Sapphire quietly makes Radeon RX 5600 XT Pulse faster

A story posted by HKEPC alleged that AMD released a new vBIOS for their board partners prior to launch. After a short investigation, we found traces of such BIOS changes to one of the custom graphics card.

AMD fights RTX 2060 price-cuts, RX 5600 XT gets a new vBIOS?

Just four days before Radeon RX 5600 XT officially launches, AMD allegedly provided a new vBIOS to their partners, which increases the TBP to 160W (from 150W). This has a direct effect on RX 5600 XT clock speeds, which are higher than previously announced at CES 2020.

While we have reached out to our sources to see if this story is true, it turns out that Sapphire already made changes to their RX 5600 XT PULSE today, so this might be the update HKEPC is referring to.

The RX 5600 XT has three clock speeds: base clock of 1130 MHz (usually not advertised by board partners), a game clock of 1375 MHz and a boost clock of 1560 MHz. Since the first Navi graphics card was released AIBs tend to focus on game clock with their official specifications. Barely any manufacturer even lists base clocks and very rarely boost clocks are changed.

Sapphire RX 5600 XT Pulse was officially released with a 1560 MHz game clock and 1620 MHz boosts clock (you can still find the official press release here). The clocks, however, have been changed today on the website to 1615 MHz and 1750 MHz respectively. What is also interesting is that the memory clock is also changed to 14 Gbps.

RX 5600 XT PULSE (11296-01-20G) official page – before and after:

The Navi 10 processor, which RX 5600 XT also uses, comes with a TBP up to 225W for RX 5700 XT. The 160W would still be lower than RX 5700 non-XT (180W). According to HKEPC, this is a way AMD responds to RTX 2060 price cuts. One would guess that Sapphire modified the specs, it is possible that other board partners will do the same.

Source: HKEPC