Good intentions can backfire, as was the case when AMD pushed a last-minute BIOS update to its hardware partners to boost the clock speed of its custom Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card, making it competitive with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060 (at a reduced price). This was the case when they increased the clock speed of their custom Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards to make them more competitive with Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060 (which was reduced in price). This has caused some confusion regarding the actual specs, especially with regard to memory. In light of this, PowerColor has provided some clarification on the situation.

We'll get to this later, but first let's recap what happened: AMD announced the 5600 XT at CES 2020, touting it as a $279 card that would outperform the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti in 1080p gaming. Shortly thereafter, EVGA announced two new KO (knockout) editions of the RTX 2060 starting at $299, sparking speculation of a price drop. Sure enough, Nvidia also made the price drop official by lowering the Founders Edition model to $299.

The performance of the 5600 XT and RTX 2060 are nearly identical, with the latter having a slight advantage (due to clock speed). Combined with support for real-time ray tracing, one might say that the RTX 2060 is a better bargain at only $20 more.

No doubt this is why AMD has provided new firmware code to its hardware partners so that they can flash their 5600 XT cards to run at higher clock speeds. There are two problems with this, however. One is that all the cards in the initial lot were already in the hands of retailers in their original specifications. This left the add-in board (AIB) partners scrambling to release their own BIOS updates so that buyers could flash the cards at home. Not ideal, but better than being stuck with a card that is slower than everyone else's.

The second problem is memory speed: adjusting the GPU clock is easy with firmware flashing, but many early 5600 XT cards shipped with 12 Gbps memory, true to AMD's reference blueprints. with a BIOS update, memory at 14 Gbps to operate at 14Gbps, but as MSI pointed out in a recent episode of MSI Insider, not all memory chips are confirmed to operate at the higher speeds.

Most of the 5600 XT cards sent for review had updated BIOSes with faster clocks and faster 14Gbps memory. However, if you buy an early 5600 XT card and flash it, you will not get the same performance results if the memory is still at 12 Gbps; MSI is being cautious by not mentioning memory speeds in the BIOS update, instead including a specific 14 Gbps memory model (5600 XT Gaming Z) to be released next month.

Now back to PowerColor: In response to The Tech Report's tweet regarding MSI's comments, PowerColor stated that all of its 5600 XT cards use memory rated to run at 14 Gbps.

"MSI has stated that some GDDR6 chips can support higher speeds while others cannot. Our 5600 XT card has GDDR6 14Gbps rated memory modules and is running within specs," PowerColor tweeted. [This is because PowerColor's website lists 12Gbps memory in the specifications section for the stock 5600 XT model (AXRX 5600XT 6GBD6-3DH/OC). I contacted PowerColor and asked if that meant that the memory on that card could run at 14Gbps but was clocked slower because it was a reference model. The answer was basically, "That's about it."

"Our stock model 5600 XT follows AMD's reference specifications, but it shares memory modules with the Red Devil and Red Dragon. The reason for this is that the Red Devil and Red Dragon have 10 PCB layers versus the stock 5600 XT's 8. Having a 10-layer PCB is important to achieve higher clocks with GDDR6 14Gbps memory," PowerColor stated.

In other words, PowerColor's stock 5600 XT actually uses the same memory chips verified to operate at 14 Gbps that are found in the Red Devil and Red Dragon variants, but because of its low-cost, low-quality printed circuit board (PCB) design may not be able to operate at those speeds.

It is odd that PowerColor chose to refute MSI's statement, but since the end result is the same, a 5600 XT card with 12Gbps memory, whether because the memory chip is not verified at that speed or because the PCB, will probably not be able to run at 14 Gbps will never be flashed to 14 Gbps. And back to my first point, this is why last-minute BIOS updates for graphics cards are so rare and problematic: "If the BIOS is not updated, the card will be flashed to 14 Gbps, and the memory chip will be flashed to 14 Gbps.