MSI says not all RX 5600 XT GPUs can hit top memory speed

Competition in the mid-range of the graphics card space is hot right now. Just before AMD released its Radeon RX 5600 XT, Nvidia dropped the price of its GeForce RTX 2060 cards. Then, AMD released a vBIOS update to give its new cards an impressive last-minute power boost. Card vendor MSI says, however, that not all Radeon RX 5600 XT GPUs will be able to hit the 14 Gbps memory speed advertised by the update.

One of the big features of the vBIOS update saw AMD boosting the RX 5600 XT's memory's speed from 12 Gbps to 14 Gbps, which is a 15% memory bandwidth increase. MSI is reticent to drop this update on all its cards, though; AMD specced the GDDR6 memory onboard the RX 5600 XT to run at 12 Gbps, and that the update could cause more RMAs for consumers. This comes via the MSI Insider podcast, hosted by MSI's marketing direct Eric Van Beurden and product marketing manager Pieter Arts.

Much the same way that CPUs in the same model can overclock to different speeds, MSI says that some GDDR6 chips can handle the faster speeds, while others cannot.

Cardmakers are releasing 14 Gbps cards

MSI and other card makers are releasing cards to specifically designed for this. MSI has the RX 5600 XT Gaming Z on the way, for example, which is guaranteed to be able to hit 14 Gbps out of the box. They advertise their other cards as being able to hit up to 12 Gbps. The company says that overclocking the un-certified chips could shorten the life of the card not tested for the full 14 Gbps speed.

MSI's own RX 5700 XT Mech and RX 5600 XT Gaming cards won't get the vBIOS update, while the Gaming X, Mech OC, and Gaming Z variants will. If you're looking at picking up one of AMD's new cards, you may want to double-check that the card you're getting will receive the new vBIOS update.

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