PowerColor RX 6400 ITX: A budget-friendly entry-level graphics card

When the chipmaker AMD disclosed the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, it conveyed the latter would be exclusive to pre-built OEM computers. A few months later, AMD changed its mind, and the Radeon RX 6400 is now open as an add-in board from different graphics card sellers. The PowerColor RX 6400 ITX may not be ideal since the most prominent selling points for the RX 6400 are that it doesn’t demand any extra power connectors and can equip in a single-slot, half-height layout factor. If you have a slim PC, the only alternatives except the RX 6400 are extremely powerless five-year-old solutions such as the RX 550 or old GT 1030.

The Navi 24 at least carries some characteristics up to the current generation. You get PCIe 4.0 support and ray-tracing hardware, including 4GB of GDDR6 supported by a 16MB Infinity Cache. However, the PCIe link is just four lanes, and in testing with a PCIe 3.0 link, performance plunged by nine percent on average. The ray-tracing support also hardly matters. While we experimented with performance at 1080p medium, the most promising outcome from a challenging DXR (DirectX Raytracing) game was only 15fps, with many DXR titles landing in single-digit frame rates. Finally, Navi 24 was initially intended for Laptops where it would be paired with chips with integrated graphics cards for video encoding and decoding. To make things worst, Navi 24 does not possess any form of H.264 or H.265 encoding support—even it can decode those formats just adequately.

Specifications

Overall, graphics performance fundamentally ties with the GTX 1650 GDDR5 solution introduced three years back. The GTX 1650 was technically quicker at 1080p ultra, although it was primarily a pyrrhic win because most gaming titles failed to achieve 30fps. Adding insult to injury, the proposed cost is $10 higher than Nvidia’s card—although it’s getting hard to find new GTX 1650 cards in supply, and they routinely sell for $200 or more. GTX 1650 also has complete H.264/H.265 encoding support, and there were even a few models that ran with decreased clocks, so they didn’t require a six-pin power connector.

Incidentally, AMD has totally locked down clock speeds on the RX 6400. Open AMD’s Radeon Settings software, and you can’t modify any of the settings, not even fan pace. The same goes for MSI Afterburner. This is acceptable because this is obviously a budget-focused card and overclocking likely isn’t at the top of anyone’s checklist of attributes. However, with a 53W TBP (typical board power), even the little fans and heatsinks on half-height models should cool the GPU adequately to let it acquire its performance potential.

It seems Nvidia saw AMD’s budget category strategies and decided that it couldn’t let the RX 6400 go unchallenged, so it just tossed a ‘new’ GTX 1630 card. While 1630 has better video encoding hardware, that’s the only benefit. The GTX 1630 has just 512 shader cores and makes the RX 6400 look much more reasonable by comparison. Unfortunately, it’s also priced as high as the far more qualified GTX 1650 that uses the same TU117 GPU, with 50 percent more shader cores and double the memory bandwidth. We feel that both new GPUs end up judging like they were pushed into production back when cryptocurrency mining and extreme graphics card shortages were ongoing, which is no longer the issue.

Benchmarks

This is a graphics card for a specific niche, especially for those who want a slim GPU. It may be your most suitable choice if you fall into that class, as slow and defeatured as the RX 6400. Some would even debate that for the intended market, the card functions admirably and warrants a higher score. However, those who don’t need a small card and have PCs with six-pin or eight-pin power connectors have more reasonable alternatives, such as the GTX 1650 Super or the last-generation RX 5500 XT. Both can be purchased on eBay for under $150, and even used cards should still run fine as these models were not fit for Ethereum mining.

Verdict