AMD quietly launches new space-saving RX 6400 graphics cards for $159

An intriguing if weak option for low-profile mini PCs

The Sapphire Pulse RX 6400 is one of the first low-profile RDNA2 GPUs.

If you’re looking for a serious gaming graphics card, look elsewhere — reviewers absolutely dragged the $199 AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT in January, and today’s GPU entry is even weaker. But if you absolutely, positively need to fit a miniature graphics card in a very small PC, the new RX 6400 might be worth a look.

Today, AMD has quietly launched the Radeon RX 6400 with an array of partners including ASRock, Biostar, Gigabyte, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX, and we’re actually seeing a few of them retail for that price or close to it, GPU shortage be damned. There’s a $159.99 ASRock Challenger and a $169.99 XFX Speedster SWFT105 in stock at Newegg right now — with a $159.99 Sapphire Pulse card also on the way.

Intriguingly, every one of these cards appears to be a miniature model, and many of them are single-slot, low-profile GPUs that can fit in much narrower cases.

(If you’re not familiar with low-profile GPUs, check out the pics above and below — they typically come with a shorter, swappable metal PCI-Express bracket like the one you see on the Sapphire card at the top of this post; the XFX card below is showing off its longer bracket for scale, but it should come with both.)

This XFX card looks short, and it’ll be shorter if you attach its low-profile PCIe bracket.

Mind you, there’s a reason these cards don’t need to be big! They’re only rated at 53W of power, less than half the power of even the lackluster RX 6500 XT, with only 12 compute units (down from 16), lower clocks, slower RAM, only 128GB per second of bandwidth, and just two display outputs. (Some of this is less surprising when you consider that its Navi24 GPU was originally designed for laptops.) On the plus side, you don’t need an extra power connector: the card can draw all its power from the PCI-Express slot.

According to one early video review, it looks like it will struggle with games like Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077 even at 1080p and on low settings but should be fine for the likes of Fortnite.

Know that while all RX 6400 models we’ve seen so far are miniature (big hat tips to VideoCardz and Wccftech for rounding up most of them), not all of them are low-profile. Many are two slots wide, some have two fans, and Gigabyte even has a model (below) that’s all of the above.

This Gigabyte model is squat but seemingly long and wide.

AMD quietly launches new space-saving RX 6400 graphics cards for $159