Low-End AMD RX 6300 Surfaces on Second-Hand Marketplace
AMD hasn’t officially announced the Radeon RX 6300, but the card is Goofish (opens in new tab) (via HXL (opens in new tab)), the second-hand market in China. The thin Navi 24 (codenamed Beige Goby) graphics card reportedly sells for under $60 and could be a good entry-level contender to rival the best graphics cards .
The first traces of the Radeon RX 6300 surfaced in the Linux kernel last May. However, the rumors didn’t stop until a Radeon graphics card came to power his Goofish. It is unknown if AMD will release the Radeon RX 6300 to the retail market. Instead, it could be his SKU for OEM only. HP lists the Radeon RX 6300 as the graphics option for its Elite Series 800 G9. (opens in new tab) Desktop PC.
The Radeon RX 6300 will utilize Navi 24 silicon, along with AMD’s other RDNA 2 products including the Radeon RX 6400 and Radeon RX 6500 XT. Measuring 107 mm² and derived from TSMC’s 6nm process node, the Navi 24 is also a great option for discrete mobile options such as the Radeon RX 6500M and Radeon RX 6550S. The Radeon RX 6300 utilizes a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface. Due to its small die size, the Navi 24 can only accommodate 16 Compute Units (CUs). The Radeon RX 6300 die comes with 12 effective CUs, equivalent to 768 streaming processors (SPs) and 12 ray tracing accelerators.
AMD uses the same recipe to bake the Radeon RX 6400, but the Radeon RX 6300 is slower than the Radeon RX 6400. HP lists the former with a game clock of 1,512 MHz, while the Radeon RX 6400 features a base clock of 2,039 MHz, about 35% higher than the Radeon RX 6300. The lower clock speed is due to the lower TGP. The Radeon RX 6400 is rated at 53W, while the Radeon RX 6300 is rated at 32W, a 40% reduction. At least you don’t have to mess with PCIe power connectors. Both Radeon graphics cards draw the power they need from standard expansion slots.
Radeon RX 6300 specs
graphics card | Radeon RX 6300 | Radeon RX 6400 |
---|---|---|
architecture | Navi 24 | Navi 24 |
process technology | TSMC 6N | TSMC 6N |
Transistor (billion) | 5.4 | 5.4 |
Die size (mm²) | 107 | 107 |
CUs | 12 | 12 |
GPU core | 768 | 768 |
RT core | 12 | 12 |
Base clock (MHz) | ? | 1,923 |
Game clock (MHz) | 1,512 | 2,039 |
Boost Clock (MHz) | ? | 2,321 |
VRAM Speed (Gbps) | 16 | 16 |
VRAM | 2GB GDDR6 | 4GB GDDR6 |
VRAM bus width | 32 | 64 |
ROP | 32 | 32 |
TMU | 48 | 48 |
TFLOPs FP32 (Boost) | ? | 3.6 |
Bandwidth (GBps) | 64 | 128 |
TGP (Watts) | 32 | 53 |
AMD didn’t just mess with the Radeon RX 6300’s clock speeds and TGP. Graphics cards show quite a few compromises in their memory subsystems. It only has 2GB of GDDR6 memory, which is half of the Radeon RX 6400. The memory chips run at 16 Gbps on both graphics cards, but the Radeon RX 6300 only has a 32-bit memory interface compared to the Radeon RX 6400’s 64-bit bus. Therefore, the Radeon RX 6300 can only offer 64 GBps of memory bandwidth, which is 50% less than the Radeon RX 6400.
The Radeon RX 6300 could be a viable option for small form factor (SFF) systems without integrated graphics. After all, Navi 24 based graphics cards come with two HDMI 2.1 ports. However, I don’t think it will help more than that. Navi 24 does not have video encoding capabilities, so it is useless on HTPC. It’s a far cry from a gaming graphics card, but the occasional title at 1080p (1920×1080) will do the trick if image fidelity is low enough.
A Chinese merchant sold the Radeon RX 6300 for 399 yuan or $58.28. However, this is clearly not an official price as the seller probably took the graphics card out of his OEM system and flipped it on Goofish. Not many options under $60. The only graphics cards available for that price are the older GeForce GT 710 or Radeon RD 5450 models around $50.