When AMD introduced its low-end Radeon RX 6400/6500-series graphics cards earlier this year, the company noted that the Radeon RX 6400 is not meant for retail and will only be available to large OEMs. But someone has to make such boards, and a custom Radeon RX 6400 graphics card from ASRock has been added to the EEC database. The key advantage of the adapter is that it consumes only about 53W and is therefore compatible with virtually all PCs.
A filing in the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) customs database indicated that ASRock has developed the RX6400 CLI 4G graphics board, which stands for the Radeon RX 6400 Challenger ITX (as noticed by VideoCardz). Since some of AMD's official slides show short, low-profile Radeon RX 6400 graphics cards, it's not surprising that a partner is prepping something similar — though we would normally expect partners to use AMD's reference design with some changes to optimize costs.
AMD's codenamed Navi 24 GPU was primarily designed with notebooks in mind, but it has also been brought to the desktop discrete market in the form of the Radeon RX 6500 XT and Radeon RX 6400. Companies often tend to keep entry-level notebook GPUs low profile, which is why things like Nvidia's GP108 and the GeForce GT 1010 hardly ever reach the hands of reviewers. But severe graphics cards shortages and higher prices likely helped AMD reconsider its entry-level graphics processor and marketing.
For what it's worth, the Radeon RX 6500 XT isn't a particularly good gaming solution for 2022: it delivers similar performance to the RX 5500 XT 4GB card that it's meant to replace, and trails the 8GB variant by quite a bit. In fact, even the FP32 compute throughput of the Radeon RX 6500 XT is very similar to the RX 5500 XT. The former offers up to 5.77 TFLOPs, whereas the latter can boast with up to 5.2 TFLOPS.
Being a cut-down version of the RX 6500 XT, both in GPU cores and clock speeds, we can expect the Radeon RX 6400 to be quite a bit slower. With 768 stream processors clocked at up to 2321 MHz, this GPU can only provide up to 3.57 FP32 TFLOPS. That's of course a lot better than the GeForce GT 1010 (0.75 TFLOPS), but on paper it doesn't even match the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB from 2016. Unless it shows up at retail with incredibly attractive pricing (like around $100), it's unlikely to show up on our list of the best graphics cards.
ASRock's RX6400 CLI 4G board carries the Challenger brand, which may be an indicator that it is aimed at the channel market, though it's certainly not a proof of anything. Keep in mind that since anyone can add pretty much everything to the EEC customs database, the listing itself does not necessarily prove that ASRock is indeed preparing to import its Radeon RX 6400 Challenger ITX into Russia or Kazakhstan. It's possible the product is only meant for the bottomless market of China, and we're unlikely to see standalone RX 6400 cards for sale in the US, though anything's possible in the current GPU market.
