AMD's RX 6650 XT Is Just A Tiny Upgrade Over The RX 6600 XT According To Leaked Specs

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 18 April 2022, 11:04 pm

If you want to buy AMD's upcoming RX 6650 XT as an upgrade from your RX 6600 XT, you won't be getting much of a performance boost. That is, if these leaked specs are correct.

(Photo : AMD )

Tom's Hardware reports that the first leaked specs for the RX 6650 XT has now surfaced, and they're not much to begin with. A reference design is said to feature a 2410 MHz game clock, which goes as high 2635 MHz when boosted. This is a very slight bump to that of the 6600 XT's 2359 MHz game clock and 2589 MHz boost clock-2.2% and 1.8% improvements to be exact.

But that's not all there is to it, obviously. More details shared by VideoCardz (who was the first to break out the news) also show a slight uplift in the memory clock, memory bandwidth, and overall power consumption.

AMD is equipping the RX 6650 XT with slightly faster memory capable of 17.5 Gbps bandwidth on the memory clock, with a maximum total bandwidth of 280 GB/s. This is up from the RX 6600 XT's 16 Gbps and 256 GB/s, which are both once again tiny upgrades from Team Red's current 1080p card.

As for the power consumption, AMD reportedly recommends that you pair their upcoming Radeon card with a 600W power supply. The 6600 XT only required a 500W PSU to power it due to its modest 160W TDP, in comparison.

Everything else about the two Radeon cards are the same. Both of them have 2048 Stream Processors, 8GB of GDDR6 memory on a 128-bit bus, and a single 8-pin power connector for juice.

However, the graphics card and CPU maker hasn't provided any details regarding what kind of silicon the 6650 XT uses. The 6600 XT featured a Navi 23 XT chip, so it could be just the same with the new one. As for the TDP, the 600W PSU requirement could point to a rating of around 170-180W, as per the original Tom's Hardware report.

When Is The Release Date For AMD's 'RDNA 2 Refresh?'

As per a report by PCGamer, the new RDNA 2 refresh cards featuring the Radeon RX 6650 XT alongside others is "on track" for a release before June. But there's no definitive release date yet.

This release window was shared by reliable industry leaker Moore's Law Is Dead on Twitter, who's gained a reputation for his Intel Arc leaks. Here is his tweet:

I can now confirm that #AMD does NOT plan to release an "RX 6850 XT". Also:

1) 6950 XT is on track!

2) 6750 XT & 6650 XT are CURRENTLY planned for Q2

I briefly talk about it on Broken Silicon tomorrow, and I actually suggested most of this last week:https://t.co/GPPkxcov8t
— Moore's Law Is Dead (@mooreslawisdead) February 15, 2022

As you can see there, he says that the 6650 XT will release alongside the 6750 XT during Q2. This window runs from April to the end of June. Though the initial leak pointed to the end of March, that day has come and gone with no sight of the new AMD cards-until just recently.

In another report by Tom's Hardware, the refreshed RDNA 2 Radeon GPUs were said to have been spotted overseas at insanely over the top pricing. A French retailer was said to have put up these prices for these specific Sapphire models of the RX 6950 XT, 6750 XT, and 6650 XT: