One of the indisputable trumps of AMD's Radeon RX 6400 graphics boards is their low power consumption, enabling GPU makers to build miniature cards. This is indeed an advantage as most single-slot low-profile graphics cards on the market today are either aimed at professional applications or are outdated. This is perhaps why GPU makers are jumping on the Radeon RX 6400 bandwagon.
Sapphire Technology's partners were among the first to leak details about the company's upcoming single-slot low-profile Pulse Radeon RX 6400 graphics card, but Sapphire will not be alone with a miniature card based on the Navi 24 graphics processing unit, as we already know. Apparently, XFX is also prepping a single-slot low-profile Swift 105 Radeon RX 6400 graphics board for the retail/channel market, reports VideoCardz.
The XFX Swift 105 card has 4GB of 64-bit GDDR6 memory, two display outputs, and a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface (x16 mechanical/electrical) interface. While the board's box carries XFX's 'Play Hard' moniker, the Radeon RX 6400 is clearly not designed for any serious gaming and will barely handle outdated titles that are not hungry for graphics oomph. The board also does not support video encoding and AV1 decoding, so multimedia enthusiasts may want to avoid Navi 24.
Yet, the main advantage of XFX's Swift 105 is its compatibility with virtually all systems that have a PCIe x16 slot (keep in mind that when installed into a PCIe Gen3 machine, the performance of the card may be lower due to limited PCIe bandwidth) as well as driver support that will continue for a few years down the road. By contrast, outdated products like AMD's Radeon RX 550 or Nvidia's GeForce GT 730 are outdated, so their proper support is not guaranteed.
So far, we only know about single-slot low-profile Radeon RX 6400 graphics cards from Sapphire and XFX. Perhaps, other makers will follow suit. Meanwhile, since most desktop PCs can house dual-slot Mini-ITX graphics cards, there are several GPU manufacturers that plan to offer such products. ASRock, Biostar, and MSI are among them. These cards will feature 4GB of memory, two display outputs, a single-fan cooling system, and will lack extra power connectors, which will make them compatible even with the cheapest desktops from OEMs.
Meanwhile, Asus is prepping its Dual Radeon RX 6400 4G (Dual-RX6400-4G) graphics card with two fans and presumably factory overclocking. While the performance of this product is something that remains to be seen, we doubt that this board will offer performance that is comparable to that of the best gaming graphics cards available today (after all, AMD's Navi 24 GPU was primarily designed with notebooks in mind), so we are not sure why install a relatively expensive cooler on such a device.
