GeForce GTX 1650 Super Killer?
Introduction
Back on October 7th, 2019 AMD announced the Radeon RX 5500 GPU series. This was indeed an announcement of an upcoming launch. At the time we thought the launch was around the corner toward the end of that month, or in November. Well, it turns out the launch has come much later than expected, as it is in fact, today.
It is what we expected, AMD is partnering with add-in-board manufacturers for this launch. There won’t be AMD reference samples, instead, review cards are from actual retail custom video cards. In this way, you get to see factory overclocked video cards at launch, with hardware availability on the shelves as of today.
From the initial announcement we know that this is smaller NAVI, i.e. lower-end NAVI RDNA GPUs. This new Radeon RX 5500 series is to replace the AMD Polaris series. AMD indicated this will be a nice upgrade or replacement from the Radeon RX 480 for example. From the announcement, we learned that these GPUs will be geared for 1080p gaming. The slide indicated a Radeon 5500M and Radeon 5500 series with general specs.
The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT is the video card being launched today. There will be two variants, those with 4GB of VRAM and those with 8GB. The 4GB model has an MSRP of $169. The 8GB model has an MSRP of $199. Let’s go over the specs below.
More Efficient
AMD reminds us that the Radeon RX 5500 series is more efficient. The Radeon RX 5500 GPU series is u to 1.6X performance per Watt versus Radeon RX 480. It is also 1.7X performance per area versus Radeon RX 480. Radeon RX 5500 GPU is 158mm2 while Radeon RX 480 was 221mm2.