Lenovo sneaked out a mysterious Radeon RX 6600 LE GPU in GeekPro 2023 desktop
A small card poses a big mystery.
Lenovo has seemingly started offering AMD's Radeon RX 6600 LE graphics cards in its GeekPro 2023 entry-level gaming desktops, as noticed by ITHome.
AMD has never officially announced a product with such name, but as discovered by @Komachi_Ensaka, the Radeon RX 6600 LE is indeed listed in AMD's drivers alongside the RX 6600 and the RX 6600S, which are among the best entry-level graphics cards.
Those who are familiar with ATI's and then AMD's naming schemes know that the 'LE' moniker typically means "Lite Edition", which usually translates into severely cut-down specifications. IT Home has apparently learned that it is a customized version. The Radeon RX 6600 LE features an RDNA 2-based GPU with 1792 stream processor with up to 2495 MHz boost frequency as well as 8 GB of GDDR6 memory with a 128-bit interface. On paper, this product has similar specifications to that of AMD's original Radeon RX 6600, it even has 4 MHz higher boost clock. For now we do not know anything about Infinity Cache capacity of this graphics card.
The Lenovo Radeon RX 6600 LE is a rather compact graphics card with a dual-slot dual-fan cooling system with three heat pipes and a backplate. Potentially, this one could fit into Mini-ITX machines, though its exact dimensions are unknown.
Why Lenovo decided to add an LE moniker to its Radeon RX 6600 graphics card is unknown. Perhaps, the company uses AMD's Navi 23 graphics processor in an unusual configuration for it (e.g., with a very low base clock, fewer texture units or cut-down Infinity Cache), or maybe it uses a severely cut-down Navi 22 GPU, which may be a particularly good overclocker. The latter could be the case as AMD reportedly discontinued production of Navi 23 earlier this year. For now, this is a small card with a mystery around it.
As for the system itself, the Lenovo GeekPro 2023 desktop comes with Intel's 10-core Core i5-13400F processor, 16 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, Lenovo's Radeon RX 6600 LE graphics card, and a 512 GB PCIe 4.0 SSD. The unit can be purchased for ¥6799 ($594 without VAT) from JD.com.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.