express slot power limit (at least, out of the box - external VRM or modified PCB may provide other... opportunities).
    Reply
  • escksu
    Wow.... This is like absolute crap from amd... If you need a cheap card getting a 2nd hand rx480 4gb makes even more sense!! Lots of 4gb cards at dirt cheap prices because they cant mine eth.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    slash3 said:
    Yep, lack of an external PCI-E power connector means that it must adhere to the 75W PCI Express slot power limit (at least, out of the box - external VRM or modified PCB may provide other... opportunities).
    Although adding one to deliver more power shouldn't be out of the question, especially since AIBs can make a custom vBIOS to account for this. Then again, I can see some enterprising people flashing video cards without the plug with said custom vBIOS and selling explodey cards.
    Reply
  • tennis2
    escksu said:
    Wow.... This is like absolute crap from amd... If you need a cheap card getting a 2nd hand rx480 4gb makes even more sense!! Lots of 4gb cards at dirt cheap prices because they cant mine eth.
    Depends on the price!
    Considering you get RX570 performance a half the power draw....meh!
    Reply
  • escksu
    tennis2 said:
    Depends on the price!
    Considering you get RX570 performance a half the power draw....meh!

    I am very sure this won't cost less than a used RX570. Btw, can go for RX480 instead. RX580 is just a refreshed and oced RX480.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Admin said:
    A TechPowerUp review shows that AMD has seemingly disabled overclocking support on the latest Radeon RX 6400 graphics card.

    AMD Reportedly Disables Overclocking on the Radeon RX 6400 : Read more

    Soon to be sitting on the shelves for $99.

    The new APU's like the 5700G would come close to the same performance with appropriate memory. You can do 1080p gaming on low settings and a reasonable frame rate with a 5700G.

    It would be interesting to see which would be a better buy:
    $150 Zen 3 5500 (Or a 12400F) CPU + $99 6400 ($249)
    $250 5700G

    Found it...Not sure why they are testing against ultra settings though. These cards are not designed for that.

    Sv3tW6LIksk
    Reply