George Hotz and his startup operation (Tiny Corporation) appeared ready to completely abandon AMD Radeon GPUs last week, after experiencing a period of firmware-related headaches. The original plan involved the development of a pre-orderable $15,000 TinyBox AI compute cluster that housed six XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards, but software/driver issues prompted experimentation via alternative hardware routes. A lot of media coverage has focused on the unusual adoption of consumer-grade GPUs—Tiny Corp.'s struggles with RDNA 3 (rather than CDNA 3) were maneuvered further into public view, after top AMD brass pitched in.

The startup's social media feed is very transparent about showcasing everyday tasks, problem-solving and important decision-making. Several Acer Predator BiFrost Arc A770 OC cards were purchased and promptly integrated into a colorfully-lit TinyBox prototype, but Hotz & Co. swiftly moved onto Team Green pastures. Tiny Corp. has begrudgingly adopted NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPUs. Earlier today, it was announced that work on the AMD-based system has resumed—although customers were forewarned about anticipated teething problems. The surprising message arrived in the early hours: "a hard to find 'umr' repo has turned around the feasibility of the AMD TinyBox. It will be a journey, but it gives us an ability to debug. We're going to sell both, red for $15,000 and green for $25,000. When you realize your pre-order you'll choose your color. Website has been updated. If you like to tinker and feel pain, buy red. The driver still crashes the GPU and hangs sometimes, but we can work together to improve it."

George Hotz and his Tiny Corporation colleagues were pinning their hopes on AMD delivering some good news earlier this month. The development of a "TinyBox" AI compute cluster project hit some major roadblocks a couple of weeks ago—at the time, Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU firmware was not gelling with Tiny Corp.'s setup. Hotz expressed "70% confidence" in AMD approving open-sourcing certain bits of firmware. At the time of writing this has not transpired—this week the Tiny Corp. social media account has, once again, switched to an "all guns blazing" mode. Hotz and Co. have publicly disclosed that they were dabbling with Intel Arc graphics cards, as of a few weeks ago. NVIDIA hardware is another possible route, according to freshly posted open thoughts.

Yesterday, it was confirmed that the young startup organization had paused its utilization of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards: "the driver is still very unstable, and when it crashes or hangs we have no way of debugging it. We have no way of dumping the state of a GPU. Apparently it isn't just the MES causing these issues, it's also the Command Processor (CP). After seeing how open Tenstorrent is, it's hard to deal with this. With Tenstorrent, I feel confident that if there's an issue, I can debug and fix it. With AMD, I don't." The $15,000 TinyBox system relies on "cheaper" gaming-oriented GPUs, rather than traditional enterprise solutions—this oddball approach has attracted a number of customers, but the latest announcements likely signal another delay. Yesterday's tweet continued to state: "we are exploring Intel, working on adding Level Zero support to tinygrad. We also added a $400 bounty for XMX support. We are also (sadly) exploring a 6x GeForce RTX 4090 GPU box. At least we know the software is good there. We will revisit AMD once we have an open and reproducible build process for the driver and firmware. We are willing to dive really deep into hardware to make it amazing. But without access, we can't."

The TinyBox AI server system attracted plenty of media attention last week—its creator, George Hotz, decided to build with AMD RDNA 3.0 GPU hardware rather than the expected/traditional choice of CDNA 3.0. Tiny Corp. is a startup firm dealing in neural network frameworks—they currently "write and maintain tinygrad." Hotz & Co. are in the process of assembling rack-mounted 12U TinyBox systems for customers—an individual server houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor and six XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The Tiny Corp. social media account has engaged in numerous NVIDIA vs. AMD AI hardware debates/tirades—Hotz appears to favor the latter, as evidenced in his latest choice of components. ROCm support on Team Red AI Instinct accelerators is fairly mature at this point in time, but a much newer prospect on gaming-oriented graphics cards.

