Stefan Mileschin

A lot of trouble for reviewers, AIBs, and consumers

AMD's Radeon RX 5600 XT has officially launched and is available with a suggested price of $279, and while it manages to beat Nvidia's RTX 2060, AMD made quite a mess for reviewers, its own AIB partners, as well as consumers, by changing the specifications just a few days after the launch, and it will have a big impact on the market.

Bear in mind that while AMD did not significantly change the announced specifications as it is still the same 7nm Navi 10 GPU with 36 Compute Units (CUs) and 2304 Stream processors, the company has raised the TDP barrier by 10W (to 160W), raised the game and Boost clocks of the GPU, as well as instructed AIB partners to boost the 6GB 192-bit GDDR6 memory from 12Gbps to 14Gbps.

The GPU clocks were pushed from 1375MHz to 1615MHz for "game" and from 1560MHz to 1750MHz for the boost clock, while the memory clock was raised from 12Gbps (1500MHz) to 14Gbps (1750MHz).



This wouldn't be a big issue in general, as all it took was a simple BIOS update, but apparently, it was done just a few days or hours before the launch, depending on who you talk to. This means that some early shipped cards will not only come with an old BIOS, with lower clocked GPU and memory, but also some AIB partners have to update the design apparently.

On the consumer side, there will be a lot of difference between RX 5600 XT cards in retail/e-tail, as some partners decided not to change some of the specifications, and some early shipped cards will have the old BIOS, so it is left to the consumer to update it. While this is not a painful update, as it is just a matter of a simple BIOS update, made quite easy by AMD AIB partners, plenty of early buyers will not be even aware of the BIOS update.

https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/5...es-launch-mess