The Radeon RX 6400 wasn’t supposed to make a retail launch. It was targeted toward OEM and mobile computers. AMD said this back at CES 2022 when the RX 6400 and the RX 6500 XT cards were announced. Yet, rumors surrounding a retail RX 6400 have been surrounding the internet ever since February when an ASRock RX 6400 Challenger ITX was spotted.
The Navi 24 powered GPU has a very basic graphics processor onboard that is only good enough to give display output to office computers. This card is neither targeted toward gamers nor media enthusiasts. It is a basic display adapter with two video output ports: an HDMI 2.0 and a DisplayPort 1.4. The card also does not come with any support for AV1 decoding or AMD’s encoding engine found in every other RX 6000 series GPU. This severely limits the target audience of this graphics card.
The RX 6400 does not need any external power connection. The PCIe x16 port supplies enough power to it. This is a boon for ultra low-end systems that come with power supplies without extra PCIe power connectors due to a lack of budget, or OEM systems which often do not include extra power cables. The RX 6500 XT, the current lowest-end card from AMD, requires an 8-pin power connection. Thus, the RX 6400 will target a unique audience who is specifically looking for a low-profile inexpensive video card for their system.
Several RX 6400 cards have been spotted on the internet already. VideoCardz discovered a listing of the Gigabyte RX 6400 Eagle in the National Radio Research Agency (RRA) of South Korea. All electronics that are sold in South Korea need to get a certification from RRA. Also, this listing was spotted with the part number “GV-R64EAGLE-4GD”, which suggests that the upcoming RX 6400 is going to get a Gigabyte Eagle model, and will come with 4GB of video memory.
The Gigabyte Eagle cards are known for better thermal designs and slightly boosted clock speeds as compared to the baseline model from the company.
Apart from Gigabyte’s listing, MSI was also spotted selling the RX 6400 Aero ITX card in Singapore. These cards are built for mini-ITX cases, and thus extra care is put into making them as low-profile as possible. MSI’s RX 6400 Aero ITX fits into the smallest ITX cases which can support a minimum of dual-slot graphics cards without any power connections.
On the bright side, the Radeon RX 6400 is a PCIe Gen 4.0 card, and the 4GB of VRAM on the card is GDDR6. This is a step-up from the messed up 4-lane PCIe 4.0 connector found on the Radeon RX 6500 XT, which was equivalent to a PCIe Gen2 x16 slot.
An Asus RX 6400 was also spotted on a Bulgarian website. The listed part number was “Dual-RX6400-4G”, which suggests the company is prepping a Dual Radeon RX 6400 4G variant of the graphics card. The website, BestPC.bg, had no pictures of this card listed. So, we do not know what this card looks like. However, the fact that board partners like Asus will be selling dual-fan versions of such a basic card means that they are targeting it toward gamers on the very bottom of the budget spectrum.
The RX 6400 does not look like a gaming card. It does not have any of the sophisticated encoding or decoding solutions like all of the other RX 6000 cards. It can only be seen as a replacement for the very basic display adapters found on some low-performance computers, just with an increased driver-support deadline.