RDNA2 Goes Low Profile With Sapphire's Pulse RX 6400
Single-fan card comes with full height and low profile bracket for compact systems.
We initially understood that the AMD Radeon RX 6400 would be an OEM exclusive graphics card, but it is looking more and more like it will become available to consumers. Today, a report and some images shared by VideoCardz cement that notion, if it were still in any doubt, and we got to see a milestone RDNA2 graphics card – the first to become available in low profile form factor. It doesn't require a power connector either, getting all its required power from the PCIe slot.
Above, you can see the Sapphire Radeon RX 6400 Pulse graphics card with its retail box. The card has a low profile (LP) bracket affixed, but an optional full-height bracket is shown next to it. Just two ports are present on the bracket, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4.
The box art confirms the Radeon RX 6400 specs, but they weren't a secret, and you can learn more from the official AMD product pages. For comparison, we have put the RX 6400's specs up against some of its close siblings below.
Radeon model |
RX 6400 |
RX 6500 XT |
RX 6600 |
---|---|---|---|
Cores |
768 |
1024 |
1792 |
Ray accelerators |
12 |
16 |
28 |
GPU clocks (up to) |
2321 MHz |
2815 MHz |
2491 MHz |
GDDR6 config |
4GB on 64-bit bus |
4GB on 64-bit bus |
8GB on 128-bit bus |
Bandwidth |
112 GBps |
128 GBps |
224 GBps |
TDP |
53W |
107W |
132W |
The new Sapphire Pulse RX 6400 graphics card won't have been difficult for Sapphire to put together, as it is very much like a minor rework of the Radeon Pro W6400 professional LP graphics card that launched in January.
Sapphire's new consumer card isn't going to attract droves of PC enthusiasts or gamers, most of whom will want something more powerful. Sapphire boldy claims it to be a 1080p FHD gaming design on the front of the packaging, though.
Even the next model up in the RDNA family has clearly failed to please gamers. After an all-round negative reception by the tech press, the Radeon RX 6500 XT quite rapidly earned the dubious honor of becoming the first graphics card to sell for less than MSRP in many months.
Though we can have a good guess at the performance of the RX 6400 from the specs, some benchmarks leaked at the end of last month. In short, indications were that the RX 6400 was about 30% slower than the RX 6500 XT. For a cross-vendor comparison, you might expect it to go toe to toe with the GeForce GTX 1650.
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At the time of writing, we don't have a release date or pricing for any Radeon RX 6400 cards to share.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
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-Fran- So this is what the 6500XT could have been instead, uh?Reply
Sad I'm no longer in the market for one of these.
Regards.