Tiny Corporation's unusual leveraging of Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs in a data center configuration has already hit a developmental roadblock. Yesterday, the company's social media account expressed driver-related frustrations in a public forum: "If AMD open sources their firmware, I'll fix their LLVM spilling bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting tons of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own." Hotz's latest complaint was taken onboard by AMD's top brass—Dr. Lisa Su responded with the following message: "Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it." Her software engineers—within a few hours—managed to fling out a set of fixes in Tiny Corporation's direction. Hotz appreciated the quick turnaround, and proceeded to run a model without encountering major stability issues: "AMD sent me an updated set of firmware blobs to try. They are responsive, and there have been big strides in the driver in the last year. It will be good! This training run is almost 5 hours in, hasn't crashed yet." Tiny Corp. drummed up speculation about AMD open sourcing GPU MES firmware—Hotz disclosed that he will be talking (on the phone) to Team Red leadership.

Tiny Corp., a neural network framework specialist, has revealed intimate details about the ongoing development and building of its "tinybox" system: "I don't think there's much value in secrecy. We have the parts to build 12 boxes and a case that's pretty close to final. Beating back all the PCI-E AER errors was hard, as anyone knows who has tried to build a system like this. Our BOM cost is around $10k, and we are selling them for $15k. We've put a year of engineering into this, it's a lot harder than it first seemed. You are welcome to believe me or not, but unless you are building in huge quantity, you are getting a great deal for $15k." The startup has taken the unusual step of integrating Team Red's current flagship gaming GPU into its AI-crunching platform. Tiny Corp. founder—George Hotz—has documented his past rejections of NVIDIA AI hardware on social media, but TinyBox will not be running AMD's latest Instinct MI300X accelerators. RDNA 3.0 is seemingly favored over CDNA 3.0—perhaps due to growing industry demand for enterprise-grade GPUs.

The rack-mounted 12U TinyBox build houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor with 128 GB of system memory. Five 1 TB SN850X SSDs take care of storage duties (4 in raid, 1 for boot), and an unoccupied 16x OCP 3.0 slot is designated for networking tasks Two 1600 W PSUs provide necessary electrical juice. The Tiny Corp. social media picture feed indicates that they have acquired a pile of XFX Speedster MERC310 RX 7900 XTX graphics cards—six units are hooked up inside of each TinyBox system. Hotz's young startup has ambitious plans: "The system image shipping with the box will be Ubuntu 22.04. It will only include tinygrad out of the box, but PyTorch and JAX support on AMD have come a long way, and your hardware is your hardware. We make money either way, you are welcome to buy it for any purpose. The goal of the tiny corp is to commoditize the petaflop, and we believe tinygrad is the best way to do it. Solving problems in software is cheaper than in hardware. tinygrad will elucidate the deep structure of what neural networks are. We have 583 preorders, and next week we'll place an order for 100 sets of parts. This is $1M in outlay. We will also ship five of the 12 boxes we have to a few early people who I've communicated with. For everyone else, they start shipping in April. The production line started running yesterday."

XFX today launched its Radeon RX 7900 GRE graphics card. Although the custom-design card sticks with the company's RX 7000 series Speedster MERC board design, XFX did not assign a brand extension to this card. The card's styling appears identical to the RX 7800 XT Speedster QICK 319 Core Edition, a card it very likely shares most of its board design with. The RX 7900 GRE is based on a compact "Navi 31" package that's rumored to be pin-compatible with the "Navi 32," which is why most custom RX 7900 GRE cards appear to have board designs closer to their RX 7800 XT counterparts, than to custom RX 7900 XT cards.

The XFX RX 7900 GRE is 33.5 cm long, 13 cm tall, and is 3 slots thick. It features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink that appears identical to that of the RX 7800 XT QICK 319, ventilated by a trio of fans. XFX has given the RX 7900 GRE factory overclocked speeds of 2052 MHz Game clocks, compared to 1880 MHz reference Game clocks; while leaving the memory untouched at 18 Gbps. The card draws power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors. Display outputs include three DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1. The company didn't reveal pricing.

The AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB reference model has reached UK shores, albeit very briefly and with a very low stock count—e-tailer AWD-IT Gaming PC (ADMI Ltd.) was the first shop in the region to offer XFX's Navi 31 XL partner card. Team Red's formerly Chinese market-exclusive Radeon RDNA 3 GPU has made its way West—as of late last year—but retail presence in Europe is less than inspiring. Circumstances could change—recent rumblings indicate that more custom options are incoming—GIGABYTE is readying a Gaming OC variant, possibly paving the way for a wider release through mainstream channels. PowerColor's Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC model has also been spotted on European price comparison engines.

