Today we’ll be taking a quick look at the ASRock Radeon RX 6500 XT Phantom Gaming D 4GB OC Graphics Card. Powered by AMD’s latest 6nm Navi 24-based GPU, it features RDNA 2 architecture, but only comes with 4GB of GDDR6 ram on a 64-bit memory bus. It’s is aimed at low-end to budget market, and it’s designed for gamers who wants 1080 gaming. It offers a total of 1,024 stream processors, 16 ray accelerators, a game/boost clock of 2610/2820 Mhz, with memory speeds of up to 18 Gbps.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen the benefits of AMD’s RDNA 2 architecture,. It’s so widely accepted, it can be found on many devices such as Xbox Series S/X, Playstation 5, Valve’s Steam Deck and even on Samsung’s latest Galaxy S22 series of mobile phones. Some of the new techologies include Ray Accelerators giving you Ray-tracing capabilities via DXR and Vulkan RT, Infinity Cache, high clock rates and more.
Back in early 2021, we’ve experienced an extremely bad situation with global chip shortages and sky-high prices of graphics cards, and unfortunatley this hasn’t changed in 2022. Graphic card prices are still up to 3x MSRP (or even more). We can all blame scalpers and crypto miners … what ever the reason, I don’t think we will likely to get hold of a next-gen graphics card at a decent price for quite some time. MSRP for the the Radeon RX 6500 XT is USD $199 … in reality, it costs over $299 to buy. Now, I hate to say this … but you will never see me buy a low-end grahics card for $300!
OK, now let’s get back to the review of the ASRock Radeon RX 6500 XT Phantom Gaming D 4GB OC Graphics Card.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
Here’s a quick comparison between AMD’s Radeon RX 5600 XT, RX 6500 XT, RX 6700 XT and the higher-end Radeon RX 6800 XT.
| Radeon RX 5600 XT | Radeon RX 6500 XT | ASRock Radeon RX 6700 XT | Radeon RX 6800 XT | |
| Compute Units | 36 | 16 | 40 | 72 |
| FinFET process |
7nm | 6nm | 7nm | 7nm |
| Base/Game Frequency | 1530/1670 | 2310/2610 | 2457/ 2548 | 1530/2015 |
| Boost Frequency | 1750 | 2820 | 2622 | 2250 |
| Stream Processors | 2304 | 1024 | 2560 | 4608 |
| Ray Accelerators | N/A | 16 | 40 | 72 |
| Memory Type | 6 GB GDDR6 | 4GB GDDR6 | 12 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Bus | 192-bit | 64-bit | 192-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Speed | 14 Gbps (with BIOS update) |
18Gbps | 16 Gbps | 16 Gbps |
Take a look at the above table. When it comes to features, you can see that the Radeon RX 6500 XT sits at the lower-end of this table. With only 4GB of GDDR6 ram, a low memory bus speed, reduced Stream processors and lower compute units … it’s been getting a lot of stick and negative feedback from the gaming community and general public, and you can see why.
Complaints aside, the ASRock Radeon RX 6500 XT Phantom Gaming D 4GB OC Graphics Card comes with dual cooling fans and a large heatsink with heatpipes. The card needs 1 x 8-pin PCIE power cable, which is located at the top of the graphcs card. You only get one HDMI port and one DisplayPort for connecting to monitors and there no RGB illumination.
Since this card is designed and aimed at the low-end to budget market, I’m not expecting any “out-of-this-world” performance or results during our benchmarks. We’ll be using a ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 Motherboard, along with an Intel Core i9-12900FK, with 32GB of Adata XPG Lancer RGB DDR5-6000, and Adata Legend 840 PCIE Gen4 1TB SSD.
Let’s continue and check out the specifications of the graphics card in our next page. You can buy the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card from various maufacturers for around USD $299 from Aamzon – https://amzn.to/3LIycMw
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