In case you haven't heard,
all accounts are that AMD is soon planning to release a refresh of its Navi 20-series graphics cards, otherwise known as the Radeon RX 6000 series. It seems a little strange to us to refresh your extant GPUs only a few months before releasing
new models. However, just as rumors say that NVIDIA
may continue to sell the RTX 3000 series alongside the RTX 4000 series, it seems like AMD may continue to sell through its stock of RDNA 2 GPUs alongside its RDNA 3 cards.
The refreshed cards
are supposedly going to be the Radeon RX 6650 XT, Radeon RX 6750 XT, and Radeon RX 6950 XT. Well, at least two of those are more-or-less certain; we saw before
a listing (with an eye-watering price) for a Radeon RX 6950 XT card. Now, the in-the-know folks over at
Videocardz have secured the specifications and a couple of snapshots of the PowerColor Hellhound RX 6650 XT.
PowerColor already sells a version of that same card with the regular RX 6600 XT GPU, and the new model looks identical in every way save for a couple of clock rate specifications. In silent mode, which the leakers say is equivalent to the AMD reference spec, the RX 6650 XT jumps from the 2589 MHz of the RX 6600 XT up to 2635 MHz, while in OC mode this "Hellhound" card goes from 2593 MHz to 2689 MHz.
So, a modest core clock increase, but that's to be expected as these are believed to be using the exact same GPU silicon as before. The more notable change is the bump in GDDR6 speed. While the refreshed Radeons were rumored to use 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory, the actual data rate of the leaked card's memory is 17.5 Gbps. That's 1500 MT/s faster than the RX 6600 XT's 16 Gbps, raising its peak memory bandwidth from 256 GB/sec to 280 GB/sec.
These changes would naturally cause the card to consume more power, and the report says that PowerColor recommends a 600 watt PSU for the RX 6650 XT, where it only mandated 500W for the previous card. However, it
supposedly still only takes a single 8-pin connector, so the total board power can't have gone up that much.
If the leaks are accurate, the refreshed Radeons
were supposed to be ready today, but instead were pushed back until May 10th. That's only three weeks away, so we'll know more soon enough.