UK buyers were treated to an initial batch of a dozen (or fewer) XFX Radeon RX 7900 GRE Reference graphics card, at £659.99 (~$832) including VAT and free delivery. AWD-IT's listing is inactive at the time of writing, but the SKU remains as a searchable asset on their web store. It appears that curious UK hardware enthusiasts have snapped up the first round of Golden Rabbit Edition (GRE) curiosities, although the price point was nowhere near as attractive when lined up against past offerings within EU mainlands. For example, Italy's PSK Mega Store had reference stock priced at €542.66 (~$585) a piece, with a digital copy of AVATAR: Frontiers of Pandora bundled in. The XFX Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB SPEEDSTER MERC 310 model is currently discounted—£699.99 via Ebuyer UK—representing a very tempting higher-specced custom design prospect (going for only £40 more than the RX 7900 GRE) .

XFX is reported to be updating its existing Speedster QICK 319 RX 7800 XT Core Edition model—VideoCardz has discovered a pale variant, imaginatively dubbed as the "White Edition." The article does not disclose their source of information and photos, but a quick Google search reveals that Bermor Techzone (BTZ), a Philippines-based e-tailer, has the white version in stock—their listing indicates a price of ₱30,900 (~$552), with no added premium over the existing black model. VideoCardz believes that this is XFX's first foray into white RDNA 3 territories, perhaps in reaction to rival graphics card manufacturers offering a growing pool of almost colorless options.

A SNOW WOLF variant of the Radeon RX 6750 GRE 10 GB card was added to XFX's Chinese product lineup last October, marking the release of their first ever white design deployed on an AMD GPU. We hope to see alternative color options rolled out further up in XFX Radeon RX 7000-series hierarchy, but the QICK 319's treatment does not extend to its PCB (judging from the leaked photos)—fellow Team Red Navi hardware-specialist PowerColor has this market segment cornered it seems. VideoCardz reckons that an official unveiling of XFX's Radeon RX 7800 XT Speedster QICK 319 "white subvariant" is "imminent."

New Eiswolf 2 AiO - now also for custom designs of the RX 7900XT/XTX GPUs! Alphacool expands its product range and enables the cooling of AMD's RX 7900XT/XTX graphics cards with the innovative Fullcover GPU AIO water cooler. The enormous waste heat from the new generation of graphics cards is dissipated excellently with these coolers. The very good water flow and the large cooling surface are the result of the particularly filigree fin structure. The jet plate with revised inflow engine also distributes the water perfectly over the cooling fins. The full-surface chrome plating of the cooler not only offers resistant protection against acids, scratches and damage, but also achieves a beautiful homogeneity and exceptional shine. The Aurora design of the cooler impresses with its visually calm and simple design as well as the wonderfully uniform lighting, which is achieved via digitally addressable RGB LEDs.

The expandable Eiswolf 2 delivers an all-round carefree package and ensures that its user can easily access a performance-oriented GPU water cooling system out-of-the-box. Also included are the NexXxos ST30 360 mm radiator, the Rise Aurora 120 mm fans, DC-LT 2 pump and TPV hoses with quick-release coupling.
The Eiswolf 2 AiO - 360 mm for RX 7900XT Reference and RX 7900XTX Merc 310 are now available in the Alphacool online store.

With the release of AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT set for January 24th, we expect a lot of custom versions from the usual AMD AIB partners, and XFX is coming with two of its own versions, the RX 7600 XT SWFT 210 and the RX 7600 XT QICK 309. In case you missed it, AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT comes with Navi 33 XT GPU and has the same 2048 Stream Processors as the previously available Radeon RX 7600 graphics card. On the other hand, the Radeon RX 7600 XT will come with higher clocks, higher power with 190 W TDP, which now require two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. The memory is also increased to 16 GB GDDR6 but it is still on the same 128-bit memory interface.

