The AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT is an interesting card because, well, it doesn’t exactly exist. AMD has technically released the 5500 series by outing the RX 5500 as an OEM part. It’s currently only available to OEM vendors who can integrate it into laptop designs or OEM PCs. It’s almost certainly not going to be the last we see of Navi 14, though. The OEM 5500 features a partially enabled chip and with all the rumors floating around about the RX 5500 XT, it’s almost certain we’ll see this full-enabled variant soon enough.
MSI has now added fuel to the fire by listing 6 Radeon RX 5500 XT variants with the EEC. These aren’t just stock models. They include overclocked SKUs as well.
Gigabyte already registered the standalone RX 5500 XT earlier, though there’s been no official product announcement from AMD as of yet. What exactly are we looking at with the 5500 XT, though?
The OEM RX 5500 features a partially enabled Navi 14 with 128 shaders disabled. A fully-enabled variant would feature as many as 1536 shaders. The 5500 has a narrow 128-bit memory bus, albeit paired with GDDR6 14 GHz memory. This lets it match the RX 570 on memory bandwidth. From the 5500 XT, we’d expect a fully enabled Navi 14 at the very least, with possible tweaks to the memory configuration. This would create a product that’s positioned somewhere between the 1660 and the rumored 1660 Super. We’ll let you know as soon as we get more details about it.
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