XFX has dropped us a line to let us know that it has decided to reboot or reset its Radeon RX 5600 XT lineup, in a manner. If you recall, back when the Radeon RX 5600 XT was launched on January 21st, 2020, there was a debacle that came about in regards to shipping clock speeds on manufacturer custom video cards.
The nature of the issue was thus, AMD had set a “reference” clock speed on the GPU and memory by which manufacturers would go by to set their factory overclocks from. This was all fine and good, and as reviewers reviewed their video cards (including us) before launch, no one thought that it would change. However, due to fierce competition by the competition (NVIDIA) in lowering its prices AMD had to counter. What AMD did was to recommend to manufacturers to raise both the GPU and memory frequencies before launch. The problem with this was that it was before the launch, the night before the launch!
Reviewers and manufactures could only scramble to try and represent the new performance levels. Manufacturers put out BIOS updates that raised the GPU frequencies. However, on the memory side of things, it was a bit more erratic. The default memory spec was 12GHz, and AMD now wanted to make it 14GHz. However, certain memories on video cards wouldn’t quality at this rating. It meant that some manufacturers were able to go ahead and qualify their memory for 14GHz, but others weren’t. At the time, XFX was one that was not. On its XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro the new game clock was 1560MHz but the memory remained at 12GHz. In addition, some early adopters got cards where they had to download and install the new BIOS to get the new clock speed. There were inconsistencies.
Well, after some time, XFX has decided to just reboot the whole launch and provide brand new hardware with new part numbers and all that not only have the new GPU clock speed already enabled but now are qualified to also run at 14GHz on the memory. That’s right, XFX has decided to launch new SKUs that offer 14GHz memory and the updated GPU frequency BIOS all in brand new hardware.
XFX states that: “There was a lot of confusion during the launch that we thought it warranted a little reset so that consumers can be confident in buying a card that has the latest spec without the need for any BIOS update.”
The video cards will look the same, with the same boxing. Here are the new SKU comparisons below. XFX will be working with retailers to try and include the “14Gbps” in the main title/description so it is easy to find them as well.
5600 XT THICC III Ultra
14Gbps: RX-56XT6TB48
12Gbps: RX-56XT6TBD8
5600 XT THICC III Pro
14Gbps: RX-56XT6TF48
12Gbps: RX-56XT6TFD8
5600 XT THICC II Pro
14Gbps: RX-56XT6DF46
12Gbps: RX-56XT6DFD6
You can find the new video cards already listed on XFX’s website.
If you want to see how much the memory frequency can improve performance on the Radeon RX 5600 XT check out our XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro overclocking review. In that review, we take the memory as high as it would go (due to hardware/software locks) at up to 14.8GHz. It showed very remarkable improvements thanks to the memory overclock, so we know that going from 12GHz to 14GHz is going to be a significant gain for the Radeon RX 5600 XT’s performance. With the new GPU frequency of 15460MHz and the memory at 14GHz the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT lineup should perform very well in games for its price point.
Make sure to check out the rest of our Radeon RX 5600 XT reviews, we have no less than four distinct reviews using the XFX Radeon RX 5600 XT THICC II Pro. In the future when we use this video card for comparisons we will make sure to overclock the memory up to 14GHz so that it represents the new spec.