The XFX RX 7600 XT SWFT 210 is pretty much the same as the Radeon RX 7600 SWFT 210 SKU, except for additional 8-pin PCIe power connector. It is a budget-oriented SKU, so it sticks to dual-fan, dual-slot cooler design, and won't have a factory-overclock, but should launch at AMD's MSRP of $329. The XFX RX 7600 XT QICK 309 on the other hand uses a more hefty triple-fan, 2.5-slot cooler design, and will come a with a factory-overclock. Unfortunately, XFX is still not listing those clocks, but we expect a decent boost on those GPU clocks.

AMD has lowered the official MSRP of the Radeon RX 7900 XT graphics card to $749, down from its launch price of $899. Its street price, as TweakTown found out, is lower still, with certain custom-design RX 7900 XT cards selling for as low as $710 on Newegg. At this price, the RX 7900 XT is set up for a major clash with certain overclocked NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER graphics cards, leftover inventories of the recently retired GeForce RTX 4070 Ti, and probably even looks to soak up some sales before the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER hits the scene on January 24. The cheapest RX 7900 XT is actually one of the better-appointed custom designs out there, the ASRock RX 7900 XT Phantom Gaming and XFX RX 7900 XT Merc 319, which had originally launched at prices comparable to the PowerColor Hellhound. These are followed by the PowerColor RX 7900 XT Hellhound and Sapphire RX 7900 XT Pulse OC at $720.

The Radeon RX 7900 XT is a very capable high-end GPU that AMD categorizes as capable of 4K Ultra HD gaming with settings maxed out. It's carved out from the "Navi 31" chiplet GPU, and configured with 84 RDNA3 compute units, worth 5,376 stream processors, 168 AI accelerators, 84 Ray accelerators, 336 TMUs, and 192 ROPs. The best part about this card is its memory sub-system, with 80 MB of Infinity Cache, and 20 GB of 20 Gbps GDDR6 memory across a 320-bit wide memory bus with 800 GB/s of bandwidth on tap, which should come in handy at 4K, or when using creator or AI applications.

XFX has revealed its own Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT lineup, showing off a total of three SKUs. These include the Radeon RX 7800 XT QICK 319 Core Edition, the Radeon RX 7800 XT MERC 319 Black Edition, and the Radeon RX 7700 XT QICK 319 Black Edition. Interestingly, XFX is skipping AMD's reference design, and focusing on its own custom design for all models. The entire lineup is a part of XFX's Speedster series, with a clean design with "the sole purpose of maximizing airflow to improve cooling and performance."

Unfortunately, XFX has yet to disclose full specifications, so game and boost clocks are still listed as TBA for both the Radeon RX 7800 XT and the Radeon RX 7700 XT models. In terms of design, the XFX Radeon RX 7800 XT QICK features a triple-fan 2.5-slot design with 13 blades and a vented aluminium backplate. It also has a dual BIOS feature. The XFX Radeon RX 7800 XT MERC 319 Black Edition is listed to feature a 2.75-slot triple fan cooler with Vapor Chamber technology, a premium one-piece aluminium stamp cover, and a different and larger direct pass-through venting backplate. It will also feature dual BIOS and, according to specifications, a better dedicated 9-phase GPU VRM. The Radeon RX 7700 XT QICK 319 Black Edition is similar with a 2.5-slot triple fan cooler but has a slightly different design.

PowerColor has today revealed the Red Devil Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB graphics card, which appears to look like a slimmer version of its existing siblings—the more powerful Red Devil RX 7900 XT and 7900 XTX. We have experienced a steady flow of news relating to AMD's new Golden Rabbit Edition GPU—with benchmark results released by review outlets in China, as well as a closer look at an unshrouded example. It was previously reported that Team Red would not be producing a reference model—VideoCardz now believes that XFX will be announcing itself as the primary manufacturing partner for said card.

Sapphire's custom equivalent was leaked earlier this week—a NITRO+ Lite-esque shroud design was unboxed and photographed ahead of today's official reveal. At the time of writing Sapphire has not published a product page for its brand new RX 7900 GRE model, but retail units are available to buy from their official store on JD.com. This NITRO+ variant is going for 5499 RMB (~$769), roughly $27 on top of AMD's official MSRP. PowerColor has not announced any pricing for the Red Devil RX 7900 GRE, but it has the same clock speeds—2050 MHz (game) & 2395 MHz (boost)—as the NITRO+. VideoCardz stated that these factory produced settings: "likely represent the highest configuration suggested by AMD."

