Tailored Radeon RX 5500 Thicc II from XFX in picture

On October 7, AMD followed up this summer’s launches of the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT with a new addition in the lower middle class – the RX 5500. Like its big siblings, the model is gifted with the Radeon RDNA (RDNA) architecture and is manufactured on TSMC’s 7-nanometer technology.

Videocardz is now publishing what are believed to be the first images of a Radeon RX 5500 from partner manufacturers. Judging by the design, the model appears to be part of the XFX product series Thicc II, but in a tuned design that takes up two expansion slots instead of three with the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT.

The cooling consists, as usual, of a number of heat conduction pipes, which run into a cooling flange of aluminum, which in turn is cooled by two fans. The graphics card also has a cover plate on the back that is bent along the edges to go together with the cover on the front. At the rear are dual DVI, an HDMI and a Displayport.

In terms of the graphics circuit itself, this is the Navi 14, which in the case of the Radeon RX 5500 is a slightly scaled-down variant with 1,408 stream processors instead of full-scale 1,536. These have a “playing frequency” of 1,717 MHz and a maximum turbo of 1,845 MHz.

On the memory front, the Navi 14 has a relatively narrow bus width of 128 bits. Despite this, the Radeon RX 5500 gets a bandwidth of 224 GB / s, which can be attributed to the fact that it can be equipped with 4 or 8 GB GDDR6 with an effective clock frequency of 14,000 MHz. It is not clear how much memory is housed in the XFX model and not least what clock frequencies it has for the graphics circuit.

AMD is still secret about exactly how the Radeon RX 5500 performs, but it is estimated to be well above Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1650 but fall just below a GTX 1660. Finally, the graphics card in the reference version is specified for a power consumption of about 150 watts.

► AMD unveils Radeon RX 5500 – 7 nanometer mid-range Navi

The launch of the Radeon RX 5500 will take place sometime during the fourth quarter. There will then be no reference design from AMD, but only customized models from Asrock, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Powercolor, Sapphire and XFX will be released.