The launch of the AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT was anything but straightforward. AMD announced its latest mid-range graphics offering at CES in January this year at $279 (approximately Rs. 19,890), calling it the “ultimate GPU for 1080p gaming”. AMD's official publicity materials showed it edging out the equivalently priced Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in multiple games. It was positioned as the ideal upgrade over the Radeon RX 590 series or the iconic GeForce GTX 1060, which are now relatively old but still widely used.
Nvidia decided to try and spoil the party by unofficially cutting prices of its GeForce RTX 2060. In the US at least, people reported seeing models on sale for $299 (approximately Rs. 21,320), down from the official $349 (approximately Rs. 24,885) launch price – it should be noted that prices in India haven't gone down at all.
AMD[1] responded in a rather unprecedented way - by changing the specifications of the Radeon RX 5600 XT[2] after its launch. More specifically, it offered a new BIOS for its board partners to distribute, which let them raise the TDP from 150W to 160W and the memory speed from 12Gbps to 14Gbps, as well as increasing the GPU boost speed. While a performance improvement is nice, not all Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards can handle these new parameters, and so not all will be updated to run at these specifications.
As you might imagine, that has created confusion in the market. Different models on sale right now have very different specifications, going well beyond the usual “factory overclock” or “performance mode” that manufacturers usually implement. We're reviewing the Sapphire[3] Pulse Radeon RX 5600 XT 6G graphics card today, which does benefit from this BIOS update, and...