The AMD Radeon RX 7600 mainstream graphics card slides a little closer to its ideal price, with an online retailer price-cut sending it down to $249, about $20 less than its MSRP of $269. The cheapest RX 7600 graphics card in the market right now is the MSI RX 7600 MECH 2X Classic, going for $249 on Amazon; followed by the XFX RX 7600 SWFT 210 at $258, and the ASRock RX 7600 Challenger at $259.99.

The sliding prices of the RX 7600 should improve its prospects against the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, which leaked 3DMark benchmarks show to be around 17% faster than the previous-generation RTX 3060 (12 GB) and 30% faster than its 8 GB variant. Our real-world testing puts the RX 7600 about 15% faster than the RTX 3060 (12 GB) at 1080p, which means there could be an interesting square-off between the RTX 4060 and RX 7600. NVIDIA has announced $299 as the baseline price for the RTX 4060, which should put pressure on AMD partners to trim prices of the RX 7600 to below the $250-mark.

AMD's flagship graphics card, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, based on the RDNA3 architecture, is seeing its street pricing in fall, as the cheapest custom-design card can be had for as low as $881. The XFX Radeon RX 7900 XTX Speedster Merc 310 is listed on Amazon for $979, with a $97 checkbox coupon that sends its price down to $881. The next cheapest card is the Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Pulse, going for $899 after a $100 checkbox coupon on its $999 price. Meanwhile, the RX 7900 XT can be had for as low as $719 with an $80 coupon. Considering that the RX 7900 XTX has shown performance at-par or better than the GeForce RTX 4080, with ray tracing performance comparable to the RTX 3090 Ti, this is tremendous value, given that $881 is what some premium RTX 4070 Ti cards are being sold at.

XFX started selling its Radeon RX 7600 series graphics cards, which consist of the affordable RX 7600 Speedster SWFT 210, and the premium RX 7600 Speedster QICK 308. The SWFT 210 is priced at the AMD MSRP for the RX 7600, of USD $269. The QICK 308 is priced at a $20-40 premium, although it has been spotted on e-tailers at the MSRP.

The SWFT 210 uses a simpler aluminium fin-stack cooler that uses a pair of 100 mm fans (hence the name 210, denoting 2x 100 mm fans). The card sticks to AMD-reference clock speeds of 2250 MHz Game clocks, and 2655 MHz boost. The larger QICK 308, on the other hand, uses a triple-slot, triple fan cooling solution, with a more elaborate multiple fin-stack heatsink, and three 80 mm fans (hence 308). This card comes with a factory-overclock. While the Game clock is untouched at 2250 MHz, the boost frequency is dialed up to 2755 MHz. This card uses the same 1x 8-pin PCIe power input configuration as its sibling.

Prices of the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT RDNA3 graphics card continue on a downward trend, with the cheapest street price now touching $762. This is $137 below the AMD MSRP for the RX 7900 XT of $899, or a 15.23% reduction. At this price, the RX 7900 XT is priced already below several custom-design GeForce RTX 4070 Ti models. At stock frequency, the RX 7900 XT beats the RTX 4070 Ti by around 6% in conventional raster 3D graphics that makes up the majority of the gaming graphics workload, while its ray tracing performance is closer to that of the previous-generation RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3090. The specific model in question is the XFX Speedster MERC 310 Radeon RX 7900 XT, with the $762 price surfacing on Amazon for $771.09 with a $10 checkbox coupon that's visible to buyers in the U.S.

Even more performance now also for RX 7900XTX Merc 310 GPU! Alphacool expands the assortment with the new and innovative Eisblock Aurora cooler for active water cooling of AMD RX 7900XTX Merc 310 graphics cards.

The enormous waste heat of the new graphics card generation is excellently dissipated with the cooler. Thanks to the particularly filigree fin structure, the cooling surface was increased and a very good water flow was made possible. The jet plate with revised inflow engine also distributes the water perfectly on the cooling fins. The full chrome plating of the copper base not only provides resistant protection against acids, scratches and damage, but also achieves remarkable homogeneity and significant gloss.

