Radeon RX 6500 XT Reportedly Ships with 2.8 GHz Boost Clock

Some updates concerning the GPU clocks and memory speed of the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT have emerged, providing newfound optimism about this entry-level Navi 24 GPU. According to VideoCardz, and Twitter's AMD-focused Greymon55, the red team's entry-level consumer desktop RDNA 2 offering will offer 10% faster clocks than the Navi 23-based GPUs and speedier memory too – 18 Gbps rated GDDR6 memory.

Leaks have suggested that AMD had decided to slice the GPU core count, Infinity Cache, memory bus, and VRAM quotas of the Radeon RX 6600 XT in half with its upcoming Radeon RX 6500 XT. The rumors led to some concerns about what performance users will be able to wring out from the little GPU, codenamed Beige Goby. However, things are looking a little better for Navi 24-based graphics cards as time moves forward.

Firstly, the Navi 24 GPU presumably utilizes TSMC's 6nm process, which should help it in performance/efficiency terms. The VideoCardz/Greymon55 data seems to confirm this, with the RX 6500 XT potentially arriving with a boost clock of 2,815 MHz and game clock of 2,610 MHz out of the box.

In addition to the speedy GPU clocks noted above, about 10% faster than the Radeon RX 6600 XT can muster, the RX 6500 XT boasts faster memory, too. Greymon55 insists that the RX 6500 XT's 4GB of GDDR6 will run at 18 Gbps, providing 144 GBps of bandwidth. But, of course, its 64-bit bus means that the available bandwidth is still relatively poor compared to the 256 GBps available to the RX 6600 XT.

The AMD Radeon RX 6400 is on the way too

The AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT isn't the only graphics card about to be launched that leverages Navi 24. It reportedly uses the Navi 24 XT GPU with 1,024 cores, while there will be a smaller OEM-only graphics card dubbed the RX 6400, based on the Navi 24 XL GPU with 768 cores. Our most recent data concerning the RX 6400 is that it will feature fewer Ray Accelerators than the RX 6500 XT (12 instead of 16) and use 16 Gbps GDDR6 on a 64-bit bus, offering up to 128 GBps of bandwidth.

The general expectation is that AMD will launch the Radeon RX 6500 XT this week, with the potential availability of the desktop GPU starting from January 19.