Last week, AMD quietly launched its Radeon RX 6400, a budget-friendly graphics card designed for those with low-profile PCs. However, a new review of the card reveals that it has no official overclocking support.
It appears that AMD disabled the only way for owners to boost the power of their Navi 24-based GPU, according to a TechPowerUp review of the new card. And with it being an even weaker version of the RX 6500 XT, this could pose a problem for those looking to overclock the graphics card for a little bit of extra power.
During its review, TechPowerUp found that AMD completely locked down the RX 6400 in the Radeon WattMan utility. While it still has the OC settings panel, there aren’t any sliders to adjust the clock speeds in its custom settings as would normally be the case.
Right now there’s no word on whether this was done intentionally or if it was a mere oversight on AMD’s part. It also remains to be seen whether third-party utilities will be able to overclock the graphics card in a more unofficial workaround.
Analysis: Why does lack of overclocking matter for the RX 6400?
The issue with the Navi 24 GPU that’s used for the graphics card is that it underperforms considerably. TechPowerUp recorded performance margins up to 17% in 1080p and 24% in 1440p compared to the Polaris graphics card.
Its general specs are pretty low as well. It only sports a 64-bit memory interface, four lanes of (up to) PCIe 4.0 connectivity, and thanks to limited media encoding capabilities there’s no support for 4K H.264/H.265 encoding and AV1 decoding. ReLive, a feature of AMD, isn’t even available for the card.
Those boosts in power and speed afforded by overclocking can make a huge difference in what games can be run on a PC or how well it runs. The fact that a graphics card as weak as the RX 6400 cannot be overclocked is sure to be a huge letdown for many budget gamers.