Eiswolf 2 AiO - now also for custom designs of RTX 4080/4090 and RX 7900XT/XTX GPUs! Alphacool presents additional innovative solutions for cooling Nvidia's Geforce RTX 4080 and 4090 and AMD's RX 7900XT/XTX graphics cards.

The enormous waste heat of the new graphics card generation is excellently dissipated with these coolers. The very good water flow and the large cooling surface are due to the particularly filigree fin structure. The jet plate with revised inflow engine also distributes the water perfectly on the cooling fins. The complete chrome plating of the cooler not only provides resistant protection against acids, scratches and damage, but also achieves a beautiful homogeneity and remarkable shine. The Aurora design of the cooler is kept visually calm and simple. This is evident not only in the cooler's design, but also in the wonderfully even lighting achieved via digitally addressable RGB LEDs.

Just over a month ago, news broke that NVIDIA is planning to move its logistics center from Hong Kong to Taiwan and it now looks like AMD is getting ready to follow suit. The news is coming via Taiwan's United Daily News (UDN) and the paper claims that AMD will be setting up its logistics center in the Farglory free trade zone area in the Dayuan district of Taoyuan, which is next to Taiwan's main international airport. Currently companies like ASML and Asus operate inside the free trade zone and Farglory is currently in the last phase of an expansion of the free trade zone, which should be finalised sometime early in 2023. As such, there should be plenty of space for both NVIDIA and AMD to set up their logistics centers there.

The move for AMD doesn't seem to make as much sense as that of NVIDIA, as AMD's main graphics card partners, which should be Sapphire and XFX (Pine Group), are Hong Kong based companies. That said, AMD still has PowerColor, ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI in Taiwan, but only PowerColor is an exclusive AMD partner. This does of course not take motherboards or servers into account, where its Taiwanese partners are key. On the other hand, just as NVIDIA, AMD produces its GPUs at TSMC, so for products that doesn't end up in the PRC, it would make more sense to have them go straight to a logistics center in Taiwan, rather than having to ship them out to Hong Kong and then back to Taiwan again. According to UDN it's apparently also cheaper for AMD to shop goods directly from Taiwan to the PRC, as it's apparently quite costly to ship via Hong Kong. Another reason is of course the ongoing trade war between the US and the PRC, which could lead to future issues for both AMD and NVIDIA. Hong Kong has also slowly lost its importance as a key center in the electronics business, with Taiwan and Singapore having become more important hubs, according to UDN.

As we're getting closer to the official launch date, pictures of AMD Radeon RX 7900-series cards from both ASRock and XFX have tipped up online. The ASRock cards are part of its Phantom Gaming and Taichi series of cards, whereas the XFX card is part of the MERC line. Sadly none of the cards appear to sport a USB-C port, suggesting that it's not a feature that any of the OEM's have thought worthwhile to include in their custom board designs.

The ASRock Phantom Gaming cards appear to be 2.5-slot cards, whereas the Taichi cards are triple slot. The Phantom Gaming cards seem to be equipped with a short backplate that only covers the rear of the PCB, rather than the full length of the card, with the Taichi cards seemingly having a full-length backplate. The XFX MERC 310 also appears to be a 2.5-slot design, but it has a very different backplate design which appears to act much more as a heatsink than most backplate designs we've seen to date. The fact that it appears to be made of a large chunk of aluminium that wraps around the back edge of the card is also rather unusual. XFX also appears to have gone with the same size for its RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX cards. We can also see that XFX has gone for three 8-pin power connectors for their cards.

AMD Radeon board partners BIOSTAR and XFX today released their custom-design RX 6400 graphics cards, in what could be a sign that board partners are allowed to quietly release the entry-level GPU. The BIOSTAR Radeon RX 6400 Gaming is a full-height graphics card with a simple aluminium mono-block fan-heatsink, and a lack of any additional power connectors. The XFX Radeon RX 6400 SWFT 105, on the other hand, is a low-profile, single-slot graphics card that may find appeal among the SFF crowd. It appears to be using an aluminium channel-type cooler with a 40-50 mm blower. The RX 6400 is carved out from the 6 nm "Navi 23" silicon by enabling 12 out of 16 RDNA2 compute units (768 stream processors), and comes with 4 GB of GDDR6 memory across the chip's 64-bit wide memory interface. We're hearing that at reference specs, the RX 6400 has a typical graphics power (TGP) of just 53 W, which is how it's able to make do without any power connectors.

