Is the AMD Radeon RX 6400 worth buying for gaming this holiday season?

The Radeon RX 6400 was launched by AMD earlier this year as an entry-level basic video adapter. It is priced at $159.

AMD did not design this RDNA 2-based GPU for gaming. It is more of a display adapter. However, many third-party add-in board (AIB) partners have developed gaming variants for this graphics card. Thus, gamers on a tight budget might consider them as options.

However, it is worth noting that the 6400 might be a disappointing graphics card for most gamers. Buyers should consider a few more factors before buying it.

Note: This article is subjective and solely reflects the opinions of the writer

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The RX 6400 might be weak, but it is better than the competition

The Sapphire PULSE low-profile edition of the card (Image via Sapphite)

Let us look at the specs of the RX 6400 first. The graphics card is based on a small 107 mm² Navi 24 GPU. It comes with 768 shading units, 48 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 32 Render Output Units (ROPs), 12 Compute Units (CUs), and 12 RT cores.

The 6400 is packed with 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM based on an extremely narrow 64-bit bus. The memory has 128 GB/s bandwidth. The graphics card is based on a low-power design and pulls just 53 W under full load.

The 6400, despite being such a weak card, uses a PCIe Gen 4 interface, which has been scoffed at by reviewers and enthusiasts. According to experts, using a PCIe Gen 3 interface would have made more sense, as the graphics card will be used by budget gamers who mostly run Gen 3-based motherboards. In theory, it can deliver 3.565 TFlops of graphics computing performance.

These specs make the RX 6400 one of the weakest and cheapest models to support hardware-accelerated ray tracing. It is the cheapest current-gen GPU available.

Despite being such a weak card on paper, the RX 6400 can deliver playable framerates in most modern AAA titles at 1080p with some compromises in visual fidelity.

Let's take a look at the competition. The card was mainly launched to rival the GTX 1630, Nvidia's latest basic display adapter. The Team Green GPU is based on the Turing architecture and uses a PCIe Gen 3 interface. It is priced at around $150, with the cheapest model starting at $140.

This graphics card is notorious in terms of gaming performance. Gamers will have to turn the settings down to the lowest possible in any modern AAA game to be able to enjoy a steady 30+ FPS experience.

The RX 6400 beats the GTX 1630 by a massive margin, as is evident from the video above.

In terms of real-world performance, the RX 6400 gets very close to and even beats the much costlier GDDR6-based GTX 1650. It achieves this feat while consuming much less power than the Team Green equivalent.

In addition, the RX 6400 is a low-profile card. Thus, gamers building a Small Form Factor (SFF) build will likely benefit from multiple models of the card that are built to occupy as little space as possible. For instance, the XFX Speedster or the Sapphire PULSE variants are based on a single-slot low-profile design.

Thus, it is evident that the 6400 is a much better option for gamers on a tight budget when pitched against the competition. However, saving up and buying at least an RX 6500 XT is recommended. Recently, the card dropped to just $100 on Newegg.

In addition, users building a media PC or a mini-ITX low-power device that will not be used for gaming can consider this GPU over any other option available in the market. It is also one of the best graphics cards for students.