Thursday, January 23rd 2020
MSI Says not all Radeon RX 5600 XT GPUs Can Hit 14 Gbps Memory Speed
Just before the launch of AMD's latest Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards, AMD released a vBIOS update that boosts the GPU clock speed by a few percent margins and increases the GDDR6 memory speed from 12 Gbps to 14 Gbps, which is almost a 17% performance increase in memory bandwidth. However, despite the release of these new firmware updates, AMD's add-in-board partners like ASUS and MSI have been cautious about applying the new vBIOS to the existing cards. A YouTube show called the MSI Insider, which is hosted by MSI employees, explains the situation. Due to the GDDR6 memory, which was originally meant as a 12 Gbps chip, when applying the new firmware update to the card can lead to RMA issues with customers.
While some cards are capable of hitting 14 Gbps speeds with the GDDR6 chips, others are not as they were not certified to work at that frequency. Silicon lottery (not the company) of the memory chips plays a big role as the quality of the onboard DRAM will have a large impact on the ability to overclock to new frequencies. That's why MSI released an RX 5600 XT GAMING Z variant with 14 Gbps vBIOS already applied out of the box. ASUS also joined the party and launched the ASUS ROG STRIX TOP graphics card, which is the only 14 Gbps enabled cards in ASUS'es whole lineup. By launching GPU SKUs with 14 Gbps speeds out of the box, manufacturers can guarantee these speeds and not depend on silicon lottery which may cause them a few RMA troubles down the road.
Source:
VideoCards
While some cards are capable of hitting 14 Gbps speeds with the GDDR6 chips, others are not as they were not certified to work at that frequency. Silicon lottery (not the company) of the memory chips plays a big role as the quality of the onboard DRAM will have a large impact on the ability to overclock to new frequencies. That's why MSI released an RX 5600 XT GAMING Z variant with 14 Gbps vBIOS already applied out of the box. ASUS also joined the party and launched the ASUS ROG STRIX TOP graphics card, which is the only 14 Gbps enabled cards in ASUS'es whole lineup. By launching GPU SKUs with 14 Gbps speeds out of the box, manufacturers can guarantee these speeds and not depend on silicon lottery which may cause them a few RMA troubles down the road.
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Edit: Looking closer, of the 14 bioses for the 5600XT, it appears 12 of them are identical in both timings and speeds (they go up to 2000mhz), but Powercolour has 2 Red Devils in there that are a little different, still Micron but upper level clock are at 2250Mhz.
Already in UK it appears that for the higher clocked versions there is a premium of £30 - £40 over the "standard" card (Red devil is £299, cheapest standard 5600XT I can find is £259 in the same store) so for the higher clocked card it is very close to 2060 Super prices (about £20-£30 difference) and a fair bit more than the 2060 vanilla price, like most things though, prices should settle in the next few weeks (hopefully).
Just for info.
The 1660 may be even more underrated. It comes 8 gbps and seems to easily hit 10 gbps. That puts it much closer to 1660 Super performance.
www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_gtx_1660_gaming_x_review,29.html
www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_gtx_1660_super_gaming_x_review,25.html