If you’re looking for a serious gaming graphics card, look elsewhere — Critic absolutely drag The $199 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT in January, today’s GPU primer is even weaker. But if you absolutely absolutely need a tiny graphics card in a very small PC, the new RX 6400 might be worth a look.
Today, AMD quietly launched the Radeon RX 6400 with a range of partners including ASRock, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, Dylan Hengjin, Sapphire and XFX, and we’re actually seeing some of them retail at or near this price , the GPU shortage be damned. Newegg currently has the $159.99 ASRock Challenger and $169.99 XFX Speedster SWFT105 in stock – and the $159.99 Sapphire Pulse card is on the way.
Interestingly, each of these cards appears to be a tiny model, many of which are single-slot, low-profile GPUs that can fit into narrower cases.
(If you’re unfamiliar with low-profile GPUs, check out the pictures above and below – they usually come with shorter, replaceable metal PCI-Express brackets, like you see on the sapphire card at the top of this article; the XFX card below Its longer scale bracket is shown, but both should come with it.)
This XFX card looks short, if you install its low profile PCIe bracket it will be even shorter.
Note, there’s a reason these cards don’t need to be huge! They’re rated at just 53W, even half the power of the lackluster RX 6500 XT, with just 12 compute units (down from 16), lower clocks, slower RAM, and only 128GB per second of bandwidth, There are only two display outputs. (Some of this isn’t surprising when you consider that its Navi24 GPU was originally designed for laptops.) On the plus side, you don’t need an extra power connector: the card can be downloaded from PCI-Express The slot gets all power.
According to an early video review, it looks like it will struggle with the game Eldon Ring and Cyberpunk 2077 Even at 1080p and low settings it should be fine Fortnite.
Knowing though that all the RX 6400 models we’ve seen so far are miniature (big hat tip Video Kaz and Wccftech round most of them), not all of them are understated. Many are two slots wide, some have two fans, and Gigabyte even has a model (pictured below) that is all of the above.
This Gigabyte model is squat, but looks long and wide.
