AMD's press conference kicked off hardware news at CES 2020 in dramatic fashion, with a number of exciting unveilings. Alongside new Ryzen 4000-series laptop processors with Zen 2 cores and enhanced Radeon graphics, and a 64-core Threadripper 3990X, AMD also debuted its new midrange GPU, the RX 5600 XT.
The leaked specifications of this new mid-range GPU proved pretty accurate and give us a good idea of the kind of performance we can expect. This card uses the same Navi 10 GPU inside the RX 5700 and has the same 36 Compute Units and 2,304 steam processors. Its clock speed is far lower though, at 1,560MHz — so there's some ground to make up there. But it's in the memory where the 5600 XT really differentiates itself. It sports 6GB, rather than the 8GB found in the 5500 XT and 5700. It's still GDDR6, but it also only runs at 12Gbps, rather than the 14Gbps found in the other Navi cards.
With a memory-bus of 192-bit, it still manages a bandwidth of 288GBps, significantly more than the 5500XT, but still far less than the 5700. Memory overclocking could be where the bulk of performance gains can be found with the 5600 XT, much like the RX Vega 56 it will effectively replace.
Set to go on sale on January 21 in a variety of add-in-board partner guises, with custom overclocks and enhanced cooling, the RX 5600 XT has a base price of $289, so expect it to compete favorably with the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti. It will also give the value-orientated GTX 1660 Super some trouble, handily outpacing it, albeit for more money. It may even close in on the performance of the RTX 2060, though, at a price around $50 less. That could be big, especially if rumors of strong mobile performance for these new AMD chips holds true.