The Chinese division of XFX may be in hot water with Chinese customs authorities, after a shipment of 5,840 graphics cards was intercepted in the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. An initial inspection of the shipment revealed mislabeling of at least three of its graphic cards, with the card's original model and specifications apparently hidden by stickers that declared other, supposedly lower-value models. A subsequent inspection concluded that all graphics cards in the shipment had been mislabeled this way. According to MyDrivers, this purposeful mislabeling of imported goods is a relatively regular occurrence.

The Chinese customs services from Meilin and Huanggang reported the event, declaring that the total value of the mislabeled shipment was accounted at around ¥20 million ($3.15 million). The Chinese customs authorities didn't name XFX as the driving force of the attempted unlawful import, but the company's Chinese branch website has been down following the incident, and the company's web presence over at Alibaba-run, online retailer Tmall has been shuttered as well. At least some of the mislabeled cards were XFX Speedster Qick 319 Radeon RX 6700 XT GPUs.

EK, has partnered up with XFX to bring you a factory water-cooled Radeon RX 6900 XT GPU. The XFX Speedster ZERO Radeon RX 6900XT RGB EKWB is one of the fastest AMD Radeon-based graphics cards on the market. This new Speedster series GPU is equipped with a 14-phase VRM power delivery system, consisting of DrMOS and high polymer capacitors. To make sure these lightning-fast graphics processors manage to hit their maximum clocks, a unique EK water block is pre-installed which also brings a prolonged lifespan due to the superior thermals that the liquid cooling provides. This also makes sure that no precious gaming time is spent on the water block mounting, and there are no questions regarding the warranty.

A powerful 14+2 Phase Power Design allows more stable performance by better distributing power across more power phases in the VRM which results in more overclocking and boosting headroom. Couple that with the incredibly cool components due to the full cover EK water block and you get a recipe for high performance, stability, and a long lifespan.

XFX started selling the AMD BC-160 cryptocurrency mining card based on the AMD "Navi 12" silicon. The card is available on AliExpress for $2,000. The "Navi 12," if you recall, is an MCM mobile GPU that AMD developed exclusively for the 2019 MacBook Pro. It combined an RDNA-based GPU die with up to 16 GB of HBM2 across a 2048-bit wide interface. Built on the 7 nm node, the GPU die of "Navi 12" on the BC-160 is configured with 36 compute units (2,304 stream processors), and 8 GB of HBM2 across the full 2048-bit memory bus.

The card uses a blower-type cooling solution, and is rated with 150 W of typical board power, with a claimed 69.5 Mh/s (ETH). Drivers are provided for Linux, and mining software supported include Team Red Miner and Phoenix Miner. The card features a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interface, its driver supports systems with up to 12 of these installed. A marketing slide sheds light on the nomenclature AMD is using for its mining cards. The "BC" in BC-160 represents "blockchain compute," the "1" stands for generation, in this case, first generation; and "60" represents hashrate-class with ETH.

VideoCardz has recently published pictures of a rumored AMD BC-160 (Blockchain Compute) mining card designed by XFX China and featuring a Navi 12 GPU. The card supposedly features 8 GB of HBM2 memory along with 2304 Stream Processors however a memory speed of 4 Gbps is also listed which is not currently available casting doubt on the legitimacy of this rumor. We did report on rumors in March that pointed to AMD releasing Navi 10/12 headless cryptocurrency mining cards so this could still be true.

The only existing product featuring the Navi 12 GPU is the Apple-exclusive AMD Radeon Pro 5600M which features 256 more Stream Processors at 2560. The BC-160 card was pictured in a mining cluster where it reached performance levels of 72 Mh/s in Etash with a TGP of 150 W. The card features two 8-pin power connectors and should offer performance around 25% faster than the Navi 10 Radeon RX 5700 XT. We are unsure if this is a real product or how much it might cost so take these rumors with a healthy dose of skepticism.