Rumor has it that AMD's aging RX 460 and RX 560 graphics cards will be replaced by a new mid-range (or perhaps budget) sibling, the RX 5500. Rumors are the cards will arrive on October 7, just in time for some tasty Black Friday deals. According to a report by VideoCardz, AMD is not only releasing a new GPU for desktops, but for mobile markets as well, and will use its Navi 14 silicon.
Full specs and pricing have yet to be confirmed, but the RX 5500 will supposedly feature 1408 stream processors, up to 8GB GDDR6 memory, and a 128-bit interface. This means that the RX 5500 could be AMD's way of competing with Nvidia's mid-range 16-series, especially the GTX 1660 since the RX 5500 supposedly has the same number of cores.
If that's the case, then we expect the RX 5500 to start at an MSRP of $200 or lower, if we look at how AMD priced its RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT as any indication. Basically, it's looking like a bit more than half the performance, for perhaps a bit more than half the price. The GTX 1660 is currently priced at $219, but has a 192-bit memory bus and, of course, is built on Nvidia's Turing architecture, TU116 in the case of the GTX 1660.
Additionally, Gigabyte has apparently filed its SKUs for a RX 5500 XT with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) office, six in total. The SKUs in question point to an XT model has having 8GB of GDDR6 memory, which could mean that there is a base RX 5500 model with less, possibly 4GB as rumors have indicated, but we still don't know if a non-XT variant is planed.
Here are those SKUs:
- GV-R55XTGAMING OC-8GD
- GV-R55XTWF2OC-8GD
- GV-R55XTOC-8GD
- GV-R55XTGAMING-8GD
- GV-R55XTWF2-8GD
- GV-R55XTD6-8GD
If what information we have so far is correct, then we could very well see a new mid-range AMD graphics card next week on Monday—which means we'll have something new to test. We'll keep an eye on any official news from AMD between now and then.
Thanks, Tom's Hardware.
