CheckMag | Alive on Arrival? 3 changes that could\'ve saved the ill-fated RX 6500 XT

Let's get the caveats out of the way, first: yes, the Navi 24 chip used in that graphics card was fundamentally flawed due to being repurposed laptop silicon. Yes, it had a tiny x4 width PCIe bus, and yes, it could only handle a pair of display outputs. Yes, if I "fixed" those for this article, that would be a different product entirely. But I'm not talking about that, only about things that could be changed without fabbing new chips altogether. Such as...

1.More modesty with numbers on the box - and the price tag

At its release in early 2022, when the entire graphics card market was inflated beyond recognition, the RX 6500 XT's MSRP of $200 wasn't particularly crazy. But many reviewers still compared it unfavourably to the launch prices of older cards, and once the flood of scalpers receded the sticker price was unpalatable at best. Though enthusiasts might still harbour some resentment for launching with an unrealistic list price, it was no greater of a sin than anything else being sold at the time, including the RTX 3050. And speaking of that card - of course, the 6500 XT usually reviewed highly unfavourably compared to its "unobtainium" Nvidia counterpart, but combining a lower price combined with a less ambitious name could've softened the blow of that matchup greatly. Launching with tier-below naming along with tier-below pricing would have lessened the perception that the two cards were in direct competition, and avoided awkward comparisons with the last-generation RX 5500 XT. But we already have an RX 6400, so that would mean...

2. One (75W) Navi 24 card to rule them all

Realistically, there was little need for the RX 6500 XT, the RX 6400, and even the little-known RX 6300 to have been separate models. The last one can safely be ignored; 2 GB display adaptor cards are increasingly redundant when both Intel and AMD desktop CPUs ship with onboard graphics these days. But between the two other Navi 24 configurations, it really seems like splitting the difference between the two would have been better. Lowering the power draw of the part to the PCIe slot spec of 75W would make it much easier to hit a lower price point, with money saved on power delivery components, bulky cooling shrouds, and expensive shipping (right in the middle of a supply chain crisis!) for physically smaller cards. A hypothetical RX 6400 XT that stuck to its guns as being a no-frills, super basic, entry level card would be made even more attractive by not needing external power - a mostly abandoned niche - and would still have left room for partners to add value by producing higher-power, factory-overclocked versions. We've already seen them do interesting things with the 6500 XT, like...

3. 8 GB of clamshell memory... please?

Okay, it's true that this one is a bit far-fetched. It's true that this was almost certainly an impossibility during the chip shortage when GDDR6 prices were sky-high from GPUs and the PS5 / Xbox Series consoles. It's true that even aside from the cost of the chips themselves, the additional board design costs on their own might have undone all the cost-optimisation I discussed above, and then some. But more memory would be a huge win here; not only would put clear blue water between itself and the 4 GB GTX 1650 (Nvidia's least-worst 75W graphics option at the time), but it would alleviate one of its biggest weaknesses. While our "6400 XT" would still suffer from a narrow 4-lane PCIe interface, a more generous vRAM allowance would have minimised how often textures or other game data would need to be transferred across that bus, a fact that Hardware Unboxed found to improve the real-world RX 6500 XT's performance a lot. It did also, unfortunately, push the price up noticeably - but hey, we can dream, right?

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