Mysterious AMD GPU Leak Hints At A Surprise Plot Twist For Budget Gaming

Just last night, I was looking for a single-slot graphics card to upgrade an older machine. The options in the market are dire, with the GeForce GT 1030 retaining a triple-digit price some eight years on from its 2017 launch, simply because it remains one of the best choices. We desperately need new low-power GPUs, and it may be that AMD is our salvation from this wasteland of old products.


Spotted by occasional leaker Gray (@Olrak29_ on Xwitter), the latest patch notes for popular hardware analysis and benchmark tool AIDA64 Extreme list something very curious: a Radeon RX 7300 (Navi 33). Navi 33 is, of course, the GPU that powers the Radeon RX 7600 XT, and in that form, has a total board power of 190 watts—certainly not the kind of thing you could fit into a single slot. However, the "RX 7300" branding has us hopeful; the Radeon RX 6400 asked just 53W, so this card, presumably even lower-tiered, should fit into the low-power segment.

The only caveat may be the performance. Certainly you don't expect great things from a low-powered, single-slot GPU, but if well-known enthusiast and part-time leaker Kepler (@Kepler_L2 on Xwitter) is right, this card may be quite puny indeed. Replying to Gray, Kepler quote tweets himself from 2023, when he was pondering the idea of a Navi 33 Ultra Lite with just 4 RDNA 3 compute units.


To put that in perspective, that is an integrated GPU that is just one-third the size of the GPU inside the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, and only twice the size of the GPU integrated into the desktop Ryzen processors. Certainly a discrete GPU of this size could be clocked very high even within a 75W power budget, so we expect it would perform better than you might think, but make no mistake: this would be a very, very small GPU.

We do find it pretty unlikely that the Radeon RX 7300 would have just 4 CUs, though. The full Navi 33 die has 32 compute units, and shipping a GPU with only four active would mean shipping a huge amount of dead silicon. Even eight CUs, double the size, would still be just a quarter of the chip active. It's entirely possible that AMD has a supply of seriously defective Navi 33 dies, but the company hasn't said a peep about the Radeon RX 7300 yet, so all we can really do is wait and re-watch the second GTA VI trailer again.